Lowey Will Not Seek Re-election in 2020

White Plains, NY – Congresswoman Nita M. Lowey (D-NY17/Westchester and Rockland), Chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee, announced today that she will not seek re-election next year in the following statement: 

“After 31 years in the United States Congress, representing the people of Westchester, Rockland, Queens and the Bronx, I have decided not to seek re-election in 2020. 

“It is my deep honor and privilege to serve my community and my country, and I will always be grateful to the people who have entrusted me to represent them. 

“I am proud of the help my office has provided to thousands of constituents on matters ranging from health insurance and veterans’ benefits to Social Security and student loans. “As a long-time Member of the House Appropriations Committee, I have secured funding to clean up and protect Long Island Sound and the Hudson River; increase access to Head Start, after school programs, and community health centers for thousands of local children and families; provide New York’s fair share of homeland security assistance; and make the commute across the Hudson easier and safer on the new Gov. Mario M. Cuomo Bridge. In difficult times, including after September 11th and Superstorm Sandy, I have fought hard in Washington for federal assistance to recover and rebuild. 

“I authored legislation to institute the .08 standard of enforcement for drunk driving, which has dramatically reduced DWI fatalities. My legislation to require commonsense, clear allergy information on food labels has improved and saved countless lives. I am also proud of my successful efforts to require contraceptive insurance coverage for federal employees and to dramatically increase investments and gender equity in federal medical research. 

“As the Chairwoman of the Appropriations subcommittee that writes the foreign aid bill, I have advanced record funding for women’s health and basic education - especially for girls - around the world, a strong U.S.-Israel relationship with bipartisan support, and other investments that support American interests abroad. 

“I am honored that my colleagues in Congress elected me as the first Chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee and will fight vigorously for House Democratic priorities as I negotiate spending bills for fiscal years 2020 and 2021. 

“I am especially thankful for the dedication and wisdom of my current and former staff in New York, in Washington, and on the House Appropriations Committee. Partnerships with countless advocates, leaders, and elected officials in New York and Washington have been invaluable. I look forward to more time with my husband Steve and our family, who have strongly supported my career in public service. 

“Thank you to the people of my district for the opportunity to serve. I will continue working as hard as ever – with the same optimism and energy – through the end of this term in Congress.”

Just Watch Me

The time leading up to the next election promises to be interesting and economically advantageous for overburdened and beleaguered taxpayers. Not because we’ll have any breakthrough politicians revolutionizing anything, but because several of our potential candidates want to move up, so they are pandering “savings” to the voters. It’s the classic line from a song, “Vote for me and I’ll set you free.” The reality however, begins more likely as, “Elect me to represent you,” which morphs into, “Thanks for electing me, but after all it is all about me. There’s more I need to do and am seeking higher office to do it. See ya!” More accurately the sentiment should be translated as, “Thanks for electing me suckers! I can make more money and get more power by moving up and away from you. Vote for me again and I’m outta here, just watch me!” Since most voters are willfully oblivious to most politics and their politicians, they think they’re doing their community a service by going to vote, recognizing the name on the ballot and voting for them or simply voting the party line when they don’t know anything of a candidate, encouraging more of the same behavior for the next crop of candidates who come along.

There is usually some sort of damage or havoc left in the exiting politician’s wake in the form of increased taxes, new rules, regulations, fees and restrictions to our personal freedoms. Our own Town leaders say they are business friendly, yet continue to institute or increase fees, pass new regulations (with fines), all limiting the business’ ability to operate profitably. Once a business’ resources are exhausted, several less desirable options are available: they let people go, they cut back on merchandise or services, move to another location or go out of business.

Their acts of desperation to continue to stay in business affects us all as the community tax base begins to erode, employees who had the ability to financially support the area cannot and cut back their spending. Some even lose their homes and are forced to move in with relatives or subsidized housing, aka affordable housing. Less taxes are paid into everything from FICA, Social Security, pensions, towns and villages, etc. The elected politicians quick-buck has long-term devastating effects.

For instance, in Greenburgh we witness a Town Board that perpetually struggles to create new taxes in the form of fees and permits or increase existing ones to offset Mr Feiner’s expensive blunders. Blunders such as Fortress Bible Church ($8M payout); WestHelp ($1.2M/yr loss), remarkably uncovered Tax Arrears ($21M uncollected over 20 yrs), Frank’s Nursery property ($3.5 M lost), water meter debacle ($4M expense) and finally, but not limited to, the 10% salary increase the Town Board will vote itself. Mr Feiner justifies the increase saying the elected officials haven’t had a raise since 2007 or so. Here’s a simple solution: quit! Anytime the salary one receives is not working for someone in the “real world” (private sector), that person starts marketing themselves and seeks a new job. Mr Feiner tried this as a politician when he ran for Congress – and lost. So this time he just instructed his Board to vote them all a pretty hefty raise. While the G10 fights this, the willfully ignorant taxpayers allow this.

