State Sen. Tom O’Mara, of the Southern Tier, has been collecting as much as $150,000 a year in salary from his private law firm because it has contracts with a half-dozen municipalities, including ones in his district, state records show.
O’Mara said he sees no problem with the arrangement, saying it goes back years and are largely payments from his firm because it has the public entities, which he represents as a senator, as clients.
He has also brought in state grants for some of the same municipalities that his law firm, Barclay Damon, contracts with.
“I do do some legal work for some of these clients from time to time,” said O’Mara, R-Big Flats, Chemung County. “But most of them are longstanding clients of the firm, since the ’80s, frankly, before I was even in the law firm, and when we merged into the larger law firm, they were clients that I continue to get origination credit for for legal work that continues.”
But he admitted to filing an incorrect listing of his outside income on his financial disclosure form earlier this year, mistakingly filing the same form in 2016 and 2017.
He then said he would sent a correct one to the state and provided a copy to the USA Today Network’s Albany Bureau, which discovered the mistake.
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