At least one Great Neck village election in June will be contested this year, according to campaign filings, with the Voice of the Village Party fielding a candidate in the Village of Great Neck.
Joe Gill, the village clerk-treasurer, made note of the contested election at a Tuesday night meeting.
Perry Spector, running on the Voice of the Village Party line, is challenging incumbents Barton Sobel and Norman Namdar, who are members of the Great Neck Greater Village Party.
Residents elected Sobel, a Great Neck-based lawyer, to the Board of Trustees in 2010 after former Trustee Edna Guilor stepped down. Consequently, Sobel is currently the longest-serving trustee on the board, with Norman Namdar being the second longest-serving member.
They are among the last holdovers from the previous administration of Ralph Kreitzman, who served as mayor from 2007 until 2015, when Mayor Pedram Bral, Annie Mendelson and Ray Plakstis unseated him and two trustees.
Bral and Mendelson faced a challenge last year from community activist Rebecca Rosenblatt Gilliar, who once backed Bral in an under-the-radar write-in campaign to try unseating Kreitzman and two others in 2013 and ran the 2015 campaign, and running mate Adam Haral.
Plakstis resigned due to health issues, leading to Steven Hope being appointed to the board and elected in 2017.
Angelique Melnyk, the deputy clerk of the Village of Lake Success, said the village could not access records on Wednesday due to power issues.
The Village Party of Lake Success – the village’s sole political party – had voted to nominate Deputy Mayor Stephen Lam, Peter Chang and Dr. Robert Gal to run for trustee positions on the board. Mayor Adam Hoffman is also running for re-election.
Fred Handsman, a longtime trustee, received the least amount of votes and was consequently not nominated. Trustee Alan Mindel, meanwhile, had declined to seek re-election due to “family and other commitments.”
Ira Levine, the former chairman of the Village Party, noted that the party had a “contested primary,” with four candidates going for three seats, and that, historically, the June elections end up uncontested because people respect the party elections.
“I think this is going to be an uncontested election,” Levine said.
Campaign filings suggest that elections this year in Kings Point, meanwhile, are uncontested. Nobody has filed to run against Mayor Michael Kalnick and Trustees Sheldon Kwiat and David Harounian.
Elections will take place on Tuesday, June 19.
The six other Great Neck villages held elections in March.
