Wasn’t Alesi the one who when interviewed on the local news about the morality of the double dipping retirement of another local representative said: “It’s legal so it must be moral”?

Mark Hare • January 27, 2011

Until this week, I didn’t know a politician’s approval rating could hit zero percent. But when state Sen. Jim Alesi filed a personal injury lawsuit against the builder and owners of a Perinton home where he broke his leg three years ago, I never heard a single person defend him.
Indeed, the Republican lawmaker from Perinton was rebuked by the leaders of his own party. Monroe County Executive Maggie Brooks said she’d never seen an “issue that has drawn so much public anger.” County GOP chairman Bill Reilich said he was “outraged” by the suit.

Alesi withdrew his suit Monday, less than a week after he filed it. He released a standard issue nonapology apology, never acknowledging that he was wrong, only expressing remorse for the “anxiety” the suit caused “the homeowners, the builders, or the community.” Is it possible he had no idea the lawsuit might cause “anxiety,” that people would see him as the villain? Now, he said, it is “hopefully time to move on and do the job I was elected to do.”

Not so fast. Had he filed the suit a week before the election, I think it’s fair to say he would not have been elected to do anything.

In January 2008, Alesi and a friend visited Trolley Brook Estates in Perinton and decided to enter an unsecured back door to an unfinished home. A staircase between the basement and the first floor had yet to be installed, so Alesi decided to climb a ladder used by the builders. He fell and broke his leg. At the time, the homeowners, John and Janet Hecker, and builder Louis DiRisio decided not to “add insult to injury” by charging Alesi with trespass.

Three years later, Alesi sued for negligence, charging that the Heckers and DiRisio failed to keep the house “reasonably safe.” Alesi says he has suffered “permanent injuries” from the fall. He did nothing wrong, he said in court papers, because Trolley Brook Estates were advertised as open to the public and because it was “reasonably foreseeable that prospective homebuyers and others would enter.”
All that sounds a lot like blaming McDonald’s for the hot coffee you spilled on yourself. In this case, nearly everyone’s gut says the same thing — if you take this risk, you are on your own. If you want to look at a new home, don’t you make an appointment or find an agent to show you a finished model? If you sneak into a partly secured unfinished home, don’t you hope no one catches you? Of course, because you know you should not be there.

I don’t want to parse his apology. Maybe the wording is just clumsy. He did come to his senses, for whatever reason.

But if Jim Alesi really doesn’t see that he was clearly wrong, then the hard-working, community-centered small-business owner who was first elected to the County Legislature in 1989 has been replaced by an Albany pol eager to take credit for all those giant cardboard checks he brings home, but who can never take responsibility for his failures. It happens to a lot of them.

Jim Alesi must ask himself if, after all these years, Albany has stolen his soul. If he can no longer see life through the eyes of the people he represents, it really is time to “move on” — or move back to the life he lived before politics. http://www.democratandchronicle.com/article/20110127/NEWS0201/101270315/1003/NEWS01/What-does-Jim-Alesi-s-nonapology-mean?