Dems Pick Siegel for Town Council Run

The Yorktown Democratic Committee has chosen Susan Siegel to run for Town Council.

Siegel, a Repubican town supervisor for one term, lost the Republican primary to Michael Grace in 2011 and was unsuccessful on the Conservative and Better Government Party lines in the general election.  

She has stayed active in local politics and civic affairs since she left office in 2011.

She's been blogging on Patch—authoring both a personal blog—opinions—and Citizens for an Informed Yorktown—a blog summarizing and highlighting actions and events at town meetings. 

Here's the full text of the press release:

Former Town Supervisor Susan Siegel was chosen last night by the Democrats to be their candidate in this coming November’s election to fill the vacant Town Board seat.

“I’m thrilled and honored to be given the opportunity to again work on the behalf of the people of Yorktown,” Siegel said. “We have a fifty-five million dollar budget and some huge tasks confronting us -- infrastructure, enlarging the tax base, and planning for the future. It’s crucial that we tackle these problems in a careful sensible way so that in the end we don't end paying more than we get. Jumping first, acting with haste just for the sake of it, is no way to run things.”

Siegel feels that she is uniquely qualified, based on her training and experience, to be able to work with the other Board members to restore good government to Town Hall. Elected as Supervisor in 2009, she served from 2010-2011.

 “I’m proud of what I was able to accomplish in two short years. Working with the Board, we cleaned up a four million dollar mess in unpaid back taxes, some of that dated back to the Seventies. We increased revenue while cutting expenses. We initiated new programs, like hiring a full-time fire inspector, and we set in motion the new senior nutrition center. We also passed an updated Comprehensive Plan, the town’s first tree preservation law, and we passed a new, stronger town ethics law.”

Siegel has a Master’s Degree in Public Administration from Pace University. A resident of Yorktown for over forty years, she has been actively involved in town government for much of that time. She was president of the Yorktown League of Women Voters, the Yorktown reporter for the Patent Trader newspaper, and the co-founder of Citizens for an Informed Yorktown.

Since leaving office she has attended almost every Town Board meeting, taking careful notes for her two web sites that report on town issues: www.ciyinfo.org that features objective summaries of all Town Board and Planning Board meetings, and www.yorktownbettergovernment.org a site devoted to explaining town issues in greater depth and how residents can voice their concerns on the issues that matter most to them.

 “Accountability is going to be my watchword,” Siegel says. ““The bottom line is that in the past two years we have been spending more than we’ve been taking in. Vishnu and Nick have done an admirable job of trying to keep the supervisor accountable. We’ve seen time and again that it's up to the councilmen on the Town Board to exercise caution and use their judgment and experience to rein in the impulsive actions the Supervisor has so often taken without thinking through the consequences, leaving us, the taxpayers, to end up paying the bill.”