Last month I wrote a diary about the comments made on Facebook by some people regarding the recent school budget vote our district had. This month I want to follow up by writing a little bit about the political climate in my small "town." I am using town in quotation marks because the place I am talking about is a Zip Code not the actual town which is much larger. However for simplicity's sake I will use the word town to refer to where. If you see the word Town with a capital T that will refer to the larger administrative division that governs my town.
Just as a primer, counties in New York State are divided into different subdivisions. The largest subdivision is a Town. Within Towns, you find incorporated villages and hamlets. Many zip codes in Towns contain both villages and hamlets. I live in zip code that is comprised of two hamlets and one incorporated village. Personally, I live in one of the two hamlets and thus not governed by the village government. My little place of abode in total (village and hamlets) has less than 8,500 residents as of the last census.
With the exception of when I was away at college, I have lived in my hometown for virtually my entire life but I never paid much attention to the politics of the town. Once my family decided to open a business here, I started following things much more closely, and boy was I amazed at what I found out.
Follow me down the orange rabbit hole for all the crazy you can stand.
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Like many places on Long Island, my town is very Republican at the state and local level. With the exception of my state Assemblyman, every non-state wide elected official that represents me is a Republican. In fact for one of my elected offices, the Democratic Party has rarely nominated their own candidate preferring to use NY’s fusion voting system to endorse the Republican candidate (I vote for myself as a write-in when that happens). Now granted few of these Republicans are your crazy nut job types found in many other parts of the country or even the state, but they do everything they can to quicken the downfall of Long Island as a whole. NIMBYism runs rampant here and caused Nassau County to lose their only professional sports franchise.
To give you an idea how Republican the town is during almost every election season signs for Republican candidates out number signs for Democrats on people’s lawns at least 10-1. In fact, I have had many lawn signs stolen from my lawn over the years. They have to keep those numbers up, right?
Now since there is almost total Republican control here, one would think the political climate would be fairly calm. Oh, how wrong you are to assume that. Let’s take a few paragraphs and talk about what has gone on around here in the last 6+ months.
Due to the high number of Republicans in the village, the political parties there have their own names. The names are irrelevant. What is relevant is that there have been no contested elections in the village for approx. 20 years. It was not until this year that the village held its first contested election for mayor along with two trustee positions. The person running for mayor as a member of the new party is, according to the newspaper reports at the time, a registered Democrat. As for the two people running for trustee with him, their political affiliations were not revealed. They were running against one trustee who was running for re-election and two other people running to replace two elected officials who were retiring. These two may have been new to the village government, but both are deeply ingrained with the controlling politicians up and down the different levels of government. The person running for mayor also happened to be the president of the local chamber of commerce. It is at the Chamber where our controversy begins.
According to published reports, a controversy erupted at the Chamber meeting during the board elections for the Chamber. Apparently some members said due to a secret by-laws change pushing up the deadline to pay membership fees, they were told they were no longer dues paying members of the chamber and could not vote in the election. Envelopes were held up containing returned checks that the president of the Chamber said were not received in time. Chanting went back and forth amongst the two factions with one side claiming the president was a dictator and the other side shouting for the leader of the rival group, a resident of one the hamlets, to get out of town. I should mention that person is a VP of a neighboring town’s chamber of commerce.
A little less than a month later, my sister heard from a high school friend of hers that a new chamber was being formed and invited our business to come to their first meeting and join. Yes you read that correctly, I live in a town of no more than 8,500 residents that now has TWO chambers of commerce. As a favor to her friend, we decided to attend the first meeting.
Being a new business, we really wanted to join as many organizations that would help us promote our business because that just makes good sense. However we were fearful that by joining one or both, we could potentially be putting ourselves in a precarious position. At my urging, my mother asked flat out if joining the other chamber would be an issue. The president said their chamber was apolitical and we could do what we want (The other chamber said the same thing when asked). I thought to myself, “That’s bullshit.” A chamber springing up within one month of a contentious vote is nothing but political. A much more honest answer would have been: “We don’t like them, but we won’t hold it against you to join their group as well.” I knew we were going to take a risk by joining both groups.
