Lynbrook Village mayor appoints new trustee, deputy mayor

Lynbrook Mayor Alan Beach on Monday appointed a new trustee and gave the title of deputy mayor to another trustee after the death of Mayor William Hendrick in October.

The new trustee, Robert Boccio, is to serve until the village’s special election in March, according to village spokeswoman Leslie Rothschild.

Boccio, a registered Republican, is filling Beach’s former trustee seat. As the former deputy mayor, Beach became mayor after Hendrick’s death.

Beach designated Trustee Hilary Becker as the board’s new deputy mayor.

“Trustee Boccio is a good man, a family man, community leader, loving husband and father, and I am confident in the role that Trustee Boccio will fulfill to keep Lynbrook moving forwards with thriving, new, extraordinary efforts towards revitalization and I thank him for his dedication to serve Lynbrook and all her residents,” Beach said in a statement Tuesday.

Hendrick had been the village’s mayor since his appointment in January 2011 after serving as a trustee from 1989 to 1993 and 1995 to 2010. He died at South Nassau Communities Hospital in Oceanside on Oct. 11 following complications from a heart attack at the age of 64.

Boccio is an attorney with the Garden City firm Vigorito, Barker, Porter & Patterson LLP and specializes in high-exposure medical malpractice actions, nursing home defense cases and pharmaceutical defect matters, according to his biography on the law firm’s website.

He ran unsuccessfully for village mayor in 2007 as a candidate for the Independence Party. During the campaign, Boccio denied allegations by an opponent whom he would not identify that he was forced out of his New York City job in 2005 after he allegedly doctored statistics concerning weapons and drug seizures at the city juvenile detention facility he ran in the Bronx, according to previous Newsday stories.

Boccio has served as a member and chairman of the village’s Board of Ethics and its Board of Zoning Appeals, as well as an assistant village prosecutor, Rothschild said in an email.