Mary Lynn Dlabola can remember exactly what she was doing 18 years ago when she decided it was time to move to someplace like Croton-on-Hudson.
She had left her home in Nassau County, Long Island, at 6:00 AM for her usual morning commute to her job as a Court Attorney in the Bronx County Supreme Court. By 6:30 AM she was stopped dead in traffic on the Cross Island Parkway, a not untypical experience.
“I called my husband,” Dlabola recalls, “and I said, I don’t know about you, but I’m moving.”
When she eventually made it to work, Mary Lynn Dlabola (pronounced “Duh-BOLA”) spoke to a colleague who lived in Westchester County. “He said, I think you would like Croton.” The following weekend Dlabola and her husband looked at a house near the Upper Village they had seen in a listing, put in an offer, and bought it.
“It was the first and only house we looked at.”
This past April, Voice of Croton announced that Dlabola would be its candidate for one of two Board of Trustees seats up for grabs in this coming November’s village elections. She will be running against two incumbents, Croton Democrats Len Simon and Maria Slippen. While it is too early to speculate about her chances, the politics of the 2026 race are certain to be interesting, and the relatively new Voice of Croton has shown that it can be very competitive against the Croton Dems. Last year their mayoral candidate, Gary Eisinger came within a hair’s breadth of beating Mayor Brian Pugh, and VoC candidate Stacey Nachtaler won a trustee seat.
Moreover, the issue that put Voice of Croton on the political map—the ongoing debate over the pace of housing development in the village—is sure to be front and center again this year, especially as Croton officials prepare to evaluate a special permit application from developers to build an apartment complex at 425 South Riverside Avenue, just across from ShopRite.
In a Guest Editorial for the Chronicle last month, Dlabola called for a “comprehensive assessment of the cumulative impacts of all approved and proposed developments before moving forward with additional high-density projects.” Given the very close races last year, it may not be an exaggeration to say that the fortunes of each candidate could depend to a large extent on what position they take on this new development, or at the very least on how seriously they take much of the community’s concerns about what some, rightly or wrongly, have called the “urbanization” of Croton.
Mary Lynn Dlabola thinks that her long career as a Court Attorney and Special Referee, handling thousands of complex cases, makes her well qualified to weigh the difficult questions the village is now facing.
Dlabola, who turned 70 this year, was born and grew up in Long Island’s South Shore. Her father spent most of his working life in construction, as had his own father and Dlabola’s great grandfather. Her mother was a secretary. Dlabola took a very early interest in politics. When she was around five or six years old, she began keeping a scrapbook of everything JFK, “much to the chagrin of my Republican parents.”
Dlabola also took an early interest in the law, and decided at a young age she wanted to be an attorney. At first she was influenced by a mentor in college who had been a civil rights attorney during the 1960s, and thought she might go that route. But as a student at the St. John’s University School of Law in Queens, she got the opportunity to intern for a judge in Queens Supreme Court.
“He and his staff mentored me,” Dlabola says, and the internship gave her the opportunity to be involved in some high profile cases. One of them was the 1976 explosion at a Queens chewing gum factory, which injured more than 45 workers, about half of them very badly burned. Six workers eventually died. That led to landmark criminal lawsuits against the parent company, Warner-Lambert,
Dlabola’s mentors also urged her to take up a career as a court attorney, a critical role in our state justice system that includes deciding some cases and making reports to a senior judge in others. (The federal version of this role is a magistrate judge.) She eventually landed a job as a Court Attorney in the Bronx Supreme Court, eventually rising to Chief Court Attorney in the civil division.
That led to her involvement in some major cases. One of the most notorious was that of Nelson Castro, a Bronx state Assembly member who had many scrapes with the law both before and during his time in office.
Dlabola was the Special Referee in one 2013 case of election fraud involving Castro, reporting to the supervising judge in the case. As the Daily News reported:
“During the hearing before Special Referee Mary Lynn Dlabola, evidence emerged that 10 people were registered to vote from Castro’s one-bedroom apartment at 2269 Hampden Place.”
Not all of Dlabola’s cases were quite so high profile. She also had a full load of divorce cases. The uncontested ones went to a Special Referee rather than a judge. One case in particular stands out to her. A husband who did not end up doing all that well in his divorce settlement ran into her a couple of weeks later. “I was a little apprehensive,” Dlabola says. “But he told me that while he did not win his case, I was the first person in the courthouse that gave him an opportunity to be heard.”
Dlabola says that one reason she is running for Village Trustee, after 18 years living in Croton, is to help be a voice for residents who do not feel they are being listened to.
“I think that is what people in Croton are looking for,” she says, “an opportunity to be heard. That’s very important to people.”
And Dlabola gave up being a Republican years ago. She says that she and her husband, Gary Dlabola, made a gradual political shift over the years, and switched to become registered Democrats right around the time that they moved to Croton. They also bought a boat and became active in the Croton Yacht Club, where Gary Dlabola was the Commodore in 2023 and is still on the board as Financial Secretary.
As members of the Yacht Club, they got to know former Commodore and current Voice of Croton leader Gary Eisinger, and campaigned for his nearly successful run as Croton mayor last year.
Dlabola says that Voice of Croton still appears to have a lot of support. While collecting signatures for her nominating petition to get on the ballot earlier this year, “basically nobody said no.” She also sat at Voice of Croton’s booth during Summerfest last month and talked to “a great number of people, who all had very strong opinions about Croton.”
Dlabola sees parallels between her career as a court attorney and special referee and her campaign for Village Trustee. “I am trying to be more positive than negative,” she says, “and addressing the issues that people are having. That is why I am running.”
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Editor’s Note: The Chronicle does not endorse candidates for elected office, but we provide a platform for the candidates and close coverage of electoral campaigns. We expect to be featuring articles by and about the other candidates (and their supporters) as the races for both Village Trustee and Village Justice get under way.
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Mary Lynn is undoubtedly a strong candidate, with no hidden agendas. Running for office to serve the residents of Croton.