I do not support Governor Hochul’s housing plan imposing state quotas on local municipalities regarding how much housing is to be built.
I also reject her proposal to remove zoning control from local municipal decision-makers. Decisions relating to housing construction are and must be locally based with community input and under local zoning authority. Decisions on housing applications must take into account traffic, noise, environmental, and public safety impacts. Effects on local communities, school districts, and municipal resources must be considered. Local officials with community input are best suited to make such decisions.
We are fortunate in New York that the New York State legislature rejected the Governor’s proposal out of hand. Thank you to Assemblywoman Gina Silitti and other state legislators who took the lead on this issue, and thank you for hearing the concerns raised by so many of us at the local level.
I am committed to upholding the Town’s responsibility in safeguarding a woman’s right to choose.
While abortion is already legal in New York, we must remain vigilant against any attempts to erode these hard-won rights. Within our limited jurisdiction, I will defend and promote access to comprehensive reproductive healthcare services, including safe and legal abortion. I will advocate for policies that support accessible and affordable reproductive healthcare, as well as sex education. If elected, I will ensure that the Town of North Hempstead remains a place where reproductive healthcare choices are respected, supported, and protected.
We are forever indebted to those who have served our country.
North Hempstead is home to over 5,000 veterans, including those who have seen combat in World War II and Vietnam; as Supervisor, I created a Veterans Advisory Board and will do so again doing everything in my power to continue to recognize their sacrifice and their service while easing the challenges they may face as a result of their service to our country.
Not In Our Town! I support and will continue to promote and engage in the Not In Our Town effort initiated by former town supervisor Judi Bosworth in 2017.
Stop Asian Hate, Oppose Antisemitism, Reject Racism, Respect Love.
Discrimination and acts of hate against the Asian community are on the rise, fueled by prejudice and misinformation. We must stand united in the face of this injustice. As Town Supervisor, I am committed to combating Asian hate and fostering a community that celebrates diversity and inclusion by sharing our stories, educating our youth (and each other), and celebrating the Asian cultures that abound in the Town of North Hempstead.
Antisemitism is also on the rise and remains as pernicious and dangerous as ever. I will continue to work with Jewish organizations, spiritual leaders, and the residents of our town to fight, find and report antisemitism wherever it appears. As deputy county executive I have headed up a number of our county programs developed to fight antisemitism, including our county effort to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism. I will continue this work as North Hempstead Town Supervisor.
Racism has not gone away and we must be ever vigilant to prevent the negative impacts that result from latent bias, hateful speech, outright racial violence. We continue to have an affirmative obligation to create opportunity where decades of oppression have led to unfair and discriminatory outcomes.
With the US Supreme Court poised to eviscerate our right to privacy, we cannot take for granted the right to love whoever it is that we love. I support anyone and everyone’s right to marry who they want and will fight to preserve that right here in New York and throughout our country. Discrimination and hateful acts against the LGBTQ community are unacceptable. We must stand together to oppose all hate wherever we find it.
Israel is an issue deeply personal to me. As Town Supervisor, I authored a resolution to reassert Israel’s right to determine its own borders.
If elected, I will continue to be a steadfast ally of Israel on the local stage. My plan to strengthen Israeli ties in North Hempstead involves educational programming, anti-BDS legislation, and expanded cultural celebrations. For more information, please read my full white paper on Israel.
Enough is enough. Mr. Santos has to go!
It is unfortunate that my opponent was cheerleader-in-chief for Mr. Santos. She campaigned for him, called him her friend, and vouched for him as our next congressman. Not good.
During my tenure as town supervisor, the town did not exceed the tax cap, and the one time that the town board authorized piercing the cap, I voted against it.
As it turned out, we did not pierce the cap that year. As far as local town taxes go, North Hempstead’s town taxes were and remain the lowest of the Nassau County towns.
One of the reasons that we were able to maintain a low tax rate, even in difficult financial times, was that my administration was extremely aggressive at obtaining federal, state, and even private grants in order to grow vital and impactful town programs such as Project Independence ($1 million+ in grants) and 311 ($1 million+ in grants). The Yes We Can Community Center was funded with a $10 million private grant and several million more dollars from NY State. Environmental projects such as wetland restoration and bay and waterfront remediation were funded each year with hundreds of thousands of dollars of annual federal and state grants awarded to the town each year.
We also maintained sound fiscal practices, conservative financing, and operational efficiencies through programs such as the shared municipal services program I created. One such program was the Office of Intermunicipal Coordination where I crafted a new office in town government through which town, village, and district governments worked together to save money and improve services.
