In Brightwaters, three run for two open trustee seats

Road and canal improvements and fiscal health are the top priorities for candidates in the village of Brightwaters.

Incumbent trustees Laurie Elliott and Diane Urso, and challenger Carmine Chiappetta, are running for two open trustee seats.

Incumbent Mayor Joseph McDermott is running unopposed for re-election. All terms are two years long.

Elliott, 52, is running for a second term on the Greater Good Party line with Urso and McDermott. She was first appointed to the board in 2014 to finish a trustee term, and elected for her first full term in 2015.

She is a homemaker and has lived in Brightwaters since 1998. She said she is proud of the board’s work to receive a recent AA rating issued by Standard & Poor’s credit agency for the village’s $1.6 million bond to repair roads and infrastructure.

Looking ahead, “There’s a lot of infrastructure work that needs to be done sooner rather than later. We have paving on board and once we have estimates on the canal, there’s some significant infrastructure there that needs to be fixed,” Elliott said.

Urso, 47, is also running for a second term. A clinical social worker, she has lived in Brightwaters for eight years. She said the board was “most proud of the village moving from the New York State list of villages in fiscal distress and now we have a AA credit rating from Standard & Poor’s,” a move that she credited to the administration “really going through the budget and working on saving.”

Urso said if re-elected, she would continue the work of repaving roads, fixing the canal and updating the downtown area — “basically the continuation with what we began, to fix these things we’ve neglected for quite some time.”

Chiappetta, 55, is a principal at an accounting firm

and has lived in the village for 26 years. He is running for the first time for trustee on the Unification Party line. He is active in village life, including overseeing the Brightwaters Neighborhood Watch. He said the biggest issues have been “how to improve our security in the village” and “managing the finances of the village on a long-term basis.”

If elected, Chiappetta said he would work on “developing a long-term capital improvement plan” to handle “issues related to lighting, drainage, lake area restoration and continued rehab of the roads and the canal.”

He also pledged to “ensure that our community is kept informed and that the community is heard.” He pointed to the recent bond issuance as an area where some critics said they felt overlooked in the village board’s decision.

“The board is in need of someone with a business acumen,” he said, adding that his background in finance would be an asset.

The election is noon to 9 p.m. June 21 at the Village Court House at 40 Seneca Dr., Brightwaters.