Mr Feiner wanted to be in Congress. Mr Astorino wants to be Governor, Mr Christie wants to be President. Mr Cuomo wants to be President – and his actions certainly belie that. In New York, it’s Andrew’s turn, so New Jersey’s big guy will really have his work cut out for him. After Cuomo’s big media blunder years ago, the “payback” to Uncle Mario happened and the junior Cuomo was appointed the HUD Chair so he could pay his dues, keep his big, entitled mouth shut and let New Yorkers forget how he insulted them, come back and get back onto the political horse. Shortly after this time, a younger Noam Bramson was elected as New Rochelle Mayor and his grooming began for the promised Nita Lowey’s Congressional seat when she retired. That is, until the Democratic apparatchik began bandying Chelsea Clinton’s name about as her successor if and when retirement plans are announced. In the meantime, our recently re-elected politicians all desire to use our backs as their stepping stone, so they are doing and saying the right things for taxpayers.

Unfortunately, Mr Feiner will not be going anywhere, anytime soon. We had always hoped that someone else would be interesting in hiring a non-practicing attorney, with no management skills, no budget skills and was convicted in Federal Court? No takers. No surprise. Since he cannot move up, apparently Greenburgh is stuck with him, thanks to the willfully ignorant that just won’t bother to pay any attention to his illegal actions and habitually reelect him. By the way, now that Westhab’s President Robert Miller is retiring, perhaps Mr Feiner will be asked to step in and fill their one void with another?

County Executive Astorino, moving along after his well-deserved reelection, is doing more than putting his toe in the proverbial waters to see if support for his run for governor has any legs. He recently travelled to the Republican Governors Association conference in Phoenix with his wife, and spent time meeting with New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie, another political anomaly in an otherwise overwhelmingly Democratic environ. Why did they need to go to Arizona to talk? They could have more easily gotten together in Westchester or New Jersey to “strategerize”. Details of what they discussed was not made public. According to the upstate newspaper the Democrat & Chronicle, Governor Cuomo claims he knows what the two discussed but isn’t disclosing what he knows.

Astorino ran a campaign about maintaing our neighborhoods zoning independence and the right to control our community’s respective look and feel. He and others have bemoaned the overreaching federal government’s hand into this issue, which ABG believes falls squarely under Home Rule. While many support Astorino’s position, many Democrats, their staff and political pundits, along with anybody anti-Republican, claim he’s doing more harm than good. Because of his actions, the federal government has been withholding funds that are more like member items and costing our communities the ability to offer more to their residents (translation: lost votes). He also reduced the spending for the County’s budget, and actually lowered County taxes. While the County tax portion of property taxes paid by the average homeowner is about 18%, the gesture is more symbolic than tangible. And yet the gesture is having good political payoff for Astorino as well as taxpayers. It appears that he is helping the overtaxed taxpayer.

Common Core is dividing New York parents of school age children. Common Core and standardized testing under the guise of educational improvements will further what school’s institutionalized learning already does. It reduces creativity, individual thought, and exceptionalism, akin to teaching coloring and insisting the kids stay within the lines. It demoralizes teachers whose only love is to impart and nurture knowledge into the rapt minds of our young. Governor Cuomo has been doing a great job of campaigning, with only a few minor missteps from which he’s been able to distance himself thanks to a sympathetic liberal press. He has championed reducing taxes, trying to stimulate growth and jobs. He has taken a position on Common Core, seeming to align himself with the majority of a vociferous public. As he continues to claim to be against high taxes, he streamlined the Tappan Zee Bridge project, continues to espouse development and jobs while bolstering his job approval ratings.

Staunch Republicans have even admitted Mr Cuomo is doing a good job. The side benefit of all of this for the electorate is that we now have a 2% NYS Tax Cap, a Tappan Zee Bridge project seeming to move forward to create jobs along with other taxpayer friendly savings, ensuring New York financial and voting support. Mr Cuomo has also been smart enough (or advised) to stay out of the Hydro-fracking controversy in the Marcellus Shale region, having yet to yield a decision to either support hydro-fracking or not. Mr Cuomo’s gestures are nothing more than a stall tactic and if he can just get to the next election cycle without having to render a decision, he’ll be all set.  But his non-campaigning campaigning is having a good economic payoff for the New York taxpayer that we’ve not experienced in a while.

