About those 17 code enforcement actions. Was Lenny Amicola’s citation politically motivated?

Also: Did the village slow walk release of relevant FOIL documents until after the election was over? Thor Snilsberg and Amicola’s attorney Roseann Schuyler speak for the record.

Robbins Pharmacy (left), Old Colonial Diner (right)

As readers who have followed the long-running controversy over Croton resident Lenny Amicola’s Trump display on Grand Street know, there are two sides to the story.

Lenny’s supporters, including his lawyer (Croton attorney Roseann Schuyler), insist that our Democratic Party controlled village has been gunning for his political displays for years, and that this latest enforcement attempt is politically motivated. The village, for its part, has made repeated statements through its village manager and mayor that the enforcement action against Amicola is a politically neutral, routine matter, citing as evidence that the village was simultaneously engaged in 17 other enforcement actions.

To try to further investigate these claims and counterclaims, in early September—just a couple of days after the Lenny story originally broke—the Chronicle filed two New York Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests for information about the case.

In one, we asked for all communications with the village, going back to 2000, concerning Lenny Amicola’s political displays, including complaints from residents, and the responses of village employees to those communications. In another, we asked for all documents, no matter what their form, concerning the 17 code enforcement cases.

In mid-October, we reported on the progress of these FOIL requests. We did receive documents related to communications with the village from residents opposed to Amicola’s displays, including the current “TRUMP IS MY PRESIDENT” sign which has been at the heart of the current controversy. These documents suggested, although they did not prove, that the village was indeed looking for a way to deal with Amicola’s display. For example, in an email to a village resident in early March of this year, Village Manager Bryan Healy wrote that the village’s attorneys were looking to see whether more recent case law might be applicable to the situation.

However, documents related to the 17 code enforcement cases were not forthcoming at that time. As we also reported, on October 7, right after the statutory 20 working days the FOIL allows to either fulfill a request, or deny it in full or in part, village clerk Paula DiSanto emailed the Chronicle to say that she needed more time. She wrote:

“I am writing to advise I will need additional time to complete your FOIL request. Our Code Enforcement Officer is currently out of the office on an extended leave, and despite my efforts, I have not yet been able to locate the records relevant to your request. I appreciate your patience and understanding, and I will continue working to retrieve the necessary documents and make them available as soon as possible.”

As Chronicle readers will know, Croton’s Code Enforcement Officer, Thor Snilsberg, resigned his position on November 17 after a lengthy unpaid leave, and is no longer employed by the village. Snilsberg began his leave right after the Lenny affair became public and a number of village employees were targeted with death threats. In a whistleblower letter he wrote at the time, which the Chronicle later obtained and published, Snilsberg accused Village Manager Healy of pressuring him to issue a code violation against Amicola—even though it was the one alleged violation that involved political speech, and thus was subject to much stricter First Amendment principles than the other 17 cases he was working on, all of which involved less protected commercial speech.

We now learn from Snilsberg that what the village clerk told us was apparently not true. According to our former Code Enforcement Officer, DiSanto never contacted him to ask for documents relevant to our FOIL request before the day that she wrote us, October 7, to say that she needed more time. (See Snilsberg’s statement below.) If this is true, it would mean on the face of it that the village violated the FOIL, which allows extensions only if there is a legitimate reason for them.

Right around the same time that we filed our FOIL request, Amicola’s attorney Roseann Schuyler did so as well. She received the same documents we did, at about the same time (we received the documents on November 14, ten days after the village elections.) Schuyler asks whether this timing was deliberate:

“I would note that it took over 60 days to receive a response to my FOIL request for the village to provide a list of the ‘seventeen non-compliant locations’ that they had identified when the news of the village enforcement action against Mr. Amicola was made public. Having now reviewed them, I’m not surprised that the Pugh administration abused the FOIL process to avoid producing these documents until after the election. Had the public been aware of Brian Pugh’s intentional deception of the public and his overtly partisan use of village employees, many more than 22 more residents may have voted differently.”

(Schuyler is referring to the, as of today, 22 vote margin by which incumbent Mayor Pugh apparently beat challenger Gary Eisinger.)

Roseann Schuyler

We want to make clear that we do not believe the village clerk would make a false or misleading statement to local news media without first having discussed it with the village manager and perhaps other officials. We asked Healy to comment on this, but he declined:

“The Village is not providing any further comment on anything related to Mr. Snilsberg.”

We also asked Mayor Brian Pugh to comment on the allegations that he and his administration deliberately (and possibly illegally) delayed production of these documents until after the election. Pugh also declined to comment.

