Why was Al Eldridge paid $30/hr?

During my research for the Greenport Uprising article, I had FOIL'ed Albert Eldridge's civil service records from Columbia County as I needed to verify a few dates. When I received the records, I discovered a rather curious discrepancy in numbers: Apparently, at least as far as the county was concerned, Albert Eldridge was making $35/hr beginning on January 1st, 2025.

This was odd considering that the Greenport town board had re-appointed Albert Eldridge on January 8th with an hourly wage of only $27 via resolution 21:

I wasn't really sure what that meant in practice and so I went ahead and obtained the payroll data for the Building Inspector for January and February 2025. This is when his actual wage revealed itself to be $30/hr, three dollars more than what the town board passed in resolution 21 when they re-appointed Al Eldridge as Building Inspector.

Find below the two earning summaries covering January 26th to February 22nd.

Note that the first day Al Eldridge clocked any hours in January was Monday, January 27th.

Albert Eldridge was hired full-time code Enforcement Officer in resolution 30, passed on February 24th. This bumped his salary officially to $35/hr. This resolution however was not retroactive and stated explicitly that it was "effective Monday, February 24, 2025".

Now the question is: Why was Greenport's Building Inspector paid three dollars per hour more than what the town board had resolved during the organizational meeting in January 2025 and who knew about this?

Statutorily, Supervisor Kathy Eldridge is the Chief Financial Officer of the Town of Greenport and therefore she would have know that her son got a little extra. There's good reason to believe that Deputy Supervisor Clayton Clark also knew since he is never too far away when questionable behavior of Kathy Eldridge emerges.

The rest of the town board—Janice Brodowski, Guy Apicella, and Frank Iaccino—were most likely left in the dark as per usual and had no clue this was going on.

Another question will be if the town will insist that Albert Eldridge return the excess earnings. It is, after all, the tax payer's money and should have never been his.