BY: Keith S. Shikowitz, Editor/Investigative Reporter
Right now, on the Clarkstown Town Board there is a three to one Republican majority, not counting Town Supervisor George Hoehmann. Gina DeFelice is hoping to add another Democratic voice to the board.
DeFelice is a 30-year resident of Clarkstown with a varied background which she feels makes it very hard to discuss it, but she was able to give the highlights of it. She And her husband raised 7 children in a blended family, which she said was no small feat.
“I have been a nursery schoolteacher, a circus arts instructor, I’ve worked in hotels and restaurants.
I’ve done freelance work for a media company which is kind of how I got interested in public service. I’m currently a nanny for three small boys. I’ve been a volunteer with Rockland Youth Dance Ensemble for 25 years and I have served on the board since 2018. I’m very involved with the arts community. I think that art brings people together,
There are always events in people’s lives that push them in a particular direction that will change their life. What was the one major thing that happened in DeFelice’s life that really changed hers?
“Well, in fact, I wanted to go this way (she pointed to her left) and life made it very difficult, and I kept going this way and there was a time I really struggled. I was a single mom. I lived out of my car for a year with two kids. That was very, very hard, and I was working 2 or 3 jobs trying to take care of my children. I went back to school, and I had this plan that in about 10 years. I knew where I was going to be 10 years from now.”
At that time, she was teaching circus arts in Westchester County when a happy accident completely changed the course of her life. She worked in a very popular camp which had a waiting list of maybe 100 people every year, almost for every session. This made it impossible for someone to be at the camp and say, ‘Can I come next session’ because there was no room. One day this 12-year-old girl said, ‘Can I please, please, please come back next session? Her colleague, Chris Glover, looked at the girl and she said, Yeah, I think so.
This happy accident put her life on a completely different path than she planned on. As the old adage goes, the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. “Yeah, I always try to teach my kids is that it’s planning is indispensable. Plans are useless, but if you have a plan, you have direction, and then if you change direction, at least you have momentum. When you’re going somewhere you should always have a plan B.
Thirty years ago, her life took a bit of a left turn and now it has taken another one, sending her into politics, which can be a brutal place to be. So, what made her decide to stick her neck out into this arena?
“Yeah, but it can also be, everything I’ve done has been challenging, but it doesn’t harm me. It’s always an opportunity to learn something more and politics is, about people, so right now politics, it almost seems like a dirty word because everyone is so polarized, right? Politics really just means people and to be a public servant. I am at heart a servant. I enjoy helping people. I love being backstage at the Nutcracker and making sure everybody has what they need to do the best job that they can, and I see that politics at the town level is that kind of a public service job.” She explained.
She added, “We’re the people to just make sure everything in the town is running as smoothly as possible so that the people who live here don’t even notice anything because you often notice a pothole or a traffic problem or a light that’s out or too many cars in the driveway or parked on the road and if we’re doing our job. Then people can just go about their lives and be productive at the same time if they want to be involved, I want to give them access to have a say in the community. Before any big project happens, I want to go out to the people and say this is what we’re thinking here. I’d love your feedback on that, or these are my office hours and please come talk to me there because I think it should be a conversation between people in town government and I like to facilitate conversations.”
One of the main things that people talk about around town, around any town, is the infrastructure. You say in your palm card that you address today’s needs while planning for tomorrow’s challenges. Infrastructure fits right into that. They have today’s needs, and you have to look at what’s going to be happening. What opinion does she have about the infrastructure and what ideas does DeFelice have that can improve the infrastructure in Clarkstown?
She is happy with the work being done in West Nyack in that hamlet center on Old Nyack Turnpike and Strawtown Road. “That is a very good example of infrastructure improvement, and I applaud the town for doing that. That’s taking an existing area with existing businesses and existing people and making it better, so it’s improving something that’s already there.”
What concerns her is there is a lot of new development. “When I say balancing it with the future and making it flexible for the future, you have to look at a long-term maintenance obligation of any new infrastructure that we have, and our taxes keep going up. In general, cost of living is going up, taxes are going up and we’re building lots of new big things. Maybe the thing to do is fix everything that we have already, take a little bit more conservative approach to building to make sure that we’re not writing all these bonds because our children and grandchildren are going to be paying down the debt on those bonds. If we can fix existing infrastructure like the project that they did that is supporting the businesses that are already there that is making that area more walkable for the people who are already in that area.”
