Faced with a contested election on June 16, Village of Great Neck Mayor Ralph Kreitzman and trustees Mitch Beckerman and Jeff Bass have gained the support of wide range of state, federal and village officials.
Letters to the editor submitted to Blank Slate Media over the past several weeks have included endorsements from Congressman Steve Israel, state Sen. Jack Martins, state Assemblywoman Michelle Schimel and a number of village mayors.
Kreitzman said he had separate conversations with Israel, Martins and Schimel about his campaign and that one out of the three of them offered their endorsement without him asking first, while the other two he asked. He would not specify which official offered their endorsement unsolicited.
“I was speaking with them and it came up in conversation with two of them,” Kreitzman said. “One of them offered it.”
Bass and Beckerman both said they had not asked any officials for endorsements.
“They understand this is a contested election,” Bass said.
Kreitzman, Beckerman and Bass are running together on the Better Government Party ticket.
They are challenged by the Voice of the Village Party, with Pedram Bral running for mayor and Raymond Plakstis Jr. and Anne Mendelson running for trustee. Village School teacher Sam Yellis is running for trustee as the lone Bridge Party candidate.
Bral, Mendelson and Christine Campbell were part of an under-the-radar write-in campaign in the 2013 elections, which resulted in hundreds of residents lining around the block to vote for the challengers.
Campbell was originally set to run for trustee on the Voice of the Village party ticket, but declined the nomination after her name was submitted on the petition. Plakstis then accepted the nomination to replace her and run for trustee.
On voting day in 2013, Trustees stood for hours making phone calls outside the polling station to residents, contending with rain as they shored up support against the surprise challenge, officials said at the time.
In one instance, Kreitzman called former Congressman Gary Ackerman (D-Great Neck), who put out a robocall to encourage supporters to vote for the re-election of Kreitzman, Beckerman and Bass, as well as the election of Trustee Mark Birnbaum as village justice.
Kreitzman defeated challenger Bral 325 to 232. Beckerman took 316 votes and Bass won 320 votes, with opposition trustee candidates Christine Campbell and Mendelson receiving 226 votes each.
Bral downplayed the endorsements, saying it is more important to be endorsed by people in the village than mayors and other elected officials who don’t live in the village.
“To be endorsed by people in different villages or people who have nothing to do with the Village of Great Neck seems silly,” Bral said. “I’d rather be represented by people who live in the Village of Great Neck.”
Rebecca Gilliar, who is the campaign manager of the Voice of the Village, also downplayed the endorsements.
“The mayor and trustees have lined up what they think is an impressive array of endorsements from politicians from outside our village,” Gilliar said. “Pretty soon they’ll have coaxed an endorsement from the mayor of Juneau, Alaska. The residents of the Village of Great Neck can see through a shallow ploy.”
Bral, born in Tehran, Iran, is currently the Director of Minimally Invasive & Robotic Gynecologic Surgery at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn.
He said Kreitzman has been in power for many years, and that it is time to “empower the people and let them have a voice.”
“I really want to contain wasteful spending and the moving of the Village of Great Neck Village Hall to East Shore Road,” Bral said. “We would spend a lot of money doing it and I really don’t want to sell off the assets the village has.”
He also said he wants to revitalize the village’s downtown to bring merchants to the closed shops.
Bral and his two running mates as well as Yellis have received letters of support from residents, but none from local officials.
Many of the letters in support of the Better Government Party have focused on Kreitzman and his work both in and outside Great Neck as a member of the executive board of New York Conference of Mayors and the Nassau County Village Officials Association, as well as his role as mayor and member of the Great Neck Village Officials Association.
“With him, politics is not what’s most important; his priorities are working together, doing what’s right, and delivering results,” Martins, a Republican from Mineola, said in a letter this week. “In today’s society, where increasing partisanship is causing gridlock, that’s a welcome quality in an elected official.”
State Assemblywoman Michelle Schimel (D-Great Neck) said in a letter she has asked Kreitzman to come to Albany three times to lobby for the use of lever voting machines in schools, villages and special districts, to lobby against the “threat” of village consolidation and when she needed to persuade the state for more budget aid for localities.
“In my opinion, his position on the executive board of New York Conference of Mayors and the Nassau County Village Officials Association, coupled with his vast knowledge of village law and governance has earned the respect of elected officials throughout the state,” she said in the letter.
Kreitzman — and Team Kreitzman as the ticket is sometimes referred to — has also received the endosrments of Great Neck Plaza Mayor Jean Celender, Kensington Mayor Susan Lopatkin, Kings Point Mayor Michael Kalnick, Russell Gardens Mayor Steven Kirschner, Thomaston Mayor Steven Weinberg and Saddle Rock Mayor Dan Levy.
