DELHI - Delhi council member and supervisor candidates participated in a question and answer forum hosted by The Reporter at the Delhi American Legion, Thursday, Oct. 26. Moderated by Elizabeth DeFalco, candidates answered questions ranging from plans for shared services to budget planning, their plans for including the public in decision making, and more. Thirty people attended the event.
The candidates - Joshua Morgan, Amy Randall and Christina Viafore, seeking a council seat, and Maya Boukai and Peter Bracci seeking the supervisor seat, introduced themselves, outlining their priorities if elected and explained why they were seeking the positions.
Incumbent Supervisor Mark Tuthill did not attend the event.
In their opening remarks, candidates summarized why they were seeking the positions. “The world is filled with people with great ideas and ideas are totally awesome,” Randall said as part of her pitch for election. “I also have ideas, but I get stuff done.” Bracci pledged to implement a “Founder’s Day” to celebrate Delhi’s history if elected and relies on his previous record of accomplishments and goal of finishing projects in his bid for the supervisor seat.
Involving the community is key to her leadership, if elected, Boukai said. She discovered that there was a lack of transparency, responsibility and communication at the county level, she said, and that trickles down to the town.
Christina Viafore, an incumbent, has experience in the position and is committed to the Delhi community flourishing, she said. Morgan echoed Boukai in sharing services as a means to a more streamlined government. He knows how to network and communicate, he said, and champions infrastructure as a foundation for his campaign.
When asked what they saw as the most pressing issue facing the town of Delhi and how they would address it, Boukai said the lack of communication between the current supervisor and community is problematic. She’s found it difficult to access information from the town, she said. “I’m all about giving people the opportunity to make a choice to participate (in their town government) or not. If there is a lack of information, the choice has been made for you.” It’s been a full-time job trying to find information from the town, she said.
Bracci said opposing interests of the town and the county concern him. “The problem I have had in the past,” he said, “Is that there are special interest (groups) in this county that are operating the county.” It is time to speak out against the practice, he said.
Morgan sees escalating costs as an issue. “The costs of buildings, the cost of hiring someone, materials, food, everything is getting really expensive,” he said. Raising property taxes to cover those costs is not a good idea, he said. Instead, he said, sharing services, including town and village offices, is a potential solution to address increased costs without passing them on to taxpayers. Applying for grants to make a shared building energy efficient will also help to reduce costs, he said.
Randall sees the most pressing issue is the notion of “separate factions” and an “us versus them ideology that seems to pervade a lot of conversations.” There is no reason the town and village can not work together to lower costs, she said. “We should think about streamlining some of the daily tasks both entities do on a daily basis.” A spirit of cooperation can also help address issues that plague different demographics such as older adults and college students. “I don’t think that anything that happens in the town of Delhi should be a partisan issue. It should be a Delhi issue,” Randall said, urging cooperation and collaboration from everyone.
Viafore is concerned about flood mitigation, she said, and existing plans which have not been implemented. “We need to find ways to follow the plan that we’ve spent and energy doing,” Viafore said. Housing is also a big issue, she said; which was addressed in the town’s comprehensive plan, but never implemented.
Regarding the county’s continued state of emergency which prohibits immigrants from settling in the county and how they view the issue, Morgan said he isn’t sure the county has the resources to sustain the immigrants. “As far as them coming here, how are we going to provide for them? I don’t know,” he said. “We already have people looking for housing and we have nothing here.” Randall said the county is not dealing with a “concrete migration of people to the area.” Instead, she said, “We are dealing with what ‘appears to be’ a migration of people to the area.” Supervisors declaring a state of emergency is a misuse of what a state of emergency actually is, she said. “My role as a council person for Delhi is to serve the public. What does the public want to do (about the issue?). How I feel about it is not germane to the conversation. What is germane is what we are going to do as a community.” Answers need to come from the community, she said.
Viafore said there are plenty of jobs available for immigrants if they make it to Delaware County but transportation and housing are problems. There is a need for people to come into the area, she said. “We have to figure out the infrastructure to make that happen. We would have to figure out how it would all work and have a plan before it happens to make sure we have the resources for them.”
Boukai said the immigration system needs a “serious overhaul” and is a state and federal issue. She agrees that Delaware County has a lack of housing, she said; but the housing issues should not have been preemptively used to prevent immigrants from coming into the county. The town supervisor’s role regarding the issue, she said, is communicating with the community and soliciting feedback on how to best address the issue. A larger issue, Boukai continued, is that people are overlooking that the immigrants in question are in the country legally. “They are trying to seek asylum,” she said. “These aren’t people who are hiding and came across the border . They’ve gone through the proper procedures.” She has a problem with the board of supervisors that did not solicit feedback from any community and unilaterally made a decision on behalf of an entire county. “We can’t solve the housing crisis. We can’t solve housing,” she said, “But we can solve the lack of communication.”
Bracci said having previously been on the social services committee for Delaware County, he knows how expensive it is to run the department and provide support to those in need. “I don’t know how we would raise funds to support it,” he said. The way he would address it, he said, is to get ahold of state law makers and enlist their assistance. “We are not financially able to take care of our own,” he said.
Candidates also answered a variety of other questions related to their potential roles as elected officials. A video recording of the forum is available at: https://www.the-reporter.net/stories/video-delhi-candidate-forum-oct-26-2023,122880?