According to her, that’s a really smart investment, but in her ward, the development that’s gone up where Schimpff’s Farm used to be at Parrot and Germonds, that may look bright new shiny, big and everything right now. The people that live around there are not happy about what’s going to happen to traffic, which is already bad. Everyone who lives there is going to have to get in their car to drive somewhere to buy groceries or to go to work or for entertainment.
“Thirty years from now that’s not going to be brand new and shiny anymore, so all those beautiful new sidewalks and all of the sewers and the piping, the electricity and all of that’s going to need maintenance and very single new thing that we build is adding to our maintenance obligation.”
DeFelice gave an example of, “If I have a house and I clear cut the backyard and I put in a pool and a pickle ball court and a gazebo and then I run a gas line down everything that I build now when I look at my expenses year over year, that’s more that I have to take care of.”
Any housing development itself would be private property, and the owner of the housing development would be responsible for the parking lot and the upkeep of the building itself, not the town. The town would probably only be responsible for the sidewalk and the streets out there which they do now anyway. The look of the building and the infrastructure, the pipes and stuff underneath and everything else, that’s all the purview of the owner, not the town.
“Let’s look at the Palisades Mall. That’s the owner’s responsibility and if they’re no longer solvent, then what? They say they’re not that profitable and they get a tax abatement.
“This housing development that’s gone in and several others, they’re for 55 and up. I’m not going to be here 30 years from now, I don’t think. If we look at demographics. What is the world going to look like 30 years from now and are all of these senior housing facilities going to be housing seniors or are they going to be vacant because they’re extremely expensive and demographics are shifting. If we are building them, we have to build in flexibility so that maybe they don’t always have to be senior housing only.”
“It would be great if we built them with traffic in mind so that maybe instead of just sidewalks going in, some dedicated bicycle lanes could go in. The one in where Schimpff’s Farm used to be, is across the street from Felix Festa. The bus depot is down the road from BOCES and Albertus Magnus. This is, it’s already a very high traffic area several times a day. I can’t go that way because I’m going to get stuck in traffic.”
When any sort of building that is going to have a lot of people driving in and out, there is a traffic study done to evaluate the impact on the community. She believes they did the traffic study in the summer and if you’re doing a traffic study in the summer in a school zone, you’re not going to have the same kind of traffic as when school is in session with thousands of school kids in a very busy intersection and when the planning was happening, some dedicated bike lanes would have been great.
I’m sure you’ve driven probably through 90% of Clarkstown at any given time over the past 30 years. How do you see the roads and the condition of them? I’ve spoken with George Hoehmann and other people already in the government, they’re talking about how they are about a year or so ahead, I think they said on the paving. There’s 300 miles of roads in Clarkstown, which the town is responsible for. They are on a 12 year, paving schedule, they say they’re ahead of that schedule.
“I would say I’m not terribly disappointed in the road conditions on my street and in the neighborhood where I live, everything looks really good. The bigger problems are the West Nyack hamlet, which is being addressed, 304. It’s a state road, right, that’s a huge traffic issue, so we need to be partnering with the state to fix that.
She spoke of possibly putting traffic circles on 304 but realized that they were probably going to be impractical. She suggested smarter traffic lights. This would help traffic move better because they can synchronize the lights so traffic can flow smoother. “Yeah, because right now you have one light that’s green the light about a quarter mile down is red and then you got traffic backed up.” Otherwise, she thinks the condition of the roads is okay, the roads that she travels that the town is responsible for, she has no complaints.
Outside of infrastructure, taxes are the other thing that people complain about the most. We hate having to pay them, but we know we have to if we want the services that government provides.
From what I’ve been told, the Hoehmann administrations have pretty much kept the line on taxes, not raising them too much when they’ve had to raise them, but really haven’t raised them much in the past few years. He said there was approximately a 1% increase per year when you aggregate it out in terms of taxes which he said is unheard of, and that includes multiple years where there were cuts and where taxes were frozen.
She feels that the current administration is and isn’t utilizing the taxes to the best interest of the community of the town. “When building a new park, for example, a new playground, the best time to have put in structures for shade would have been when that was built. There’s a beautiful playground in West Nyack that people that I’ve spoken to who live in the area and use that park will not go there before 6 p.m. because it’s too hot and their children overheat. They overheat. I said to myself, my son-in-law has lupus, he can’t be in the sun and he cannot take my granddaughter to that park. The playground is beautiful. A more thoughtful approach to look at every detail and take care of every piece of it at the same time because now it’s going to be something that we have to revisit later. It might be more expensive to add in at a later date.
