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Chester County Press

Uncle Irvin: Elling, Falcoff & Stevens

06/09/2015 01:51PM ● By Richard Gaw


The headline of this column is not a law firm. It's the names of Kennett Township Supervisors involved in hiring Albert McCarthy as chief of the township's one-man police force.

Elling and Falcoff were supervisors when the township first hired McCarthy on the rebound from being chief of Kennett Square Borough police force. Scudder Stevens is the present chairman of the supervisors, who signed a contract to extend McCarthy's tenure one more year.

These elected officials are directly responsible for hiring McCarthy, who just resigned after hitting two vehicles with the borough's police car, causing one lawsuit, which the borough settled. There's a good chance a second one is coming.

It is not known whether supervisors Falcoff and Elling ever required McCarthy to pass a physical, and Stevens rehired him, even after McCarthy and his physician admitted he suffered from a blackout.

Stevens was elected supervisor as a reformer because of questionable decisions made by Falcoff and Elling over the years. It looks like Stevens reformed nothing and continued down the slippery slope of his predecessors. McCarthy's contract extension after the first crash and lawsuit was an illustration of Stevens' lack of common sense.

That same trait led Stevens to convince his fellow supervisors to pass an ordinance to prevent a resident from target practice on his own large homestead -- a clear violation of the Second Amendment to the Constitution, the right to bear arms. Stevens, himself an attorney, was humiliated when District Justice Dan Masiano ruled the ordinance unconstitutional, which Stevens wisely did not appeal.

Stevens has a number of years left on his six-year term to finally become the supervisor who was elected on a platform of needed reform.