By John Milgrim
   Ottaway News Service
   jmottaway@aol.com
   February 22, 2001

   Albany –  Alan Chartock is a well-known Northeast Public Radio executive, a popular tenured SUNY professor and syndicated columnist who spent much of his career railing against the Republican political machine, cronyism and patronage.
    But now he's coming under fire himself for drawing two separate full-time salaries on the public and charity doles that alone add up to more than what the state pays George Pataki to govern.
   "First of all, there's nothing illegal or improper about it. There are a lot of people in the State University payroll who work other jobs, and that's the way it is," said Chartock, who's maybe best known for his weekly aired conversations with former Gov. Mario Cuomo. "I'm a workaholic."
   And several of those he's publicly taken on, in print or on the air, agree with him.
    "If the world was flat, he'd fall off the left side," said Joel Miller, Assembly Higher Education Committee member. But, "no one has complained about the performance of the radio station, and if the school isn't complaining about his performance as a professor, so be it."
   The recent criticism, however, isn't coming from the state Capitol's halls but instead from the World Wide Web and owner of the site www.wamc.net, a so-called "pirate" site to public radio's wamc.org.
   "How much is too much?" blare headlines on the site's home page, critiquing salaries Chartock and other station executives draw. "The more I started digging, the more the smell got worse and worse," said Glenn Heller, who put the site together. 
   Chartock, through WAMC in the Capital Region, also controls public radio stations 91.7 in Middletown, 90.9 in Kingston, and 107.7 in Newburgh.
   Heller's WAMC site, according to SUNY spokesman Dave Henahan, incorrectly states that full-time faculty can't moonlight.
   Chartock makes a base salary at SUNY of $91,584 and, according to tax records and Chartock, slightly more than $100,000 in salary and benefits from WAMC, which is federally subsidized. He said he volunteered his time to the Legislative Gazette, a weekly newspaper covering state government and linked to SUNY New Paltz. He wouldn't discuss his salary for his TV appearances in Albany. "All of these things allow me to bring perspective into a classroom."