During my tenure as supervisor, the North Hempstead bond rating was upgraded to the highest level in the Town’s history at the time of the rating. The Moody’s analysis stated that “the Aa2 rating reflects the Town’s strong financial position resulting from enhanced long-term planning and internal controls . . . and a declining debt burden driven by the Town’s debt management plan.” During my years as Supervisor, the Town was consistently recognized by bond rating agencies for its strong and effective fiscal management.
In September 2013, I was appointed by Governor Andrew Cuomo as Chairman of the Nassau Interim Finance Authority (NIFA) overseeing Nassau County’s budgets and expenditures in order to ensure fiscal responsibility. During this period, I renegotiated police and public employee contracts saving hundreds of millions of dollars while lifting a multi-year wage freeze that was crushing the workforce morale and productivity.
When subsequently serving as Deputy County Executive in Suffolk County, I implemented our county’s Shared Services Initiative that saved millions of dollars in public monies while ensuring uniform, high-quality services for all residents.
As Town Supervisor, I will always be mindful of opportunities to streamline our municipal spending, create operational efficiencies, and aggressively pursue federal, state, and private grants in order to make our local tax dollars stretch further.
It is clear that in today’s world, every level of government should have a strategy for dealing with mental health issues that exist within each community.
The town government itself may not have sufficient programs or expertise in dealing with a resident who is experiencing a mental health crisis or situation.
I intend to create a Mental Health Forum in the Town of North Hempstead for the purpose of generating an ongoing discussion amongst town and community leaders along with advocates and experts on how our town can provide comfort and guidance to those who are experiencing or dealing with mental health issues.
Climate Action
It is imperative for all of us to commit to protecting our environment, reducing our carbon footprint, and taking on the challenges we are facing as a community, a country and a planet as our climate changes. We are all responsible for meeting the challenge, we are all responsible for taking climate action.
North Hempstead is a town with many wetlands, bays, harbors, and coves while sitting on top of the great Magothy Aquifer from which we get all of our drinking water along with the rest of Long Island. Water is precious in our town and just one of the subjects on which I have focused when I previously served as town supervisor.
When we speak of the environment, we are speaking of more than the natural beauty that encompasses our town. Environment is also the air we breathe, the resources we consume, the climate we endure and the world we inhabit. Everything we do, therefore, is done in the context of how it impacts our environment. We may not be able to create a perfectly sustainable world, but we can try…and we can make a difference with every effort we make.
I believe in a three-pronged approach to protecting our environment. First, we must fully understand the impact on our environment caused by virtually everything we do. Every policy, project, town code, local law, everything that we do has an environmental impact. It is our job to understand what that impact is with the goal of reducing, negating or mitigating negative impacts.
Second, we must look to find solutions, alternatives, or mitigation techniques to make sure that we are either creating a sustainable foundation for what we are doing or we are, at least, moving reasonably in that direction.
Third, we must find partners, allies and friends. This means partnering with individuals; organizations, local institutions, agencies, and businesses; and also other governments, be they local villages, neighboring towns, our county, our state or our federal government.
In my various roles in government, I have created dozens of programs, projects and policies that move us towards greater sustainability or, at least, mitigate damage that is caused by reasons beyond my control. In no particular order, I created or adopted the following:
- School Recycling Project
- Wetlands restoration – Newburger Cove
- Wetlands restoration – Mill Pond
- Wetlands restoration – Gerry Park Pond
- Wetland restoration
- Rain Barrel Program
- Composting
- Trassion Show
- Sheets Creek Clean up
- Renewable Energy purchase
- Conversion to Hybrid Fleet
- Conversion to Electric Fleet
- Platinum Leed Certified Community Center (Yes We Can – Westbury)
- Open Space Referendum
The breadth and depth of the programs I created or pursued show, I believe, my commitment to the environment in every sense of what that word means.
The stakes today are higher than they have ever been. We are now not only trying to make a difference in our own local community, but showing the way for municipalities throughout our region, state and country to take seriously the dangers that looms over our planet if we fail to change course now, in real time, today.
In 2012, I hosted the Town’s first-ever “trashion” show, which featured recycled apparel designed and created by students from the nine school districts participating in the school recycling program. The event was an enormous success and continued past my tenure as Town Supervisor.
I plan to regularly coordinate with the many devoted environmental organizations in our town to ease the permitting process for clean-up events and eco-aware celebrations.
Upon becoming town supervisor many years ago, one of the first policy decisions I made was to bring the 311 call system and performance management program to North Hempstead. At the time, a number of cities across the country had launched such a program beginning in Baltimore under then-mayor Martin O’Malley. No suburban governments had initiated a 311 system, however.
I was convinced that the challenges residents’ faced when trying to communicate with their local government whether to gather information, report a problem or make a suggestion was overwhelming and needlessly complicated. The 311 system changed that problem forever.
