The road to “Dr. Greg Schmidt Way” passed through the minefield of Croton politics.
After five years of lobbying by friends and political allies, Croton’s former mayor—the village’s “Mr. Summerfest”—gets the recognition many feel he has long deserved.
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In the charisma department, Greg Schmidt has still got it.
Croton’s former mayor and trustee, back in town for the unveiling of a street sign on Grand Street bearing his name and a proclamation in his honor by the Board of Trustees, was holding forth near the sign, which is just across the street from the modest white house he used to live in. After being introduced by trustee Len Simon, who played a key role in making this day happen, Schmidt stepped forward and immediately began listing, in a clear and sonorous voice, the accomplishments of his two mayoral administrations,
A crowd of several dozen Crotonites (along with three generations of Schmidt’s family) braved the post-storm cold for the event. It was clear that many of them wished Schmidt was still mayor. At the very least, they were here to honor “Mr. Summerfest,” the nickname Schmidt acquired after helping to found the famous Croton event more than 40 years ago.
But Schmidt’s last mayoral term, along with the trusteeships of his two allies and fellow members of the political group Croton United, ended in November 2017, when Brian Pugh and his allies decisively defeated them in that year’s municipal election. Ever since, Croton has been what some critics say is a “one party town.”
(It might be more accurate to say Croton is a “two party town,” since our local Democrats now also run under the banner of the Working Families Party.)
For the past five years, one of Schmidt’s allies, former trustee Bob Anderson, had been leading a campaign to have Croton formally honor the former mayor. It was a long and hard road, Anderson told the Chronicle.
Why did it take so long?
“It’s very simple,” Anderson said. “After the naming of the meeting room [in the municipal building] after longtime trustee Georgianna Grant and a street after former mayor Roland Bogardus, it became clear that there were no criteria for honoring people.”
(Editor: Grant was a Democrat and Bogardus was a Republican.)
In a letter to The Gazette in June 2022, Anderson described the frustrations he went through to get a street named after Schmidt:
“…when I approached the village board a few years ago to request that Dr. Schmidt be recognized for his years of service, the response was that the board had to reach “consensus”. The board has shuffled members in and out and some have remained the same, and we have a new village manager, but apparently the Board is still unable to reach a consensus on the question of whether it is appropriate to honor Dr. Schmidt’s contributions to the village in a public way. The board has named streets and meeting rooms in the blink of an eye, so the question is why this should take so long or be ignored.”
It probably did not help that Schmidt and his allies were political enemies of current mayor Brian Pugh and his allies. In 2016, for example, the year before Pugh beat Schmidt, Croton United and the Croton Democrats traded accusations of unfair election practices before the Westchester Fair Campaign Practices Committee. The Committee upheld some of the charges on both sides, although there are still debates over whose conduct was worse.
The Committee did uphold one of the bitterest charges made by Croton United, however: That Pugh had posted material on his Facebook page claiming to show that Croton United was associated with the Croton Republican Party. Indeed, there is little question that the founding members of Croton United included Democrats, Independents, and Republicans alike, even if it was sometimes supported in elections by the local GOP. (Schmidt, for example, was a registered Democrat.)
Of course, there were real and serious issues dividing Schmidt and his allies from the Democrats. Many of them revolved around fiscal responsibility and spending; others around transparency in government. Croton United accused the Democrats of being anti-business, and the Dems accused their opponents of failing to value the local environment.
There were fiery clashes in Board of Trustees meetings when members of both groups were serving together. In one celebrated exchange, Schmidt and former trustee Ann Gallelli traded barbs over Schmidt’s apparent lack of enthusiasm for the development of Croton Landing.
(To play the video below, please paste this link into your browser: facebook.com/crotondems/videos/1302860456400465/ )
Of course, sometimes one side turned out to be right and sometimes the other. Thus Schmidt was almost surely wrong when he dissed Croton Landing, now a much beloved local park and promenade, open to both residents and non-residents alike. And Croton United may well have been right when it opposed the acquisition of Gouveia Park, one of Gallelli’s pet projects, which the village is still struggling to figure out what to do with ten years later.
And even though Croton United is today little more than a Web site, since it has not run candidates in many years, its arguments against overdeveloping the village with housing projects are still much alive in today’s debates over the Katz project, the Finkelstein property, developments on Riverside, and so forth.
That might explain why Mayor Brian Pugh, although present for the events honoring Greg Schmidt, showed only muted enthusiasm about the recognition for his former rival. But in the end, Bob Anderson’s persistence paid off, as he began approaching members of the board individually, especially Len Simon.
“I invited Len to lunch and said, let’s talk about Greg,” Anderson told the Chronicle. “Len said, yes, we all now agree.” With “consensus” finally reached, Simon contacted Schmidt, who now lives in Pennsylvania, and the date this week was arranged.
(As the Chronicle publishes, Simon has declined to answer the Chronicle’s questions about why it took so long and what was the decisive factor in making it happen.)
“My perseverance in trying to get the village to do the right thing finally paid off,” Anderson says.
Are there lessons to be learned?
As for Croton being a “one party town,” perhaps the long road to the naming of Dr. Greg Schmidt Way also leads to the conclusion that monopoly rule is not good for a village like Croton, which houses a diversity of opinion despite being run by Democrats for more than six years. Even some Dems on the Board give at least lip service to this concern. For example, after the last election, the Chronicle’s editor had a public exchange on Facebook with trustee Nora Nicholson, who agreed that even though she and her allies had run unopposed, it would have been good to have some public events—for example, a Town Hall—to discuss the issues.
Of course, there was nothing stopping village Democrats from doing that, just as there is nothing stopping members of Croton United from running candidates, even if right now they may not have a good chance of winning—just having the political debates is healthy and important.
Even the often cited obstacle to beating the Democrats—the moving some years back of Croton elections from March to November, when state and national candidates are also on the ballot, thus encouraging straight party-line votes—should not be a barrier to anyone who feels strongly enough about the direction they think our village should go in. That is what politics is supposed to be about: Passionate argument and advocacy of one’s position.
Perhaps most importantly, there are signs, which the Chronicle has covered in earlier articles, that current village debates over housing and other issues show that whether or not Croton United or like-minded leaders are in office or not, the issues they once ran on are still on the minds of many in Croton. That is true whether or not those who still want to raise them are accused of being “divisive.”
Perhaps that explains why there was so much enthusiasm in the crowd welcoming Greg Schmidt back to Croton. And perhaps the current mayor and trustees should be careful not to get too comfortable in office. The history of our village suggests that could be a mistake, for all concerned.
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Well done, truly balanced and objective.