Obamacare is dividing the country and even the Democrats who voted for it. In fact, Obamacare’s implementation been postponed until after the next election to allow those same Democrats a pass to reelection. Our financial advisors are telling us the worst is yet to come. President Obama’s legacy is done. It’s Obamacare – good or bad. As businesses get affected by it and begin reacting to it as best they can, more and more people will be negatively affected. But the willfully ignorant will have forgotten how they were impacted and reelect the same people, just to get screwed again. The people who are financially better-off will just suck it up as they always do and pay the difference. The politicians will have been exempted from participating and pander to those with financially less, promising them much but delivering little.

It can’t all be blamed on the willfully ignorant, but it’s a good place to start. If and when they start paying attention, we can start to turn the tide and improve our lot in New York. It needs to start locally, only then will we get A Better Greenburgh.

Spending While Saying They Save

Republican County Executive Rob Astorino claims he’s trying to save the taxpayers money but is actually spending more on duplicative services behind the scenes. When he took office, he tried to consolidate the County Police (parkway patrols, bomb squad, SWAT) and the County Fire Service (fire training, hazardous materials response and technical rescue response, dispatching) into a Public Safety group, ultimately managed by the County Police. He appointed George Longworth, a retired police chief as the Commissioner of Public Safety, retired detective Joseph Yasinsky as is Deputy Police Commissioner, and retired fire officer John Cullen as his Deputy Fire Commissioner. Are they “double-dipping”, collecting their civil service pensions or did they come back to public service and put their pensions on hold? These were all political payback appointed positions which are ultimately a “cash cow” for union support via overtime dollars.

The majority of the Westchester fire service complained openly and vociferously against the consolidation and Astorino claimed “the plan we had discussed is off the table”. Even though it was proven that any consolidation here would not be cost effective, he went to work behind the scenes with his other plan to continue the consolidation anyway. It’s like saying you going to combine an airline mechanic position and a automobile mechanic position into one because they are both mechanics. It simply doesn’t work.

The Department of Emergency Services (originally the Richard A Flynn Fire Training Facility) humbly began under the auspices of the County Police in a small basement room in their facility in Hawthorne, NY, at the junction of Rt 9A and Saw Mill River Parkway. It was never a marriage made in heaven and the volunteer firefighters in Westchester County fought to get their own facility to have control and fire-specific orientations toward dispatching, training and safety. That effort came to fruition in 1973. Raymond Rush became the first administrator of the facility until he was ousted by then-County Executive Andy O’Rourke and its leadership became a patronage position for the County Executive du jour.

The County Department of Emergency Services dispatches about 30 fire departments throughout the County. They also maintain a Special Operations Team which encompasses Hazardous Materials and Technical Rescue Response teams. These all-volunteer members and are highly trained, equipped and led by one paid Chief. Each team is comprised of volunteer professionals from numerous walks of life including the fire, medical, police, engineering, construction and other backgrounds. As volunteers, they cost the county no money, especially overtime money, which is what the county police get for training and responses through backfill funding for their participation. Backfill funding is the practice of sending someone who is working or “on-duty” to training (or putting them on another assignment) and then (back)filling that person’s position with another member on (backfill) overtime. When the “professionals” consisting of paid county personnel on overtime cannot handle a call, they call either of these volunteer Special Operations Teams to bail them out.

Without the original fanfare, Astorino began approving purchasing duplicate equipment for the county police that the Special Operations teams already have (four vehicles and numerous trailers with equipment). Since the paid fire union mandates they will not work with volunteers, and Astorino is beholden to the unions for their “support”, he has been getting them this duplicate set of gear, equipment and training, costing the county taxpayers unnecessary hundreds of thousands and maybe millions of dollars, and handing it over to the county police “just in case”. It’s this kind of subterfuge that is causing him to lose battle after battle with the public. His pandering and deceit may cost him re-election even if his challenger Noam Bramson is proven to be the lesser candidate. But his end-game is to support the police and fire union personnel in hopes of buying their votes.

