The Nassau County Village Officials Association celebrated its centennial by honoring its first century of accomplishments and East Williston Mayor Bonnie Parente as she stepped down from her term as president at its annual gala.
“As we celebrate our centennial, we honor the legacy of those who came before us while recommitting ourselves to the work ahead,” said Thomaston Mayor Steven Weinberg, the organization’s first vice president. “The NCVOA is more relevant today than ever before. We are the collective voice of Nassau County’s villages and residents must continue to be represented, community issues addressed, and meaningful progress achieved.”
The NCVOA, which now represents all 64 of Nassau’s incorporated villages, was founded in 1925 by the “presidents” (now called mayors) of Freeport, Lynbrook, Rockville Centre and Hempstead, who initially met to address growing traffic problems caused by the rise of automobiles.
Parente, who has been attending meetings since 2011, has led the Nassau County Village Officials Association as its president for the past year and through various executive board positions for the past five. She was the guest of honor at the association’s centennial celebration on Oct. 16.
“I think it’s very important that village officials stay involved in this organization,” Parente said. “Being a mayor and being an elected official in a village, you can’t just rely on going to two village meetings a month and an occasional email with your residents. You need to keep your ear to the ground, and you need to attend regular meetings outside of your village so that you know what’s going to affect your residents.”
When accepting her honor, she said the association is critical to village government and thanked her fellow mayors who she said have always stepped up to give her advice, whether the question was water filtration, zoning, license plate readers or volunteer fire departments.
Volunteer fire departments, it so happened, was the “issue of the year” during Parente’s term: The federal government had floated a proposal to require villages to pay their volunteer fire departments, which Parente — and local governments across the country — said would “cripple” their finances.
Her activism on the topic within and outside of the association was what she noted as one of her proudest accomplishments while leading the association.
“As president, I testified at the [federal] hearing representing our 64 incorporated villages with 71 volunteer departments and 475,000 residents,” Parente said. “We were successful in putting a halt to the [proposal] that threatened to cripple the current volunteer program.”
She said the issue of payment for volunteer firefighters was just one example of how the association gives village officials the opportunity to “share information and be on the lookout for each other” in terms of how state and federal policy trickles down to directly impact their communities.
The association’s importance to local government is something the new president, Mayor of the Village of Sea Cliff Elena Villafane, echoed.
“If I, as the mayor of Sea Cliff, with 5000 people, have something that I want attention paid to – if I speak by myself, I’m a small little voice,” Villafane said. “But if I speak with all of my 64 villages, well, then we’re a force to be reckoned with.”
Villafane emphasized the importance of local government in improving the day-to-day lives of village residents.
“There’s no Republican or Democratic way to pick up garbage. It is what it is,” she said. “So even though the members of the NCVOA come from across the political spectrum – you can find everybody from the most conservative to the most liberal in our membership – we all have the same concern.”
The NCVOA meets monthly and provides information to all of the county’s villages.