Throughout the run-up to the village election, it became quite clear that each of the chambers were essentially business group arms of the two political parties. The nastiness that had been going back-and-forth was reaching a fevered pitch. Facebook was flooded with comments declaring one of the chambers as fake and one political party as a sham. People were complaining about illegally placed signs, signs that were being stolen or destroyed and dirty tricks being committed by each of the parties. There were even comments from some about who helped the area the most after Sandy and who seemed to not care at all.
If all that wasn’t enough, the Town and County politicians were getting involved by endorsing candidates (all endorsed candidates from the incumbent party). That led to cries of manipulation by the other party. I could spend an entire diary talking about the corruption of local Long Island governments, but I’ll leave it at this: at least half of the politicians down here could be brought up any number of corruption-related charges.
Thus we come to Election Day. Of course there were rampant accusations of voter disenfranchisement. But the election ended with the incumbent party sweeping the three races. And of course, even though there were calls for the town to come together to support each other, vindictiveness ruled the day. The losing party levied accusations of the election being a sham. There were accusations of the new government being ultra-secretive and violating open meeting laws by shutting down speaking who did not live in the village.
The two chambers continued to go at each other saying each was being shut out of attending events being hosted by the other chamber. There were accusations of the village giving preferential treatment to the chamber that supported the elected officials during the campaign and not the chamber that had been a part of the village for over 60 years. The original chamber kept stating the village was doing everything it could to keep them out of supporting community events and posting signs while the new chamber was getting everything it wanted.
Most recently one of the original instigators of this whole nonsense circulated what has to be the most vindictive and defaming letter I have ever. There was no reason for this to go out but for pure hatred and spite. I have never been more embarrassed about where I live than I am right now.
So why am I talking about all of this? Partially because I love to rant about things that piss me off, but also because we are expecting to have our grand opening next month and really wanted the entire town to come out and support us including both chambers. But we cannot have that because the town is completely divided. You’d think the way people are acting we are having a Tea Party uprising, but we are not. It is just a bunch of jerks who cannot get along even though we are still trying to recover from Sandy. There is still at least 20% of the population who have not been able to return. One would think that would be the most important thing. And supporting a new business that will be hiring mostly locals would be at/near the top of the list. Oh well, I guess not.
So tell me what kinds of crazy local politics do you all have?
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Top Comments for June 12, 2014:
From BlackSheep1:
I am nominating Coss's excellent observation. This just nails Li'l Ricky. From Jen Hayden's diary, "Texas Governor compares homosexuality to alcoholism."
From
ozsea1:
great comment from Eric Stetson, and a worthy addition to Top Comments.
[ed's note: comment out rec time, but worthy nonetheless]
From
Eyesbright:
I've grown very fond of Mojo11's comments. He won me over last year with his Motorcycle Vagina diary (link included in his comment) and he's on a roll again today with this comment, especially.
In Jen Hayden's fine diary on Rick Perry's latest bs.
From your now calmer diarist:
Flagged by Caniac41:
shoeless figured out the reason behind the Republicans filibuster of Sen Warren's student loan bill.
From Laura Clawson's diary: "Elizabeth Warren says it's 'time to come back louder' after Republicans filibuster student loan bill"
smiley7 links us to Juan Cole's excellent analysis of how one of the Bush Administration's original reasons for their disastrous Iraq War policy has finally come full circle. From smiley7's diary: "When will we ever learn? Iraq, Updated"
Top Mojo for yesterday, June 11th, first comments and tip jars excluded. Thank you
mik for the mojo magic! For those of you interested in How Top Mojo Works, please see his diary
FAQing Top Mojo.
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June 11, 2014 Picture Quilt, courtesy of jotter!