Kreitzman said of all the mayors who have endorsed him, one said they would endorse him without him asking, although he would not specify who.
“I asked some of them if they would. One said it even before I called and spoke to that person,” Kreitzman said. “These are people I speak to with some frequency.”
He said he began speaking with other mayors after he began to think the Village of Great Neck might have a contested election. He said the opposition candidates ran on a “stealth” basis last time, so he assumed they would be back for this election, but on the ballot.
“Would I do this for any election, I don’t know,” Kreitzman said of asking village mayors for support. “I have gotten letters [of support] in the past.”
Like the state and federal officials, the mayors cited Kreitzman’s experience both in and outside the village.
“His willingness to help whenever called upon must be the reason he has served all of us as the president of the Great Neck and Nassau County Village Officials Associations and, impressively, on the executive board of the New York State Conference of Mayors,” Levy said in the letter.
Kreitzman also received the support of Great Neck School Board of Education Trustee Larry Gross and Richard Stancati, alternate member to the Village of Great Neck Planning Board.
Some residents also wrote to support Yellis.
Carole Lynn Marino and Julio Marino said Yellis doesn’t have the same “resources” as incumbent trustees, but that his background in education and his honest character would make the village a better place.
Resident David Zielenziger wrote a letter advocating for Yellis to be elected, saying he wants to take another look at rezoning, making the Village Green a center for culture and cutting excessive traffic on Middle Neck Road.
“The incumbents, on bended knee before the developers, have unleashed an onslaught of hundreds of new apartments, townhouses and cars on our village,” Zielenziger wrote in the letter.
Yellis said he asked the League of Women Voters of Nassau County to moderate a debate between himself and the other trustee candidates, but as of Wednesday morning no debate has been scheduled, according to Carmen Lloyd, who organizes the debate moderators for the League of Women Voters.
“I haven’t heard back from anyone saying they scheduled event,” Lloyd said. “At this point I would say there is no information with them going forward.”
Gilliar wrote a letter in support of Bral, Mendelson and Plakstis, criticizing the current board for the rezoning of parts of Middle Neck and Steamboat roads, the plans to sell the current Village Hall property and build a new Village Hall and Department of Public Works on East Shore Road.
“If we do not stop these unmentioned plans, we will have to drive through Kings Point to reach our village hall and DPW,” Gilliar wrote in the letter. “The incumbents are pretty much planning to move our village services out of the village. If the endorsements had spelled out the coming cataclysms in the life of our village promulgated by our elected officials, you would be sure to vote against them.”
She also questioned the relationships between Kreitzman and Kirschner and Kalnick.
Mendelson, a technical software product manager for Thomson Reuters, said she is running because she wants to keep the village a village.
She has said the rezoning of parts of Middle Neck and Steamboat roads will put a burden on the village.
“The zoning has changes such that it expanded residential areas so that apartment buildings can be put in,” Mendelson has said. “As a result, we will have greater traffic and greater stress on our aquifers.”
The rezoning, passed by Village of Great Neck trustees in October, condensed the village’s business district to revitalize the downtown area. The rezoning permits apartments above commercial businesses in the central business core of Middle Neck Road and apartments and townhouses at the northern and southern ends of the road. Under the rezoning, townhouses are also allowed on portions of Steamboat Road.
Mendelson said she also opposes the sale of the current Village Hall and building of a new Village Hall at 265 East Shore Road. She said the village can currently work with what it has, and that the current Village Hall only needs renovated.
“I don’t want any unwanted expenses,” Mendelson said. “It’s needed renovation for as long as I can remember.”
Mendelson worked in defense and software development for years before she got her teaching certificate in 2003, after which she began teaching math at Great Neck North High School. She worked as a teacher until 2013 when her job was eliminated due to budget cuts, she said.
She said her willingness to work with residents and help the community, coupled with her familiarity with the village, will help her serve as trustee if elected.
“After 10 years of having the current people in power, they have been dismantling everything we hold dear in this village and turning it into a place we don’t recognize,” Mendelson said.
For the second consecutive week, efforts to reach Plakstis, a former Great Neck Alert Fire Company chief, were unavailing.
According to a platform sent by Gilliar, Plakstis lead teams of volunteers at Ground Zero after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, according to the platform. He has decided to run for office because “current mayor, with the approval of his trustees, has interfered in decisions by the zoning and planning boards, lobbying on behalf of developers.”
Plakstis ran for Great Neck Park District Commissioner in 2011, losing to current commissioner Dan Nachmanoff. Plakstis came in second with 368 votes, Neil Leiberman, husband of Great Neck News columnist Karen Rubin, received 347 and Great Neck resident Martin Markson received 342.
