In the final debate of a hard-fought campaign for political leadership in Pelham Manor, incumbent Mayor Jennifer Monachino Lapey defended her record last week against aggressive attacks from challenger Mark Cardwell, while a pair of her incumbent running-mate trustees tried to fend off criticism from candidates aligned with Cardwell.
The two-hour debate, hosted in Pelham Manor by the League of Women Voters on October 23, covered a wide range of subjects, but three issues dominated the discussion: storm-water flooding, pedestrian safety and management of the village’s finances.
In contrast to a similar debate in early October among candidates for office in the Town of Pelham, in which the opponents were unfailingly polite to each other, last week’s forum was a gloves-off affair from the start.
“Our current leadership has failed us,” declared Cardwell in his opening statement. “We face a flooding crisis, safety problems and exorbitant taxes, all while our mayor refuses to listen, collaborate or plan. I know parents worry about sending their kids to school on the chaotic streets. They worry about flooding every time rain is forecast and they worry about their cars and homes getting broken into. You deserve better.”
Lapey would have none of it. “I‘m a practicing attorney who was a prosecutor. I’ve been doing the job, and the results are clear, and I have a demonstrated record of service,” she said when describing the success she and the trustees had in obtaining state grants to fund local improvements. “I’m here fighting for this village, day in and day out,” she said. “This village is universally regarded as a success, and we have the record of experience to show for it.”
On the subject of the Manor’s budget, Cardwell claimed that there are millions of dollars available for the village’s use, and that he would use it without incurring debt to combat flooding and improve pedestrian safety. In response, Lapey said that the village has not incurred debt in the past, and that the “millions” that Cardwell was referring to was actually $5.5 million in unrestricted funds, which is within the recommended range of a safety net for a village to have in accordance with the New York state guidelines.
On the issue of pedestrian safety, Lapey spoke about the accomplishments that she and the current trustees had achieved. “We reduced the speed limit from 30 to 25 and 15 miles an hour around the schools,” she said. “We added approximately 50 stop signs….We have unmarked vehicles, and we also have a gun that collects data, and then we also have another apparatus, which is a speed tracker, which is a visual cue, and our officers are out in the field.”
In response, Cardwell told the story of an incident he witnessed last year, when he was out walking, turned a corner and saw a boy on the ground, screaming, after being hit by a car. “I said to myself, why, when I wrote to the mayor nine years ago about a kid getting hit by a car, is it still happening?” He thanked Lapey for having stop signs installed shortly after last year’s incident, but criticized her for not approaching traffic safety in a more comprehensive way.
“I really take offense to weaponizing an incident with a child,” Lapey said in a bristling rebuttal. “It’s unprofessional and inappropriate to raise an incident where there was a situation, that there are facts and evidence that we know of, that I’m not able to talk about [except] hypothetically and broadly. Children make mistakes. Sometimes children run out after a variety of things. We cannot blame the Manor police department or this village for the acts of individuals.”
As for flooding, Cardwell enumerated all the steps he would take as mayor, from collaborating with top officials of neighboring communities, to dredging clogged water basins and digging up an area near Glover Field that contributes to the flooding.
“You cannot dredge in an area that is not within your control,” Lapey responded, noting that the proposed dredging area is within New York City Parks Department boundaries. “We are also working on the Glover Field area with the school district. Mr. Cardwell’s self-professed plan of taking a backhoe to school-owned property and breaking a sewer line with raw sewage, rendering our field unusable, is insanity.”
In a rebuttal, Cardwell said, “The mayor of New Rochelle has told us that she has never spoken to you. That’s not the kind of leadership we need to resolve that problem in New Rochelle.”
“But the backhoe is a good idea,” Lapey shot back, eliciting a few chuckles from the audience of about 60 people.
Later in the forum, Lapey and Cardwell clashed over the idea of creating resident committees, which he favors. She noted the addition of an unrestricted public comment period to every Village board meeting now, and said there was no need to create extra layers between residents town officials. “Government is a two-way street,” she said.
In the second part of the forum, Democrats Ryan Kurtz and Deborah Winstead continued pounding on the issues of flooding and traffic safety, keeping the incumbent Republican trustees–Tim Case and DJ McLaughlin–on the defensive for much of the hour.
Kurtz led the onslaught from his opening statement. “I want to see the Manor at its best. To do that, we need new perspectives.” He claimed that political power in the Manor had been controlled by a small “core group” for decades. “It leads to group-think that lets really obvious things fall through the cracks and stifles progress,” he said. “This isn’t partisan, it’s just human nature.” As an example, he claimed that until a few years ago, the village was holding some $9 million in a checking account, where it was earning zero interest. “That’s group-think run amok.”
Case pushed back on the allegations of weak oversight of the village’s funds, describing in detail how the village’s cash was accounted for, from unrestricted money to funds reserved for projects, and how all these numbers were accessible on the Pelham Manor website. “Every year, we have over $2.5 million dollars worth of assigned capital projects planned, and it’s all right there in black and white,” he said.
Kurtz described the issue of flooding as “priority number one,” and said he would hold an open town hall meeting the village’s flooding engineer. Winstead joined his argument, saying that Pelham Manor would have to ramp up the pressure on “our neighboring municipalities.” To demonstrate her doggedness as a lawyer, she told a story about an incident early in her career, when a lawyer on the opposite side of an issue refused to return her phone calls. In order to break through, she went to the lawyer’s office and sat outside for four hours until she finally got the meeting.
Case defended the work that he, McLaughlin and Lapey had done, saying the trustees had taken “significant steps” to address flooding issues. He pointed to a $1.6 million dollar storm water drainage improvement currently being done on Highbrook Avenue, and mentioned the the addition of a drain on Monroe street. He said representatives of the Manor had been in contact with neighboring municipalities even if, “[their] mayor never spoke to our mayor.”
Winstead pushed back on the Highbrook effort, arguing that the storm water project was only designed to protect residents from a one-year storm event, never mind a 10-year event.
Responding to claims from his opponents that the Manor was lagging in securing grant money for infrastructure improvements, McLaughlin pointed out the Manor ranked second among 18 villages in Westchester in getting grants over the last three years.
As for pedestrian safety, Kurtz argued that the Manor could be doing so much more, such as keeping the areas near intersections free of delivery trucks, improving visibility for local drivers. “We can’t just be counting how many stop signs we’ve installed,” he said.
Winstead recommended more consistent enforcement of traffic rules. “In order for enforcement to work, it has to be visible and it has to be constant,” she said. As an example, she pointed to the Village of Pelham, which vigorously enforces driving regulations on Fifth Avenue. When “you want to make a U-turn down there by DeCicco’s or before, you don’t do it, do you? You know why? Because you’re going to get a ticket.”
Case pushed back, noting that the Manor board had made great strides in the area of pedestrian safety. “I feel as if our village-wide traffic study that we had completed a couple years ago has been a smashing success. We did add stop signs, which people were happy about. We did lower the speed limit, we added crossing guards to several intersections before and after school. And I’ve noticed a significant difference driving around town.”
In response, Winstead said she had knocked on over 1,000 doors during the campaign and the biggest complaint she heard from voters was that it was not safe for kids to walk around town.
Despite the combative nature of the debate, Kurtz made a final appeal in his closing statement for non-partisan elections where voters could choose their officials without the backdrop of considering which political party they were affiliated with.
“This election is not a choice between good and evil,” he said. “It’s a choice between different ideas and leadership styles. I think, to move beyond the place that we are, we need to move to non-partisan elections like they have in Scarsdale. Currently, ideas here are not judged based on their merits, unfortunately at times, but based on who’s saying it and what their political party is at the national level.”
