Max Frankel has lived in the Village of Flower Hill for 26 years – albeit non-consecutively.
“I was raised in the Roslyn area until 2001, and in 2012 I came back with my wife,” Frankel said in a phone interview. “We now live on the same street I grew up in.”
If he’s elected to the village’s Board of Trustees on March 16, as the only new face in a slate of uncontested Flower Hill Party candidates including two-term trustee Frank Genese and recent board appointees Mary Jo Collins and Claire Dorfman, Frankel would be a second-generation trustee.
In the 1990s, his mother Ann was serving as a trustee on the board, and she continues to serve the village as its resident arborist.
For Frankel, being raised in the village and seeing what parts of the village have and have not changed gives him a unique perspective that would be useful on the board.
“Just growing up here and seeing how Flower Hill changed for the better for so much over the years is amazing,” Frankel said. “When I was younger, my father and my mother were going around getting signatures for a petition for one-way streets in our neighborhood where cars would cut through, which is one of the main things I’ve seen living here.”
The traffic issues in Flower Hill have persisted into Frankel’s adulthood and prompted him to volunteer for the village’s traffic committee two months ago to “get [his] feet wet” in its inner workings.
Frankel, who works as a commercial mortgage underwriter, adds that he would bring his financial expertise to the board.
“From a financial perspective I understanding the ins and outs kind of of the business side of what the board deals with,” Frankel said. “So anything that has to do with building projects, and financing and housing development, and just understanding the costs and the intricacies of the financial aspects of everything, I definitely bring to the table.”
In addition to traffic, Frankel sees beautification and housing as something he’s interested in looking at while serving on the board.
“I’m very interested in the housing and the building aspect of what’s kind of going on, with these smaller houses that are all being torn down, and you’re having these enormous new homes being built up,” Frankel said. “I’d like to be making sure things are to code and that we really keep with the standards, that I guess we’ve set forth in the village.”
The village’s standards for beautification were most recently seen when a mural painted at 1067 Northern Blvd. prompted complaints last month, ending with the building’s owner receiving code violations for “failing to maintain exterior surfaces of the building,” “keeping up with the standards of the community,” and for the display of a sign upon the building without application.
Frankel, who lives near the building and says he’s been a customer of one of its tenants, Joanne’s Pizza, for most of his life, says that since the business did not go to the proper officials for permits beforehand, the village was “100% correct” in its actions.
“Regarding art, I think it’s a matter of ‘to each his own’ – people can like it, people can hate it, it’s whatever they want,” Frankel said. “However, the problem is it sets a precedent for people to do things that they shouldn’t do and start taking advantage of the system. Say if someone wanted to paint their house a certain way, and then neighbors have an uproar over that, [the hypothetical homeowners] can say, ‘Well, Joanne’s was allowed to do it, so why can’t we? It’s not the mural itself, it’s setting a precedent for other people to take advantage of the rules without going through the processes of the village.”
A graduate of Roslyn High School, Frankel obtained a bachelor’s of science in psychology and history from Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania.
He began his career in finance by working for Citigroup’s Troubled Asset Loan Sale and Syndication Group, also receiving formal credit training during that time.
He currently works as a senior commercial underwriter for Bethpage Federal Credit Union’s Commercial Real Estate Group. He lives in the Roslyn area with his wife and three children.
