Have a great weekend!

In a little while I will mark the start of the Labor Day weekend by playing in the 10th Annual James Van Arsdale Invitational Mens Doubles Round Robin Tennis Tournament at Silver Lake. This will be followed by at least five days of rest and relaxation. I don’t expect to get back to politics until some time next week, unless something really outrageous happens.

I hope you all have a great weekend too. Perhaps you could use all your extra free time to join Facebook.com and tune up your profiles, but whatever you do, have fun!

Friends

Sorry, I’m a little late with this column this morning, but my new fascination with Facebook has soaked up a lot of time. Since starting my Facebook page on Monday night, I now have a total of 9 official friends. O.K., three of them are my own children (Celia where are you?), but that’s not a bad start!

The way Facebook works is that you generally have to be accepted as someone’s friend before you can see their profile (and they can see yours). This is all very new to me, so I may have this wrong.

The rest of my “friends” are either current members who accepted my offer of friendship, or new members who joined after I sent a spam out yesterday to 195 people in my address book. Among the new members are Kathleen Houston and John Zmich. Welcome aboard!

If you know these people, (and who in Geneseo doesn’t?) I’m sure you could be their friend too! But a word about friendship and politics. Being my friend (on Facebook or in the real world) does not mean you have to be my political supporter. And vice-versa, Thank God!

In other words, you do not have to be my friend, you don’t even have to like me (although it helps), to vote for me. You just have to think that I will do the best job of any of the available candidates. On the other hand, you can think I’m the greatest person in the history of the world (and want to be my friend), and still not think that I’m the right person to be Geneseo Supervisor in 2008!

I understand this, because I learned a long time ago that politics is not personal. So lighten up, have some fun and get your own face on Facebook.com! And then you can decide if you want to be my friend (and I hope the answer will be yes!)

P.S. Speaking of friends, it was nice to see County Administrator Nick Mazza strolling on Main Street yesterday. He seemed to be well-received by the locals, so much so that he was late getting back to his car and found a parking ticket on it. Being the true mensch that Nick is, he marched right in to the Village Hall and paid the ticket on the spot. It’s good to see a thaw in County-Village relations! Thanks Nick! Come back soon!

See my face on Facebook

After reading a story in Newsweek about how Facebook is taking over the world, I decided to try to catch up with this social networking web site. Actually I’ve had an account for a while, but that was inspired solely by a desire to check out who my children’s friends are. Now I want to see what Facebook can do for me and my campaign.

In case you don’t know, www.facebook.com was started as a way for students at the same college to meet and get to know each other faster. For a long time, you had to have a college-based e-mail address to sign up. Recently, however, the service opened the doors to anybody and non-college students are now the majority of new members, although the overall demographic still skews fairly young. (By the way the service is absolutely free.)

As an example, when I had Facebook check out the 195 e-mail addresses in my contact list, it only found 14 current members of Facebook, and most of those were either college students or staff. Still I sent a spam blast out to all of those people inviting them to join, so that may increase. (Most of the names were e-mail addresses I gathered over the summer of local Republicans, so that is probably not an accurate measure of Facebook’s overall market penetration.)

I’m a newbie at this, of course, so don’t expect great things from my site, but if you are a member I would be happy to be your friend! A candidate needs all the friends he can get! If you are a member, you can check out my face here!

A ‘non-political’ weekend

For the first time since late May, I took a weekend off from politics. Well, not totally, of course. When you’re a candidate, people are going to think you are campaigning every time you step outside your own house.

I did play Saturday morning basketball for the first time in a couple months. I had given that more vigorous full-court game up, for fear that an injury would cripple my door-to-door ability. Since I don’t plan to hit any more doors until after Labor Day, however, I thought I would chance it.

I have banged on doors for 12 of the last 13 weekends (with one weekend off for the caucus). It’s a hard habit to break. When I drive through town, I have a barely controllable urge to stop the car and hit every door that I haven’t been to before.

Saturday afternoon I played in the Geneseo Fire Department’s Wormburner Classic Golf Tournament. Our team was even par through 16 holes before going boogie, double-boogie to finish 3 over. Only then did we discover that even par was the winning score!

I then slipped over to catch a little bit of the Fiddler’s Picnic at Long Point Park. There was a good crowd, although I don’t believe that many are actually from Geneseo. Each of the groups has a following that travels from all over Western New York to hear their favorites.

I did see Town Board candidate Patti Lavigne who had been drafted by organizer Howard Appell to serve on the stage crew. Patti was in good spirits and ready to go for the fall campaign. She is the one Republican that I will consider voting for this year. Obviously I will not be voting for Will, and I believe there are better choices on the Democratic line for town board than our two incumbents who have been missing in action on the Lowes issue.

To avoid politics altogether, I never left home Sunday.

My bypass plan

Over the 2005 Christmas break, I took some time to work out a proposal for a bypass of 20A traffic around the south side of the village. This is an idea that has been floating around for many years, but which never seems to go anywhere. I thought if I could make the plan more specific, perhaps I could bring it closer to reality.

I drove around and figured out the best routes and then studied tax maps to see who owned the property. Then I talked to some of the landowners including Austin Wadsworth, Stan Rutherford, Ken Book and Peter Bruckel. I even paid a visit on the late Walter Kingston who assured me that there was no traffic problem in Geneseo, and that a bypass was not needed and would never be built.

Undeterred, I produced a map of the proposed route and presented the idea to the Geneseo Town Board on Jan. 2, 2006. (That was the same meeting in which the board called me into an executive session to discuss whether I was enough of a team player to be re-appointed to the county traffic safety board, but that’s another story.)

Town Board member Mike Tenalio showed some interest in the idea and asked me to write it up. I subsequently produced a three-page narrative description of the idea. (I have now posted both the map and the narrative on my campaign site.)

I then presented the idea to a number of interested parties including County Executive Nick Mazza, County Highway Superintendent Don Higgins, the Traffic Safety Board and the Village Board. The idea even got mentioned in a newspaper story in the LC News before it was put on the shelf. To be fair, whatever interest there might have been, was effectively scared off by the gathering storm of the Lowes War.

And so the idea has remained dormant for over a year, although it is occasionally mentioned as something that might be considered in an expanded Access Management Study. The idea was brought back to mind by comments made by a resident of Hawthorn Circle who had attended the Access Management public hearing.

“What this town needs is a bypass,” Kenneth Kranz told me when I banged on his door during my campaign. As he started to describe his idea, I told him I had already designed such a plan a year and a half ago. I sent Ken a copy of my plan and he encouraged me to post it on my web site. I hope maybe the idea will catch on, but I’m not wildly optimistic.

This little incident is a case study in why I am running for Supervisor. It’s nice to have ideas, but in order to move them forward, you actually have to have some control over the agenda. If I am elected, perhaps I can make sure my ideas are taken a little more seriously.

BTW This particular plan would put my competitor Will Wadsworth in an awkward position if elected. With the bypass across the back of his father’s Homestead property, a key part of the proposal, he would have trouble promoting it without being accused of a conflict of interest.