What is Greenport's Bobby Bonilla Day?

Bobby Bonilla during his second stint with the NY Mets

Every year on July 1st, the typically masochist NY Mets fans celebrate Bobby Bonilla Day, and they will continue to do so until the year 2035.

What they are celebrating, tongue-in-cheek, is a particularly boneheaded business decision the NY Mets made in 2000 when they wanted to offload the underperforming slugger Bobby Bonilla, who at the time still had $5.9M left on his contract. Fred Wilpon, then owner of the Mets, was too stingy to pay the remaining roughly $6M as a lump sum and instead negotiated a deal whereby the Mets would pay Bonilla $1.2M every July 1st, beginning in 2011, all the way throughout 2035.

This deferred payment plan at an 8% interest year seemed like a good deal at the time since the Wilpons would invest the initially saved $6M with Bernie Madoff, who promised a yearly return of 10%. We all know how that turned out.

Four days ago, August 25, was the anniversary of Al Eldridge's driver's license revocation. For over a year now, he has been unable to drive himself around Greenport in his role as code enforcement officer. Instead, on Mondays it is his mother's, Supervisor Kathy Eldridge's, job to drive her son (paid $35/hr) to inspection sites. On the remaining four days of the week, this dubious responsibility falls upon the other full-time code enforcement officer Thomas Burrall who is being paid $30/hr.

In other words, four days of the week two code enforcement officers do the job of one, at the cumulative wage of $65/hr. It's almost as good a deal as the one the Mets negotiated with Bobby's agent.

We thereby propose that August 25th shall from now on be known as the Al Eldridge Revoked License Day.