On Tuesday, the polls will open at 6:00 am and will close at 9:00 pm. This year Preserve Ramapo did not run any candidates, but when asked, we of course have strong opinions on this upcoming election.
We are endorsing and ask you to come out Tuesday and vote for the following candidates:
Staying at home is not an option. It doesn’t matter if you own or rent, if you are here for a year or the rest of your life–voting is an American privilege and your entire community is counting on you to come out on Election Day to elect honest men and women to lead our municipalities. After years of telling you the truth about Christopher St. Lawrence and his cronies, we can’t let this happen again. It’s time for a change.
The sample ballots below show where these candidates appear on the Ramapo, Spring Valley and Suffern ballots. Note that there are three important propositions on the back of the ballot you will be given at your polling place. Please check our recommendations for those three propositions below. (Double tap on the image for a larger view)
Ramapo Sample Ballot
Spring Valley Sample Ballot
Suffern Sample Ballot
On the Back of all Ballots
You can look up your polling place on the Board of Elections site here.
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Preserve Ramapo Endorsements for 2017
Robert I. Rhodes, October 26, 2017
Ramapo’s Democratic Party has been so widely discredited that its campaign posters do not even identify that its candidates are Democrats. Further, one might gather from the comments of its candidates that convicted Ramapo Supervisor Christopher St. Lawrence was a superman responsible for a one-man crime wave. That, of course, is nonsense.
St. Lawrence’s formerly loyal supporters are now desperately trying to put lipstick on the pig they continue to feed. Supervisor candidate Michael Specht is the Ramapo attorney to our notorious Zoning Board of Appeals (ZBA). As a member of our town board Yitzchok Ullman was a loyal supporter of our dishonest supervisor and even voted for the legislation that helped St. Lawrence cook our town’s books for years. Now as our “acting” supervisor he has promised to bring “transparency” to Ramapo town government. We have seen no evidence of this new transparency. It is just one more lie from our pervasively corrupt Ramapo administration.
Until we finally get the financial statement for 2015, first promised for the summer of 2016, and the financial statement for 2016, promised for this past June, we have no idea what will be revealed. These financial reports have been conveniently buried until after the forthcoming town election. We need an honest Ramapo Supervisor with majority control of our town board to deal with the as yet unidentified fraud being hidden by Ullman and his complicit town board. We need a town supervisor with the guts to clean house in Ramapo
Preserve Ramapo is endorsing the Reform party candidates for office in Ramapo. These include Bill Weber for Town Supervisor, Shani Bechhofer and Grant Valentine for the Town Council.
Yes, Bill Weber, as noted by the Journal News, is a CPA. But he is also an honest man. He is not connected to the slum lords and developers who have been the power behind St. Lawrence’s remarkably corrupt political regime.
With a majority on our town board together they will have the power to replace the corrupt administrators who did St. Lawrence’s dirty work and who are still running our town. This is of particular importance since both sets of candidates agree that the 2004 Comprehensive Plan—a gift to the developers running the show—needs to be updated. By the end of 2018 we will have a new Comprehensive Plan. We can’t let it be another excuse to give away the Town to the developers. This is where it is imperative that we have citizen-supported candidates elected to the Town Board.
We are also supporting Robert Romanowski for Superintendent of Highways. Bob Romanowski is one of the most knowledgeable people in all of Ramapo with respect to Town operations. He has attended more Town Board meetings than pretty much anyone else other than St. Lawrence. He is organized, capable and reliable, and he has come through for the citizens of Ramapo time and again. This is a role that Bob will excel in, and we would be relieved to know that when winter storms come that Bob will be there to make sure our roads are passable.
Now let’s take a look at county government.
The supervisors of our five towns have had an understanding, don’t criticize anything going on in my town and I won’t criticize anything going on in your town. This understanding included County Executive Scott Vanderhoef our passive county executive. He retired while still in office and allowed St. Lawrence to control our sewer commission and our solid waste authority. At the same time, our derelict county legislature refused to make unpleasant decisions. Yes, it supported many worthwhile programs, but also brought us to the edge of bankruptcy.
Shortly after Ed Day became County Executive, he discovered that our county had only $20,000 in the bank and was going to have real difficulty even meeting its payroll. The buck had been passed up to him. He was forced to make those unpleasant decisions. And he had to do them while our fractious county legislature challenged him at every opportunity. Ed made those decisions and returned Rockland to fiscal health.
Ed Day was also faced with a real health and safety emergency. Throughout Rockland, slumlords were making a killing. Our towns, and especially Ramapo, had been overwhelmed by dangerous and illegal housing. There was too little code enforcement, too modest penalties, and town judges who refused to take housing violations seriously. And especially in Ramapo new apartment houses were built too close together to allow effective access to firefighters. Leading builders in our community even shoehorned more apartments into their new housing than they were entitled.
For years our fire chiefs wrote letters and reports to state authorities begging for support for code enforcement. Thanks to political interference at the highest level of state government their pleas were ignored. They finally wrote a letter to every municipality in Ramapo asking that new housing be built that recognized their needs. That letter was never made public by our apolitical firefighters and it was ignored by St. Lawrence, his planning board and ZBA. (Thanks to a confidential source we were able to publish that letter on our website.)
Ed Day, to his credit, has used the police powers of our health department to do the job that our towns have refused to do. He hasn’t done it quietly and his leadership has been used by his political opponents to attack his motives. But where were they before, and where are they now? Ed has returned integrity of county government.
We strongly support Ed Day for reelection as our county executive and the election of Bill Weber as our Ramapo Town Supervisor along with his running mates Shani Bechhofer and Grant Valentine for Town Council.
Robert I. Rhodes, Ph.D., Chairman, Preserve Ramapo