Sea Cliff election: 4 candidates for 2 village board seats

Incumbent Sea Cliff trustee Kevin McGilloway and three other candidates are running for two seats on the village board in Tuesday’s election.

McGilloway and his running mate Henriette Rohl are touting their experience in village government, while Elizabeth Baron and Terryl Donovan say their combined decades of manager-level work experience has prepared them for serving on the village board.

McGilloway, 69, a retired chief information officer, is seeking his third two-year trustee term after serving eight years on the village zoning board of appeals.

“The last four years have been great for Sea Cliff,” said McGilloway, citing the AA-plus Standard & Poor’s rating and the state comptroller’s fiscal-stress score of zero. “We have strong financials, strong services.”

Rohl has served a year on the village environmental conservation commission and traffic and safety committee. Rohl, 49, who owns a Sea Cliff candle company and previously oversaw portfolios for a commercial bank, said experience is key to effectively serving on the board.

“When you’re actively involved in a community and you actually know people who are involved in different aspects of the community, it’s a lot easier to reach out to solicit their opinions, to get their involvement and to understand what’s going on and how we operate as a village,” said Rohl, who with McGilloway is running on the Civic Progress slate.

Baron, 42, a senior information-technology managing director, and Donovan, 66, a retired education administrator, are running on the Sea Cliff Open Government slate.

Baron said her technological skills and her ability to collaborate with and act on the feedback of others are needed on the board. Donovan said her administrative experience in New York City’s sanitation and education departments, and more recently in the North Shore School District, honed her leadership skills.

Over the past year, the village began livestreaming meetings, and put building permit forms and other information online, with vows to further expand accessibility.

Baron noted that the moves came only after the election of an Open Government candidate last year, adding, “Frankly, I think we can do better . . . I think we can do a lot more. I think we can transform how we do our government — make it more open and make it more transparent.”

Baron and Donovan vowed to go beyond current plans for expanding transparency. Donovan said the resignation of Mayor Bruce Kennedy on the Monday after Thanksgiving in 2016, his appointment as village administrator, and the selection of then-Councilman Edward Lieberman as the new mayor — all in a meeting called only hours before it began — shows the need for an ethics review board.

Donovan said the board would allow people who “have a question about the way something is done or feel they haven’t been treated in an open and fair way” to “have recourse for that to be investigated.”