Candidate pledges no salary for a year

Posted

To the Editor:
Would you trust Mayor Ed Fare to balance your checkbook and pay your monthly bills? Based on his eight-year track record, you would be justified to say no.
Under Fare’s watch, Valley Stream has suffered nine consecutive downgrades, reducing our credit rating to junk bond status. Bad credit means higher interest rates, and less money available to cover vital expenses. Despite this, Fare continues to minimize Moody’s dire warnings. As for Vincent Grasso and Dermond Thomas, they promise that they have learned their lesson and will change their free-spending ways. I don’t buy it and neither should you. The source of our financial troubles is the United Community Party’s “tax-and-spend” policies that produce structurally imbalanced budgets fueled by boondoggles like the purchase and renovation of a new courthouse, which took far more tax dollars to complete than originally disclosed, and the Arlington waste-transfer station that is $4 million over budget.
My administration would address our financial problems by removing up to 25 percent of bloated expenses now in the budget.
If Fare, Grasso and Thomas are re-elected, we could count on property taxes increasing. Why would anyone believe property taxes would not go up when Fare has raised our taxes more than 34 percent while increasing his salary as mayor? As mayor, I would take no salary for a year until Moody’s restored our credit rating above junk status, and I call on the opposition to do the same.

The time has come for a new team, the Achieve Party: Jed Kaplowitz and Cristobal Stewart as trustees and David Sparrow for village justice. Together, we would eliminate the UCP’s wasteful spending policies. We need you to vote us in on Tuesday, March 19.
Anthony Bonelli
Valley Stream

Bonelli is running for mayor of Valley Stream on the Achieve Party line.