You said some are good, some are bad. Which was that?
“It was good except that it wasn’t complete. Having a playground there would be good use of taxpayer dollars. Having a playground that nobody uses because it’s too bright, that’s a waste of money. It doesn’t have to be a waste it can be fixed. I want to get involved. My focus isn’t taxes it’s creating more community involvement.
She sees an inherent problem in accomplishing that task. When she goes to town board meetings, they’re empty. When she knocks on doors, people say we’re not interested, we don’t want to be involved, we don’t do politics. In this vein, she sees her role as trying to change the nature of how people view politics and community engagement. She feels people are this apathetic towards politics because it’s getting ugly out there and that politics has always been ugly, not as ugly as it is now.
“I think social media and echo chambers help fuel more negativity about politics, people see someone on the other side as an enemy and not someone that they can work with, and I don’t believe in that.” She feels that social media has not helped reduce the negative view of politics as well as the mainstream media. “I think it’s becoming harder and harder to find a media outlet that’s not biased in one way or another. I think it’s all ad and click driven. Gone are the days of everybody getting their news from a single source and if there are so many sources out there, they have to compete for views or for subscriptions, and if they’re competing, then they have to have a grab or a pull, so they have to get people sort of viscerally and appeal to them emotionally. That’s going to make people self-select which outlet they’re going to go to, and they’re going to be fed more of the same.”
Today’s sensationalized journalism is akin to the yellow journalism of the late 1890s where William Randolph Hearst, said, “You supply me the pictures, I’ll supply you the war.” There are many people who say that the mainstream media, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, all those networks are just propaganda arms of, the Democratic Party.
Does DeFelice see that in the media coverage?
Another part of her platform is to strengthen the local economy by supporting small businesses that make up the character of the town. Clarkstown has 60% of the ratables for Rockland County now. What percentage of the ratables does Costa have outside of the malls?
“That’s a question about Rockland. Is Clarkstown getting its fair share of a percentage of the taxes that we’re bringing in. Eugene (Bondar) is all over that. When I say support small business, I mean in this new housing development that’s going in at Schimpff’s Farm, if you look at their website, they’re saying how close it is to New York City. They aren’t saying what great restaurants there are in New City. If we want to attract people here, we want them to spend their money here we should be telling them what great businesses there are here.”
She says she did a crazy thing. She had her palm card printed at Alan Press in Bardonia.
“It’s not a union shop and everybody told me, well, you have to get your palm cards printed at a union shop because you know it’s a democratic value, and I said, but supporting small business is a democratic value, and it should be just a community minded person’s value. I’m going to go to the business that I’ve been using for 30 years, and they do a great job. That’s what I mean by supporting small business.”
“Everybody is very happy who loves Chick fil A, are very happy there’s a Chick fil A in Rockland. I don’t know what happened to the businesses that were there before. Some of them were not in great shape. There was a nice little restaurant there. There was a sushi place that Eugene mentioned, and it was fantastic.
I love sushi, but you know, and I wasn’t on the town council, so I don’t know the answer to this question, but was there anything offered to the businesses that were closing that I guess they were renting space in there, was there any help to get them to relocate to somewhere else where a already existed that maybe was vacant and just needed to be remodeled.” She said.
Continuing, she stated, “It’s great to bring in new business, but we have to weigh that against our existing businesses. I talked to someone who said yes, but that strip mall was really ugly, and this looks much nicer. I don’t disagree with that. I’m just saying we really should be taking care that we’re not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.” She mentioned a number of businesses that were located in the strip mall where the Chick -Fil-A is and then said, “When we do something like that, I want to make sure that we’re taking care of the people who are being displaced.”
You say you’re an idea person, what ideas do you have to bring in new business?
“Maybe not necessarily new business as in a new type of business. You lose a mom-and-pop shop because the people were old and decided to sell or their kids don’t want to take over. What would you do to bring in the new mom and pop shop? I’m thinking of Loria’s cheese shop over by Carousel Cakes. It was fantastic.”
“A very sad thing happened. He wanted to retire, but Fairway just came very close by and Fairway had outstanding cheese. Fairway was a big company, and everybody was excited about Fairway, so he couldn’t get anybody to buy his little shop because who’s going to go to a local cheese shop when there’s a Fairway, so he had to close down no cheese shop. A few years later, Fairway decides that they’re not profitable and then they leave. Now there was no cheese except for DeCiccos which has amazing cheese.”
