In early 2005 Lenny Roberto and I started Primary Challenge. For years Lenny tried to convince me that this is where the people have the best opportunity to pick their candidate and in all to many cases the primary is the general election due to gerrymandered districts.
People across the country are fed up with the candidates both parties are thrusting upon them so in the general election we are stuck voting for the lessor of two evils. What we need still is primaries across the country to get better quality candidates running.
Taxpayer backlash hushed to a whisper
Outsider Thompson faces scrappy incumbent, Iannello, for Legislature’s 10th District seat
He is scrappy. So is she. He’s an outsider. She isn’t. Republican Rus Thompson wants what Democrat Michele M. Iannello got two years ago — the right to represent the Kenmore-Town of Tonawanda- Grand Island district in the Erie County Legislature.
In 2005, the contest was supposed to be about taxpayer backlash. Thompson enlisted with Primary Challenge, the movement to replace entrenched incumbents with would be reformers.
Remember them all? Fifty-four candidates filed petitions for County Legislature seats two years ago. While not all were aligned with Primary Challenge, taxpayer sentiment had created for them a siren song for public office.
Thompson in 2005 failed to win the Republican primary and did not reach the general election that determined the seat for District 10, which Iannello won for her first two-year term.
He is back this year, and in many ways he represents the last wisps of Primary Challenge, at least as far as county government goes.
The only Primary Challenge incumbent from 2005, Cynthia E. Locklear, lost her Democratic primary contest in September to Timothy Wroblewski. Though well-respected by Republicans and Democrats, she’ll leave the Legislature at year’s end.
Primary Challenge has some candidates in town races. In the Legislature field, just Thompson and James Liegl of Colden remain. Liegl is running against Democratic incumbent Robert B. Reynolds of Hamburg.
“People get these wild ideas about what can be done without understanding the structures they are going into that blunt their capacity to get things done immediately,” said Michael Heselswerdt, a Canisius College political science professor, when asked why many Primary Challenge enthusiasts have scattered.
Perhaps it’s worth noting, then, that Thompson has not yet lost interest and still bangs the drum for reforms. Among other things, he wants to see the Legislature shrink to nine members from 15 while keeping the salary for those remaining nine legislators at $42,588 — “good full-time pay,” he says.
Meanwhile, he proposes closing the Legislature’s 15 district offices, a step once touted in many circles — though not within the Legislature — as a way to save money and draw down the number of political appointees serving lawmakers.
“If you want the departments to cut their budgets, you have to lead by example,” he said.
But Thompson admits that until the Legislature goes along and abandons district offices, he will have one — or even two, as former incumbent Charles M. Swanick did — to maintain a presence on Grand Island. Thompson said that, like Swanick, he will place the offices in public buildings so he can avoid paying rent.
Thompson has made a name for himself through his efforts to remove tolls from the Grand Island bridges by circulating petitions and forwarding thousands of signatures to the powers in Albany.
Lately, he also questions whether Iannello lives in her district. She lists an official address of 223 Parkwood Ave., Kenmore, a house she owns. But the man she married in 2005 — Democratic Elections Commissioner Dennis Ward — lists an address at 210 Capen Blvd. That’s in another legislative district and in Amherst, where Ward is the town’s Democratic Party chairman.
So do they live apart? “Of course I live in my district,” Iannello said.
She did not answer the question did she…
Ward said he has owned his house for some 20 years but often ends his day in Iannello’s home in Kenmore. It’s not unusual for couples to have two residences, he said. They see it as a non-issue.
I could agree with that if they had a winter home in Florida but, they are married? and live in different places? What’s wrong with this picture?
“I’m taking it as a compliment that he can’t find anything wrong with my record so he goes after my personal life,” Iannello said.
Now that’s funny… 
First of all it was not me that brought this issue about her residency up, it was two callers on WBEN and residents that live in the district. People have been asking me where she lives and I could not tell them exactly. The other thing is I have been all over her voting record and her lack of action toward any real structural reforms.
Iannello has not been a shrinking violet. Early in her first term she was part of a renegade group of newcomers backing one of their own for Legislature chairwoman and refusing to line up, for a while, behind the party leadership’s preference, Lynn M. Marinelli.
she was quickly slapped by the unions and the Party to get in line and she did quickly
Iannello pushed a resolution advocating term limits, which went nowhere. She also pushed a bill that would give the Legislature the right to curb a county executive’s patronage powers and let lawmakers cancel contracts that a county executive signed but which smack of favoritism. That proposal also has been derailed, and, considered unworkable, it won’t be improved in time to go to a referendum in November.
I have a compromise for her plan to infringe on the county executives patronage powers, allow the county executive pull patronage out of the legislature….
Over initial objections from other lawmakers, she won a provision placing the legislator for District 10 — Iannello or whoever replaces her — on the committee determining the Niagara Greenway projects that should proceed in Erie County with money from the State Power Authority relicensing agreement.
I would hope so…. Most of it is in the 10th district.
She doesn’t maintain an office in her district. Instead, she has placed her office and her aides downtown, with the rest of the Legislature’s staff on the fourth floor of Old County Hall.
Besides the residency issue this is a slap in the face to the people in the district and it is misleading to say it is to save money. There are ample places to have a district office with out paying rent as Swanick did for many years.
Like Thompson, Iannello was motivated to run in 2005 by the games being played with tax dollars, she said, and she became a candidate before Swanick announced in 2005 that he would retire from the Legislature.
mspina@buffnews.com
Tags: Erie County Insanity
