Party lines

At a recent campaign committee meeting, I was pleased to see that I had an equal number of Republicans and Democrats (and a few independents) working together to help me get elected. I will not reveal their names to protect those who are guilty of daring to diverge from their party’s official choices.

You may also notice that my lawn signs are sprouting in front of houses from all sides of the political spectrum. This has a something do with the contentious development issue that has scrambled up the political lines in Geneseo this year, but it has probably always been true that party matters less in local elections.

I will almost certainly continue to vote Republican in most national and state elections. Although I am a great admirer of Barack Obama, I’m one of those dyed-in-the-wool Republicans whose hand would be afflicted by a palsy if I tried to vote for him, as Mario Cuomo famously observed on his last visit to Livingston County.

Because of my history of partisan Republicanism, including serving on the Republican State Committee for 5 years, and staunchly supporting my friend Lou Collela for County Judge just two years ago (over my other friend Dennis Cohen), I think it is quite remarkable that I am receiving so much support from the other party, and I am very grateful.

Change is part of life, and as a friend remarked to me yesterday, some people change for the better and some change into monsters. I hope I can be one of the former, although, given recent history, I can understand why Democrats might be concerned.

In this race I will succeed only if I can emerge as a true independent. Last year’s Boiled Frog run for Mayor was more like a Republican primary. Since there was no Democratic candidate in the race, members of that party were free to support me and still consider themselves anti-Republican. This year the choices are starker.

With big blue posters around town promoting the Democratic team, it takes a little moxie to buck the party and put Geneseo First, but that’s why they put curtains on voting booths!

P.S. My radio interview on WYSL is now posted along with those of the other three candidates. On Thursday we will tape a four-way debate to air next Saturday on WYSL. As always, that audio tape will also be posted here.

The mother’s milk of politics

Some have remarked how relieved they are that I have not asked them for money for my campaign. Although I have accepted political donations in past campaigns, I have decided not to in this race. I do this for a couple of reasons:

First, I was never comfortable with the sense of obligation that flows from the exchange of money. If I am elected I will almost certainly have to make some difficult decisions in the future that will make some of my supporters unhappy. I don’t want money to cloud my judgment or even give the appearance of doing so.

Second, I do not want to take anything away from the effort to raise money for Please Don’t Destroy Geneseo right now. We are at a very critical phase of the Newman PDD controversy and PDDG needs as much money as possible to combat the well-financed PR campaign that is now underway. If you feel like writing a check, please send it to PDDG, Box 236 Geneseo, 14454.

Third, I can make this gesture because I don’t anticipate spending a huge amount of money on the campaign anyway. I’m hoping to conduct the whole campaign on about $3,000, most of which I have already spent on lawn signs, postage and advertising. I think there is a limit as to what money can buy politically, and I am putting more faith in my own door-to-door efforts and the help of my friends and supporters.

This does not seem like an unreasonable gamble on the chance of getting a job that pays around $38,000 a year and I am fortunate to be in a position to make that bet. I am not running for the money, but it helps! In my platform, however, I have come out against automatic pay raises for town board members in the future, as has been the practice in the Kennison administration!

And finally it will make filling out my NYS financial disclosure forms a lot easier!

Thoughts on a bike

Having spent the better part of the summer campaigning on my bike, I have a few observations on the state of biking in our fair town. Although we have a lot of nice country roads that are very pleasurable for biking, there are three roads that I find very nerve racking.

It probably goes without saying that Rt. 20A should be avoided like the plague, and I did, except for the couple times that I had to cross it. Aside from that, I found both Reservoir and Lima Road in the town to be extremely dangerous.

This is because of a combination of heavy volume, high speed and very narrow shoulders on both roads. The Lima Road situation is complicated by the large number of horse farms located along the road.

I definitely do not believe it is safe for anyone to ride a horse anywhere near Lima Road, but some do. For a long time I’ve had the idea of building a recreational trail parallel to Lima Road that could be used by horses, bicyclists and hikers. This would probably work in the more rural stretches along the road, but there may not be enough room in some of the more developed areas.

At the very least, the road needs to be widened enough to allow a bike lane on either side. I’m no expert on that subject, but I found many parents along the road who would not even let their children walk to neighbor’s homes on the road under current conditions. I suspect similar concerns apply to Reservoir.