As an aside, the County’s Technical Rescue Team was awarded a Congressional Unit Citation for their participation in rescuing one of the rafters in distress on Sunday, August 28, 2011, during the tail end of Tropical Storms Irene and Lee after participating in numerous responses during a 35-hour period. The County Legislators also recognized the Team for those same efforts as did the Westchester County Volunteer Firemen’s Association, The Westchester County Fire Chiefs Association and the NYS Chiefs Association. So why pay for services that are provided for free by the County to any municipality who asks for it with SWAT(special weapons and tactics), Technical Rescue and Hazardous Materials responses? Mr Bernstein is correct to question whether the Town should have a SWAT team, but needs to continue the argument to Technical Rescue and Hazardous Materials responses as well.

During the Democratic Primary Debate, and in a campaign mailing, Mr Feiner accused his opponent, for the Supervisor’s position, Mr Bernstein, of seeking to contract fire service protection away from the Village fire departments to the paid fire departments, which he claims would raise their fire protection costs by roughly 30%. Mr Feiner is famous for quoting outdated information and throwing out numbers that sound impressive but have no real basis in fact. What Mr Bernstein had said was we should look at all of the Town’s expenses and if contracting with the Village fire departments is not cost effective, put the fire protection out to bid. As long as everything throughout the Town is on the table for review, ABG sees no harm in reviewing this. Reviewing whether a duplicate SWAT team, hazardous materials and technical rescue team is needed when the county already maintains available ones for us to use at no charge is a logical choice.

The Greenburgh police SWAT unit, hazardous materials unit and a technical rescue units are comprised of individual members, some of whom are members of the paid fire departments. If called out, it automatically initiates the backfill funding overtime extravaganza for both police and fire. There is little or no oversight of these expenditures as they are automtically deemed necessary due to an emergency. There is usually little if any other overtime available due to current budget constraints. But, the paid services see this as a minimum of six to eight hours worth of extra money and treat every minor dustup as a major event. It bolsters their claims of needing these in these positions and of course the overtime. But do we really need it? 

The Villages contract fire protection service with the Village in portions of the Unincorporated Town. The largest contract being with the Elmsford Fire Department for covering the western portion of the Town in the area of Rt 119 between the Elmsford and Tarrytown and north Elmsford from about I-287 to Grasslands Road. The amount of money spent for the Elmsford, and other Village contracts throughout the Town is under $1M. To realistically think the paid fire departments can cover this space is not cost effective, practical or necessary. We urge you to check your tax bill and you’ll see the two largest expenses on it: school taxes and fire protection taxes (in Unincorporated).

Mr Feiner claims we do need the SWAT team because if something were to happen, they’re there. But so is the County – at no charge! Supervisor Feiner and the Town of Greenburgh is doing a similar union payback thing with the police and paid fire personnel by allowing it. In discussing this with a variety of beleaguered taxpaying residents, everyone ABG spoke with did not know that this took place but were not surprised, claiming there’s always abuse in every system. They knew about “normal” overtime for things like coverage for personnel calling out sick, special events, storms and so on. Most did not even know of the backfill funding component of overtime for paid emergency responders.

Backfill funding is utilized routinely in the Yonkers Fire Department with grants from (mostly) Congresswoman Nita Lowey (and NYS Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand) under various program grant names that would never indicate it was overtime or backfill funding money. Things like a grant from Homeland Security for “improved inter-municipal operations”. You might say it’s a grant from the federal government and doesn’t cost us anything. You’d be wrong. It is a grant from the federal government, but it paid for by all taxpayers and it is only going to the paid departments. Most people want and expect their taxes to be used in their communities.

Ms Lowey will rarely, if ever, get the same amounts of money (we’re talking hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of dollars) for any of the 50 or so volunteer fire departments in Westchester. Usually the meager amounts she gets volunteer fire departments are “member items” of up to $5,000. Member items are discretionary funds each legislator maintains with the ability to give it away to any special interest they choose. Volunteer firefighters in Westchester County outnumber paid firefighters about four to one. The volunteers live and vote in and for their communities. Most paid firefighters don’t live or vote where they work. So while the paid firefighter unions lobby are more successful than the volunteer departments in the “gimme more” department, you’d be hard-pressed to prove this isn’t about paying off the unions.

September 10 is the Democratic primary. ABG has touched on a few “goings on” that most people don’t know about. Why? A lack of transparency exists throughout local, county, state and federal government that is rarely learned about until it’s usually too late or somebody gets caught doing something wrong. Greenburgh has been shrouded in secret meetings, back room deals, winks and nods, developer carte blanche and neighborhood assassinations by the current administration. It’s time for real change in Greenburgh. ABG urges concerned Democrats to come out and vote in the Tuesday primary. Vote for A Better Greenburgh.