Meet LI's newest assemblyman

Daily Point

From Cedarhurst to Albany, wearing two hats

The newest member of Long Island’s state Assembly delegation will be a man of many hats.

Ari Brown won a special election and soon will represent the 20th district, a seat vacated by Melissa Miller when she joined the Hempstead Town council.

But Brown is also the deputy mayor of Cedarhurst. He was first elected to the village’s board of trustees 21 years ago, but after winning reelection to the board in 2019, the village mayor, Benjamin Weinstock, selected him to serve as deputy mayor, too.

Brown told The Point he isn’t planning to relinquish his village job upon being sworn in to the state seat next week

That raised a question. Can someone hold two elected offices at once?

The answer, as with everything in New York, seems to be a bit complicated, and dependent on what those two jobs are. Brown said when he first considered running for the Assembly seat, he talked with lawyers from the New York Conference of Mayors, who told him existing case law indicated there was no problem and no conflict.

“The question has been asked since the 1960s, and it’s not an issue at all,” Brown told The Point.

To explore the issue further, The Point turned to municipal law expert Paul Sabatino for his take.

Sabatino pointed to the so-called “two hat doctrine,” which in New York, he said, means someone can’t wear two hats if the two offices being held are in conflict with one another. At times, he noted, that can be open to interpretation and debate.

But in this case, a village and a state Assembly seat likely are not a problem, Sabatino said.

“They’re not engaging in activities that directly conflict with each other,” Sabatino said.

Nonetheless, Sabatino said, he encourages elected officials to “err on the side of caution.” He noted that serving in two positions opens up potential problems, such as the need to recuse on votes relevant to the other job or the issue of keeping track of timesheets when that’s of concern.

“Wearing two hats at the same time, I just think, is not a good idea, but it’s not a blanket prohibition,” Sabatino said. “It’s a road filled with land mines and potential obstacles, and if you’re going to navigate that road, you better be careful.”

Sabatino noted that while with Suffolk County, he was responsible for legislation that prohibited county elected officials from earning two public sector salaries. Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone, however, sought to change that law when former State Sen. Monica Martinez was elected as a county legislator while also serving as an assistant principal at a Brentwood middle school.

Ultimately, Bellone withdrew his proposal, leaving the decision to the county ethics board, which said Martinez could not keep her school administrator job while serving as a county legislator.

Sabatino told The Point that Suffolk’s laws were stricter than the state’s but in any event, the Martinez precedent wouldn’t apply in Brown’s case.

But Brown said he didn’t see a conflict — or even the potential for the need to recuse himself. And he said he wasn’t concerned about handling both village and legislature meetings and duties.

“A father of seven can do anything,” Brown said.

While the deputy mayor position until recently came with a salary of $15,000, the village recently cut the pay to about $10,000, Brown said. Assembly members, meanwhile, earn $110,000 a year.

And he said the village he represents won’t get special treatment in Albany, either.

“I promised everybody from Point Lookout to Inwood I will be evenhanded,” he said. “I will not just be about the Five Towns and Cedarhurst.”

As for his Albany job, Brown told The Point he’s primarily concerned with criminal justice and public safety issues, especially concerning bail reform. But he also focused on “parental rights,” which, he said, includes the ability to make individual decisions on everything from masking and vaccination to education. He noted that he isn’t vaccinated against COVID-19 and does not think the state should mandate vaccination. And he doesn’t support the state Education Department’s proposal to require “substantial equivalency” in private and parochial school instruction.

Brown, a Republican, told The Point he plans to run for a full term in the fall.

— Randi F. Marshall @RandiMarshall

Talking Point

Wilson on the air

Republican gubernatorial hopeful Harry Wilson came out with a new TV ad Wednesday addressing crime, with a focus on the Sunset Park subway shooting that injured more than 20 last week.

The ad, whose tagline is “Political insiders have failed us. Only an outsider can make New York safe again,” demonstrates how much criminal justice issues have dominated the race so far. It also shows a little bit of Wilson’s campaign strategy as he looks to win the GOP primary, despite Shirley Rep. Lee Zeldin getting the nod from the state party.

Wilson told The Point that the ad is running statewide, “more weighted towards upstate at this point in time.”

That region seems to be a focus for the Scarsdale businessman, who is generally seen as relatively moderate and who has pledged millions of his own money for the run. He has already been up on TV with other ads that emphasize his biography and roots in upstate Johnstown, a “tight knit” and “patriotic” community where he says that his dad tended bar, mother worked at a sewing factory, and uncle served as mayor.

The former member of President Barack Obama's auto task force labels himself a “turnaround expert” running to “turnaround New York.”

Wilson says he’s trying to get that pitch across to voters with a “kind of all of the above” strategy that includes paid advertising, social media, and earned media. He also is trying to get a general election ballot line through the Unite NY third party, which is circulating petitions for him.

Beyond his status as an outsider, Wilson said his pitch to voters includes his record of winning crossover votes statewide during his very competitive bid for comptroller in 2010.

This year, he said, the GOP gubernatorial candidate “has to be someone who can attract a substantial majority of independents and enough disaffected Democrats to come our way to be able to win.”

— Mark Chiusano @mjchiusano

Pencil Point

COVID and the Constitution

For more cartoons, visit www.newsday.com/nationalcartoons

Reference Point

An unexpected turn

The Point brings back an old chestnut this week — Throwback Thursday — with an entry from more than a half-century ago whose spirit has been bottled in countless other Newsday editorial pages over the years.

The date was April 21, 1969, and the occasion was the rejection by an Islip Town board of an apartment complex to be built in Bay Shore. The editorial board called it “an imaginative, superbly planned proposal” and said the town board “has committed a grievous blunder with potentially sad and far-reaching consequences.”

Builders Maurice Barbash and Saul Seiff had pitched a plan that would have clustered 852 units in one area of a large parcel and deeded the remaining 111 acres to the National Audubon Society for conservation. The proposal was loudly opposed by local residents who packed two hearings. The editorial board lamented the town’s rejection, saying it “leaves the land open for conventional development, which will put houses on every available plot and preserve no open, green space.”

The board went further, deploring Islip’s “singular lack of foresight,” its “unfortunate decision,” and its “rebuff of intelligent land use,” and wondered “how many builders are going to even make the effort to come up with superior development plans?”

Barbash, of course, had built a well-deserved reputation as a conservationist. He championed the creation of Fire Island National Seashore and opposed the Shoreham nuclear plant. As developers, he and Seiff were known for “taking a conservationist approach that was rare for the time. Barbash would try to preserve as many trees and other natural elements as he could,” a Newsday obituary noted upon his death in 2013.

But as it turned out in the case of the apartment complex in Bay Shore, Islip’s rejection led to an even greater win for environmentalists. The land in question, you see, was part of the Sagtikos Manor estate better known as Gardiner’s Manor, and its 231 acres were later purchased by Suffolk County and turned into what’s now known as Gardiner County Park, a magnet for nature lovers and dog owners.

“Islip’s Mistake” read the headline on Newsday’s editorial 53 years ago. But maybe, upon reflection, not so much.

— Michael Dobie @mwdobie and Amanda Fiscina @adfiscina