We will end this part of our report with Snilsberg’s statement to us, and then go into details about the documents that were partially produced in response to the FOIL request.

“Unfortunately, the lack of transparency and accountability from our Village management continues. Had they been serious about responding to the Chronicle’s FOIL request on time, then why did they wait until after the FOIL’s due date to reach out to me for input?

While the emails provided to the Chronicle fail to explain why Village Manager Healy ordered me to ticket Mr. Amicola, they do support my whistleblower claim that Mr. Amicola’s banner was the only instance of political speech I was enforcing.

At the advice of my attorney, I’m reviewing my emails, notes, and photos to construct a timeline of my enforcement efforts. Should Mr. Amicola choose to file a lawsuit against the Village, I expect to be deposed and I believe that more emails will come to light in the discovery process.”

The 17 other code enforcement cases

In response to this FOIL request, the village clerk provided the Chronicle with 13 pages of emails, most of them between Snilsberg and Healy with some cc’s to former Village Engineer Dan O’Connor and DiSanto. Despite our request for records of all kinds no matter what their form, we did not receive copies of texts, notes, photographs, or other materials that the FOIL also requires to be reviewed and released if there are no claims of exemptions.

As for the exemptions that the FOIL allows, we were also provided with a list of redactions made on some of the documents. There were five such exemptions claimed, one of which involved privacy issues and the other four “intergovernmental immunity.” Here are the claimed exemptions:

We were not told about any documents that were withheld in their entirety, but we have reason to believe that some were. The Chronicle will report on that question in due course; the FOIL gives us the right to appeal the withholding of any documents, and we are currently reviewing the matter.

The documents cover the period from April 10 to September 11, 2025. As we stated above, Healy told a resident back in early March that Croton’s attorneys were reviewing how an action against Lenny Amicola’s Trump display might be legally enforced, but there are no smoking guns in these documents to support contentions by Amicola’s supporters that the 17 other code violations were simply designed to provide cover for a politically motivated move against his free speech rights.

Village Manager Bryan Healy

The earliest emails produced under the FOIL are dated April 10 of this year, and appear to be incomplete, in the sense that they come in the middle of an apparently ongoing conversation between Snilsberg and Healy, which may well have been verbal rather than written. Healy first asks Snilsberg,

“Can you share your plan for addressing the commercial signage now that the email and brochure have been circulated? I would like to see some of the more flagrant violations (like the diner and the gas stations) addressed first.”

About five minutes later, Snilsberg responds that fifteen notification letters “went out with my business card and the signage flier.” Snilsberg adds that “I told the businesses that I’m available to answer questions, will reinspect on Thursday the 17th, and that I’d be issuing violations and an order to remedy if we hadn’t discussed a plan to voluntarily comply.”

Throughout the correspondence over a number of months, Snilsberg stresses that he prefers to use a soft enforcement touch based on informing businesses about the village code on signage rather than being heavy handed. Over that time, the 15 original cases would be expanded to 17 (see below.)

Nevertheless, Snilsberg told Healy in a May 22 email that in a conversation with Laurie Weisz, the owner and CEO of Suburban Guides, Inc., which produces town websites in Westchester County, Weisz “had gotten an earful from businesses that are not happy with my gentlest form of education and enforcement.” Snilsberg asked Healy for a meeting to further discuss “how code enforcement can create a positive (rather than punitive) relationship with all the Village businesses.”

In the documents produced, the first actual mention of Lenny Amicola does not come until May 21, in an email from Snilsberg to Village Engineer Dan O’Connor and Healy. Amicola is mentioned in passing in this email, which provides an update on Snilsberg’s code enforcement efforts up to that time, all of which concern commercial displays other than Amicola’s political display. Snilsberg writes:

“I do not have a record of the day I gave Lenny a copy of the 4/10 banner letter. That was simply an educational customer centric approach so I don’t think that should stop us from putting him on the 30 day clock like everyone else.”

Indeed, there is nothing in the documents we received that provides direct support for discriminatory treatment of Amicola for his political speech, although we again have to emphasize that some portions were redacted and that we do not have all the documents relevant to our FOIL request. The documents do, however, support Snilsberg’s contention that Amicola’s display was the only one with political content.

On September 4, the day the story about the village’s filing of criminal charges against Lenny Amicola (on Sepember 3) broke in the Chronicle, Snilsberg provided Healy for what appears to be the first time with a complete list of the 17 other cases he was working on, all of which involved commercial establishments. The list appears in the first two-thirds of this email and we reproduce it here:

(Note that SRA refers to South Riverside Avenue and NRA refers to North Riverside Avenue.)

