Elaine Phillips, mayor of the Village of Flower Hill, began campaigning Thursday for outgoing state Sen. Jack Martins’ Seventh Senate District seat.
Speaking at the American Legion Hall Post 144 in Williston Park, Phillips, a Republican, asked about 80 elected officials, family members, friends and community members for their support in November’s election.
“I love Long Island and I want to make it the best place it can be,” she said. “I’m not a professional politician.”
Martins, who was at Phillips’ news conference Thursday, filed papers in January to create a campaign committee to run for the Third Congressional District’s seat just two days after U.S. Rep. Steve Israel announced he would step down at the end of his term in November.
Beginning her speech, Phillips drew on her early life when her father died when she was 12 and afterward began working with her mother in the kitchen of the nearby American Legion post to help the family make ends meet.
She said she was the first person in her family to go to college and went on to have a successful career in the financial services industry while raising three children.
“I always believed, as my mother taught me, that the real reason of all this hard work was to create a better future for them,” Phillips said.
She was elected to her third term as mayor of Flower Hill in March.
Phillips touted her record as mayor and said she would take the achievements to the state Legislature.
“As mayor of my village for the past four years, I have helped fix the village finances and cut property taxes,” she said. “I enacted a tough new ethics law and appointed an independent ethics board. Everyone knows we need better ethics in Albany.”
Phillips also noted that four of the five board trustees in Flower Hill were appointed by her without asking what their political affiliation was.
“I appointed these people because they were the right people to do the job, not because of political parties, but because they were the people who were going to help our village and make it a better place,” she said.
If elected, Phillips said, she would fight to cut taxes, create jobs, set term limits in the state Senate, get each school district a “fair share” of state aid, protect the environment and stop the heroin epidemic threatening communities in the district.
She also said she wanted to end unfunded mandates by the state Legislature.
“I have been dealing with unfunded mandates for the last five years as mayor and we need to tell Albany ‘enough,’” Phillips said.
Throughout her speech, she alluded to her achievements in karate in which she holds a fourth-degree black belt in a Korean martial art called soo bahk do moo duk kwan.
“I may be small in structure, but trust me, I can fight,” Phillips said.
Martins said Phillips is a “wonderful candidate” and is what the community needs as its representative in Albany.
“You want to talk about the person you want on that hill, the person you want on that wall, the person you want defending our communities,” he said. “Elaine’s background, her upbringing, her work ethic, her position as a mayor, as a trusted member of her community, a working mother, as a person who broke and shattered that glass ceiling but did it in a way that served as an example for our community.”
Martins also said that Phillips has proven herself as a local elected official and has the ability to make changes on a state level.
“If we ever wanted to have someone in Albany who would be able to properly protect us, defend us, hold the line and do the right thing, we know we have someone who will fight for us in Elaine Phillips,” he said.
Nassau County Clerk Maureen O’Connell said it was important that Phillips wins the Nov. 8 election to avoid a Democratic majority in the state Senate.
“If we don’t elect Elaine, it’s going to change the demographic and dynamic in the New York State Senate and tilt it in favor of the New York City Democrats. And how do you think that’s going to affect us? It’s going to be very serious,” O’Connell said. “It will shift our school aid, it will shift our infrastructure money, it will change the whole dynamic of our beautiful suburban Long Island and Nassau County forever.”
A number of other Republican elected officials joined Phillips at her conference including state Sen. Michael Venditto, state Assemblymen Tom McKevitt, Brian Curran and David McDonough, Nassau County Legislator Laura Schaefer, Town of Oyster Bay Councilman Chris Coschignano, Plandome Manor Mayor Barbara Donno and Ninth Senate District candidate Chris McGrath.
Phillips is set to face off against Adam Haber, a Democrat who announced in February that he was stepping down from the Nassau Interim Finance Authority board to make a second bid for the state Senate’s Seventh District seat.
Since losing to Martins in 2014, Haber, an East Hills restaurateur and former bond trader, said he has developed greater name recognition from his work on the NIFA board and as a Roslyn school trustee, which would give him an advantage in the race.