She says everyone talks about bringing in new business but her notion is if we can support the businesses that are already here and we can make the towns more walkable or encourage more people to stay and spend their money at home, and 50 businesses are so successful that they have to hire one more person, that’s the same as having a new business with 50 new people. It’s strengthening businesses that already exist. If we do bring in new business, we have to make sure that it’s the kind of business that’s going to support jobs for people who live here.
“If people are living here, then they’re contributing to the property taxes and they’re buying groceries in the area and they’re going to our restaurants and they’re shopping at our stores. If we bring in a business that’s just a low wage type of business where somebody’s going to bus in or drive in from somewhere else and work there and then go home it’s not bringing as much value to the community as something that’s going to be really more central like I think of a jobs town and a housing town.”
Palm cards have been used by candidates and others to promote themselves or their business. The problem with palm cards is people get them, and they basically glance at them and then toss them. On your card you say you are committed to open accountable leadership. Responding directly to the residents and bringing a can-do spirit to solving the challenges we face, keeping Clarkstown unaffordable, easing tax burdens and other sorts of things. What do you feel can be done? Do you feel that the government is being accountable now? If not, what can you do to change that?
Her idea to change this is to release the agenda for the meeting well in advance of the meeting. Which means the week before and put it in plainer language. “If there’s anything coming up like discussion about something that’s going to happen that’s going to impact people in a certain place. Maybe that’s the time to canvas instead of canvassing saying please vote for me, canvass saying I’m your representative I just want you to know we’re considering something in this area, and we’re going to hold a meeting about it and say when, so we welcome your feedback.”
Sending stuff out a week ahead of time is a good idea, but an inherent problem with that is, people get something today for meeting next week. They look at it, say to themselves, I should go to that. They put it down, and what happens to that piece of paper over the next week? It gets buried under a lot of other papers or thrown out and the person forgets about the meeting because their life took over.
Her solution to that problem is maybe making phone calls. “You do the experiment. You send the thing out and if it’s not having an impact, then you have to change. You have to be flexible. Maybe robocalls are a better idea or getting out there and knocking on doors. You try something and see what works. I’d like to see more people involved.
“We need people involved in politics. I know I’m such a pathological optimist, but it’s not a bad thing. I know, and I may fail.”
Everything we try has the possibility to either pass or fail, but the question that I’m asking you is what ideas you have in your head. That may or may not work, that you can try to get to take turn the apathy into not activism, but activeness.
“Yes, this is great. Like I said, ideas versus ideology and activity versus activism, are what we’re talking about. How did you turn inactiveness into interest and activeness. We have to be responsive by answering every email, every phone call and inviting people. Put the word out that says, hey, I’m going to be sitting at Panera between you know 10 and 12 on Saturday. If you have an issue in your community, bring it to me and then I can take it back to the board just to give people more and easier opportunities to talk to us.”
According to her, when people hear town or city hall, they feel intimidated. She’s looking to create some less intimidating ways for people to come together. “We can’t have this fighting, fear and hatred anymore. We have to somehow get back to seeing that we really are all neighbors and take some of the intimidation out of it, Hold a town hall at Panera, Starbucks or a Chick fil A or wherever we can. It might encourage people to participate more.”
Public safety is a major issue across the country, you’ve got President Trump side saying we’ve got a major public safety problem. You’ve got people like JB Pritzker and the people out in Portland saying there’s no problem here, no public safety problem. Unfortunately, the evidence doesn’t bear out their statements. In Chicago, you have many people being shot every weekend. I’ve seen on the news that at least 5 people are dead most weekends from gun violence or any kind of violence. We have crime and issues here, but how do you see public safety in Clarkstown? Is it safe?
“Yes, it is. I’m very fortunate to live here. I was happy to raise my kids here. I think the police are doing an excellent job and I think that in order for us to remain the kind of safe haven that we are is that we have to really focus on building community and not falling prey to this kind of partisan animosity and hatred of others that’s taking over in other parts of the world if we allow ourselves to be too much of you play for the other team, so I’m going to like you dislike you simply on principle. You start having the I’m against you and you’re against me and people are unhappy and angry and that’s when problems can start to happen.”
She says that the law enforcement in Clarkstown are frankly really great people like she sees them at the street fairs and stuff like that not only does she know that they’re protecting them but they’re great people to just talk to. They’re so friendly and I think they represent the kind of community that Clarkstown is.
She stated, “What we want to do is we want to maintain that kind of friendly community. That means maybe building it a little bit more.
