On May 7, New Paltz, Ulster County, New York, held elections for village office. The elections are partisan, but the village parties are not permitted to be the same as the state qualified parties. Two seats were up for Village Board. Only two candidates appeared on the ballot, Tom Rocco with the label Responsive Government Party, and Jonathan Cohen of the Common Sense Party. They are registered Democrats.
Two Green Party members had petitioned to be on the ballot, but their petitions were challenged, so they ran write-in campaigns. Rebecca Rotzler won as a write-in, defeating one of the ballot-listed candidates. See this story. If Rotzler had been on the ballot, her party label would have been Innovation Party. She was not permitted to be on the ballot as a Green, because the Green Party is ballot-qualified in the state. She had also been elected to the Village Board in 2003. At that time, the Green Party was not ballot-qualified, so when she won in 2003, she was listed as a Green. Thanks to IndependentPoliticalReport for this news.
Quite an unusual law when it comes to party labels. Also I must say that Responsive Government and Common Sense don’t really describe the Democratic Party at all, let alone most registered members of that party.
typical “special district” NEW PALTZ — A proposal to expand the village of New Paltz so that it has the same boundaries as the town is to be reviewed at a meeting on Tuesday.
The proposal, however, does not call for a full merger of the town and village. Rather, one set of elected officials would run both municipalities, but as separate town and village boards.
e.g. not Woodstock or not People’s Republic of Rosendale
Rock on.
It isn’t strictly true that the Green Party, or the Democrats for that matter, could not run candidates in these village elections. They would simply have to use a somewhat different process to nominate candidates than the 100 signature requirement everyone uses now, because it’s just traditional. Don Kerr (who I don’t know as a Green?) and Rebecca Rotzler both had their petitions challenged and were found to have fewer than 100 valid signatures.
As for the consolidtion proposal, New Paltz has two governments in the same territory, one for the entire town and one for the village which represents about half the population of the town. The overlap and duplication (and resulting conflict) have brought about the current attempt to find one government to replace the two. New York State law on municipalities doesn’t make it easy.
simple, ban all special tax districts
I thought the Green Party lost their ballot line in the last Governor’s race.
Whoops, just checked the results, turns out they got it back in the last race.
#5, we want to do more than simplify the taxing districts. We want to construct a multi-party election system, and in New York that means we need to use the village form of government. If we were to dissolve the village and leave only the town intact the Democrats (who have a 60% voter registration majority) would control all the elected positions in the new unified government. The town government has only Democrats now, and the village government is much more diverse. The Greens on the village board, Mayor Jason West and now Trustee Rotzler, are both opposed to the one government efforts.
even in a socialist district such as New Paltz a blanket primary for every office using OTB petitioning would be enough to win
#9, how does a “blanket primary” work? And socialits don’t win anything in New Paltz, just sayin’.
Most people in New Paltz like to get high.
Yeah, we’re done here.