Over the course of several years, I transitioned each department, and ultimately all calls, to the town to go to our 311 system so that every call would be logged, documented, preserved for future follow-up by the caller, and resolved by town personnel.
The town would receive upwards of 200,000 calls per year on issues such as code violations, reporting litter, lost animals, tax questions, potholes, street lights, trees, Project Independence, concert locations/start times, storm information, utility outages, garbage pick up, recycling, etc.
The town would also utilize the data created from these calls to discern how long it takes to respond to various inquiries resulting in improved management practices and results.
The 311 system is still up and running today and North Hempstead remains the only town in Nassau County to use this system.
While serving as Deputy County Executive in Suffolk County, I introduced the 311 system to County Executive Steve Bellone and we launched a countywide 311 system as well.
When last serving as North Hempstead town supervisor, I built the Town’s first-ever ‘Green Fleet,’ consisting of over twenty hybrid and electric vehicles (EVs) as well as CNG buses acquired through grants from NYSERDA. EVs have dramatically improved in availability, cost efficiency, and range in the last ten years. As Town Supervisor, I will build upon Councilwoman Veronica Lurvey’s plan to build a townwide EV charging station infrastructure and to also fully transition the Town fleet to EVs consistent with state and national standards.. I will also continue to pursue a full regional EV charging network for the public at large and work with our local utility and other providers to enable charging stations to be powered with renewable energy sources.
In addition, when designing and building the Yes We Can Community Center, one of my major accomplishments, I included one of the first EV charging stations in the State of New York.
In my role as Deputy County Executive in Suffolk County, I played a leading role in putting forward Suffolk County’s EV plan to build 1500 charging stations throughout the county and to transition the entire Suffolk County fleet to EVs by 2035. In addition, as part of the “Shared Services” program that I oversee in Suffolk, we worked together to build our first EV charging stations at the Lindenhurst Library as part of our library shared services partnership.
As part of my policy goal to incentivize and complete our transition to EVs, I am committed to ensuring that the natural resources used to make batteries are mined under proper human rights and environmentally sound conditions and that battery recycling is fully pursued and utilized. We will work with our fire departments to develop and deploy safe and effective ways to address battery fires which are less frequent than gas powered vehicles, but a concern nevertheless. And, as indicated above, we will work to make sure that our charging station infrastructure will be powered by renewable energy sources in order to mitigate the effects on our grid and carbon footprint.
As we age, we increasingly face physical, emotional and social challenges. After years of investing in one’s community through work, family and taxes it is incumbent upon local government to invest in our senior citizens as the aging process creates new challenges in navigating the world we live in.
In 2006, I created Project Independence which quickly became a go-to program for our senior citizens and their families looking for support services that made it easier to “age in place.” We partnered with taxi companies, medical professionals, social workers and home handyman programs to provide the support services that help those who could benefit from assistance in various ways.
Prior to creating Project Independence I deployed a 311 call center and data analytics ¬-technology system to North Hempstead. Any resident could simply dial 311 and get a fully informed, professional town agent who could address any issue, concern, problem or idea that the caller raised.
When I created the Project Independence program, I combined it with our 311 call system so that any senior citizen could dial 311 and be immediately connected to Project Independence staff which included social workers, visiting nurses and government support staff. When I added the transportation programs that offered free taxi rides to local supermarkets and also discounted taxi rides to doctors offices, we utilized the 311 system as a dispatch center to arrange for the requested taxi rides in partnership with our local taxi companies throughout the town.
By 2010, we were handling more than 15,000 Project Independence calls a year. By that time we had added a visiting nurse program and a social worker program where we would connect seniors to medical personnel and to mental health professionals by phone or in person to address emotional and other mental health issues. We also provided services from a handyman program where representatives from a not-for-profit handyman agency trained people with disabilities who had handyman type skills and could fix various home needs under the supervision of agency personnel.
We also created a neighbor to neighbor program where families of senior citizens could call a designated neighbor to check in on their aging parent or relative if they were having difficulty contacting them. Of note was the grandparenting program we established in conjunction with a social service agency to assist grandparents who for one reason or another became the primary caregiver of a young child.
North Hempstead’s Project Independence program was recognized as a nationally leading seniors program that would receive support and recognition from the United States Congress, New York State, AARP, and CNN/Money Magazine when it designated North Hempstead as one of the best places to live in America for senior citizens.
Since its inception, the program has attracted tens of thousands of active participants and hundreds of thousands of service requests. The program utilizes local steering committees in communities throughout the town organized by local senior citizens and town employees. Together, they prepare and distribute a newsletter and work towards continuous improvement of the program.
As Town Supervisor, I will continue to invest in and develop Project Independence.