Does DeFelice feel that the police respond well and in a timely fashion?
“I haven’t heard any comments either way about response time of the police in the forum last week.
Everyone wants to talk about public safety and they’re thinking about it from the lens of everything that you just said about like what’s happening in the country and the world at large. We have the good fortune to live in one of the safest places, I think Clarkstown is rated as one of the safest places to live. We have the luxury of focusing our public safety awareness on the little things like the shade structures at the playground, so it’s a safer place for our kids to play and making sure that every sidewalk crack, is filled so that somebody with a walker doesn’t fall down or that intersections are safe places so we don’t have traffic accidents.”
She added that she feels public safety outside of the criminal and police aspect just a hyper focus on the little details that that would prevent the minor mishaps and to the quality-of-life issues. We’re in a really great place and we have the luxury to do that and we should take full advantage of it.
One big thing that we mentioned before at the mall, which is having financial problems, disarray, businesses coming and going, major businesses leaving. How do you feel about what’s going on at the mall and what ideas do you have that can help to revitalize the mall and get it to the level tax rate it was when it first came in.
“It’s hard building a big mall like that was probably short sighted because somebody somewhere else can always build a bigger shinier mall and then everybody flocks to the new big shiny type thing like the
American Dream Mall is in Jersey that’s the big shiny. The Palisades Mall looks like it’s sinking. There can be a lot of great ideas to bring people there, but if they go there and they see that this is roped off and that’s falling down, and now we’re in this weird catch-22 where we kind of have to maybe improve the structure of the mall.
It’s a private property and if they’re already struggling and going bankrupt then they don’t have the money to do that. So that’s very complicated, but I do like what they’re doing with having different activities and things to do in there.”
If you look at the current businesses coming into the mall, according to DeFelice, it’s more of a destination, entertainment venue because nobody shops in person because people are more likely to shop online. “We don’t want them shopping at the mall instead of our local shops in our towns anyway. The entertainment is good, restaurants there are good. There are huge rooms, like community rooms that occasionally get used and I don’t know if they can bring some business in there that needs the space where it could be a work hub, mixed use is a consideration, I think around the world and around the country having residential spaces in malls like they have actually makes a lot of sense for a number of reasons. We don’t have a lot of great mass transit options here in in Rockland and in Clarkstown, but there is a bus that goes from the Palisades Mall to Tarrytown and having people live there already makes the commute easier.”
“You don’t have to drive to the bus or the train. I think there’s a doctor’s office in there. There’s a dentist in there. There’s entertainment, restaurants, Target has a shopping center. There’s a, there’s a lot right there that if people were living there. It would be easy if everything is right there in the mall, that would mean that people barely leave there to do anything with everything they need is right there.”
She added that if people are living at the Palisades Mall, they’re shopping at the Palisades Mall, and they’re eating at the Palisades Mall maybe it will help boost up the stores and there wouldn’t be so much turnover. “I think it’s something that we have to consider, but we can’t consider it because we don’t own the mall.”
The town may not be able to do any of the possible solutions, but they can partner with whoever’s going to own the mall and work out a PILOT (Payment In Lieu of Taxes) program.
The bottom line of this whole thing is you want to be on the town board. There’s a Republican Bob Axelrod who’s been there since just a year, but he’s still the incumbent, and Clarkstown is divided. Why should people vote for you over Axelrod? What is it about you that people should say, hey, you know what, let me give her a chance.
“This is the toughest question because it’s a question where I have to promote myself. The way you treat people, that people say, okay I’m going to vote for her. I recognize that Clarkstown is very purple and purple is my favorite color.”
Finally, she feels term limits are a good idea and she wants to expand the public participation in the government. “I have a large network of people that’s largely in one community. My opponent’s got an amazing network of people that he met through Leadership Rockland and through his social networks, and we don’t have the same networks of people. There’s no guarantee that I will win election any time, but I’ll keep trying. I’ll bring new people in. For people to see that being civically engaged is actually useful and not scary, and then I would love to pass it on to someone else so that they can reach out to a different network of people. The town board is there to reach out to the community, represent them, bring their input back to the town board, make informed decisions, make, suggestions, etc. so widening the net of who’s involved and who’s represented can be accomplished, I think if we’re rotating who’s representing the people, so that’s why I believe in term limits. I see it as active, not subtractive. So we should take the most advantage of that and just bring in as many people that we can to, to have that conversation so that after we leave, they still continue. That’s why people should vote for me.