One of my campaign proposals is to require an impact fee from large-scale commercial developers to help pay for transportation needs in the town. I can’t think of a more appropriate use for such money than making these two roads more friendly for non-motorists.

Our radical agenda

This morning I posted the third of four candidate radio interviews from the David A. Parish Show on WYSL. As you would expect, Wes Kennison has his sound bites ready to go for the fall election.

According to Wes, PDDG is pursuing a “radical agenda” and all the candidates (except for his incumbent team) have backed away from their former association with the organization. Although there have been many misstatements in all three interviews, this whopper cries out for correction.

First of all, most of the candidates, besides Sally Wood and I, have never been associated with PDDG– and neither one of us is backing away!

Will Wadsworth happened to be walking by on the night that PDDG was born as we were picketing outside the Geneseo Planning Board meeting. He held up one of our signs long enough to have a famous picture taken for the newspaper. That was the beginning and end of his association with PDDG.

Despite frequent e-mails inviting him to attend, we never saw him at another PDDG or planning board meeting until last week. Perhaps if he had gotten involved, his position on Lowes would be a little better informed, but that’s another story!

Likewise Bob Wilcox has never had any association with PDDG. I have seen him at a few planning board meetings, but he has never played any role in our organization or adopted any of our “radical agenda,” other than to mouth platitudes about Smart Growth.

It should be noted as well that Town Board candidates John Zmich and Patti Lavigne are current members of the Geneseo Planning Board, and as such, it would be inappropriate for them to be members of PDDG. The fact that their votes on the planning board have generally been in harmony with positions PDDG has taken only proves that great minds think alike! And judging from last week’s votes on the board, there is no indication that they are backing away from their positions either!

Now about that agenda: PDDG has stood for a fair and open process in the consideration of the Newman PDD application. We have insisted that public records should be public and that existing planning and zoning should be respected.

We also believe that the planning board should be allowed to do its job without undue political pressure from the town board. For that reason, we demanded that the planning board be advised by its own independent attorney, paid for by the applicant.

We have also called for the planning board to adopt a code of ethics to prohibit private collusion between board members and applicants. We strongly object to the conduct of the current Chairman, Dwight Folts, who has continued to act as a member of the “development team” instead of as an independent board member.

If all this is a radical agenda then count me a radical. In addition, in the interview, Kennison claims that PDDG’s tactics are “too combative.” This is certainly a case of the pot calling the kettle black!

In the last two years the Kennison administration has disbanded the master plan committee, fired the planning board chairman, refused to reappoint a member who’s only crime was he wouldn’t follow orders, tried to use the town attorneys as a battering ram to keep the planning board in line, and stonewalled on every attempt to get public records disclosed.

The town’s claim that important correspondence with the developer in this case was “inadvertently destroyed” lacks any credibility. This is proven by the latest outrage that they will not even ask the developer to deliver its copies of the “missing” records, as Newman has offered to do.

Combative? You bet your bippy! But you have to be combative when you’ve got so much to hide!

Signs, signs, everywhere a sign

Yesterday I started putting up my political lawn signs. I started on Lima Road which perhaps not surprisingly seems to be a hotbed of Strong Supporters. At this point, according to local ordinance, I can only put them in the town, not the village.

The town law allows temporary signs to be up for 60 days and we are 47 days from the election by my count. The village law only allows signs for 40 days, so I will have to wait until next Friday before I can start putting them up.

The town does require an application and a $20 “cash” deposit, which I paid yesterday afternoon. I was glad it was not $20 per sign! The application asked the locations of the signs, but I just wrote in “every street in town.” I hope I can keep that promise!

There are of course constitutional issues with any attempt to regulate political speech. A year or so ago, the Mayor mentioned at a board meeting that he thought the “Geneseo Yes, Genrietta No” signs had been up too long. I immediately wrote a letter challenging any attempt to ban the signs, and nothing more was heard about it.

In this case, however, I figured it was just as easy to follow the law since it doesn’t seem that onerous. I suppose it goes without saying that if anyone out there in blogland wants to be the first on their block to have a Strong for Supervisor sign I would be happy to oblige. Please let me know!