There are 17 businesses listed, meaning that Lenny Amicola’s display on Grand Street was actually the 18th code enforcement, and again, the only one involving political speech. The businesses referenced above are ones familiar to villagers, such as the Croton Colonial Diner, most gas stations in the village (Citgo, Mobil, Sunoco, etc.), auto repair shops, Robbins Pharmacy, businesses in Croton Commons, Croton Bait & Tackle, and so forth.

Immediately after reciting this list, Snilsberg makes the following reference to Amicola:

In response to this long email from Snilsberg, Healy, a little more than an hour later on September 4, tells him:

“Thank you for this detailed response. Please issue the six violations to be consistent. They should be done by close of business tomorrow. Thank you.”

Croton on Hudson Board of Trustees

It’s important to stress again that the FOIL documents produced to the Chronicle do not in and of themselves constitute evidence that the village was out to get Amicola for his political speech. On the other hand, they are not complete, and do not reflect any conversations that Healy may have had with Mayor Brian Pugh or other board members. (We have reason to believe that such conversations about code enforcement issues did take place.)

Snilsberg, in his whistleblower letter and his statement to us published above, makes very clear that in his view there was a hidden motivation behind all of this code enforcement effort, and that was to get at Amicola’s display. Just when Snilsberg came to this conclusion is not clear, although he certainly had reached it by September 8 when he wrote the whistleblower letter.

For Amicola’s attorney, Roseann Schuyler—who has made clear that bringing legal action against the village is a possibility she and her client are considering—there is little question. We have quoted part of the statement she gave us above, concerning the delay in producing the FOIL documents. Here is the rest of what she told us, for the record:

“It appears that the ‘seventeen non-compliant locations’ that the village cited in its statement justifying its unlawful enforcement action against Mr. Amicola all share one common attribute that distinguishes them from Mr. Amicola’s property, which is that all 17 are commercial properties whose displays involved commercial speech. The village was well within its authority to enforce section 230-44(M) of the village code against these properties, both because this particular code provision explicitly references commercial speech, and because it is black letter law that commercial speech may be regulated at greater levels than other forms of speech. However, Mr. Amicola’s flag, which is displayed on his residential property and which expresses a political viewpoint, is a very different matter. As the Department of Justice made clear to the village, “The U.S. Supreme Court has long recognized that political speech lies at the core of what the First Amendment is designed to protect.” Contrary to what the village suggested, the matters are very different and the documents demonstrate that the enforcement against Mr. Amicola was, in fact, targeted, as his is the only example of non-commercial speech occurring on non-commercial property.

Moreover, I would note that as of September 4, 2025, the day that the story about the enforcement action filed against Mr. Amicola appeared in the Croton Chronicle, Mr. Amicola’s property was the only property that had received a violation under code sec. 230-44(M). None of the seventeen commercial properties had been cited, despite the village’s attempt to suggest otherwise. It is also of note that once the story became public the village manager explicitly directed the code enforcement officer to issue six other violations under sec. 230-44(M), and to make sure to do so by the close of business on September 5. It’s obvious this was a last-minute pretextual effort to provide cover for what the documents and Mr. Snilsberg’s whistleblower letter make clear: a conspiracy by the Pugh administration to violate Mr. Amicola’s rights by unlawful targeted code enforcement against him due to the administration’s hostility to the content of Mr. Amicola’s speech.”

Despite our best efforts to shed light on how and why the code enforcement action against Lenny Amicola became a national story that drew the attention of President Trump’s Department of Justice and Trump himself, there are many unanswered questions. One of them concerns why former Village Engineer Dan O’Connor retired earlier than expected (his retirement was not originally planned until sometime next year.) O’Connor privately told colleagues that the village had asked him to retire early. As for why, sources tell us that at least one reason was that O’Connor was not keen on stepped up code enforcement, which was clearly part of Healy’s (and the Board of Trustees?) agenda.

(This could help explain why Healy had begun dealing with Snilsberg—a new village employee who had only been hired this past January—directly about code enforcement actions, instead of going through the normal chain of command with O’Connor in the middle.)

Attorney Roseann Schuyler has made clear that unless the village agrees in writing not to go after Lenny Amicola a third time for his political display, she is ready to file a lawsuit that would focus on the First Amendment issues that have arisen in this case. If that happens, and the case survives a likely motion to dismiss by the village, Schuyler and her client will be entitled to legal discovery, that is, to all documents relevant to the issues and to take depositions of all individuals involved, under oath.

If that happens, this story may not be even close to over.

********************************************************************************************************

To share this post, or to share The Croton Chronicle, please click on these links.

Comments policy: No personal attacks, please be polite and respectful at all times.