I am urging residents to vote for the team of Jim Avena, Priscilla von Roeschlaub and Roy Smithheimer in the upcoming Manorhaven Village election.
I have known Priscilla for years and a more honest, hard-working and decent person would be hard to find. She just got the raingardens at the front of Manorhaven Bvld replanted, working countless hours on this project to make the gateway to Manorhaven beautiful again. When I say working, I mean fighting for funds to get the project done and save the Village thousands more – the Village was required by the grant it was given to maintain the beds or repay the 20,000 in funding – planning, driving her own van out to the wholesale nurseries to bring back the plants because the Village truck was “broken”, organizing volunteers, getting down in the dirt to plant the beds, and bringing the whole project in under budget, for only $1500.00. You can’t get more dedicated than that.
Roy has also been a friend. He believes in the Port community and spent many years working on beautification, and revitalizing and improving the local economy. I know he will bring that experience to Manorhaven.
Jim Avena has an amazing background in finance that will keep the Village on track. Since keeping a working waterfront is very important for the Village, I asked him directly if he would support residential in the marine zone- and he said no. I will personally hold him to that.
And then there is the opposition. I ran for village Trustee in 1998 against the Pagano ticket and won, along with my running mates. There was a reason, actually many reasons, that Gary was voted out of office then, and those are still good reasons why he should never get back in. But if you didn’t live here in the 90’s you don’t know what it was like. Gary originally ran against then Mayor Arlene Musselwhite. Arleen had made a serious error in figuring the village budget and believed she needed to raise taxes to balance the budget, which she did. Gary ran against that tax raise, but a platform wasn’t enough, so he got Arleen removed from the ballot on a technicality – how she had fastened together her nominating petitions. Gary got in – but did he turn back the mistakenly raised taxes? Nope. But over time the budget caught up with that surplus, but Gary didn’t want to raise taxes, so instead he introduced all kinds of new ways of extracting money – you had to buy stickers for your yard waste bags. The Code enforcement department became the department of ticketing. One of my team’s platforms was giving people a chance to correct their mistakes by issuing orders to remedy before issuing tickets unless they were repeat offenders. People were sick of being ticketed to death and Gary got thrown out.
I again urge you to vote for Jim, Priscilla and Roy. Let’s not turn back the clock to the bad old days.
Jennifer Wilson-Pines
Manorhaven Trustee and Deputy Mayor 1998-2006
