Village general election 2024: at-large trustee race

Two at-large trustee seats are on the ballot at this month’s village election. Village trustee incumbents John Tufarelli and Sean Wright of the United Community Party seek to retain their seats against Achieve Party challenger Anthony Bonelli who made a similar unsuccessful bid for trustee in 2020. 

In this three-way contest, the top two vote-getters on March 19 will earn their place at Village Hall. Trustees Wright and Tufarelli have been fixtures of village politics for years.

Sean Wright and John Tufarelli

Wright’s career background is in law, serving as a prosecutor for the village for more than seven years, handling ticket and building violations cases.

The 54-year-old trustee became a Hempstead Town attorney in 2011 and worked as an arbitrator in Queens and Nassau County. His community roots run deep. He was a former treasurer for the Friends of Bridge substance abuse counseling center, a former assistant coach with the Valley Stream Green Hornets, and a volunteer attorney advisor for High School Mock Trial.

Tufarelli, a longtime resident of Valley Stream, will seek his fifth term on the trustee board. He was the former owner of Wheeler Deli, a longstanding business the 62-year-old trustee operated for over two decades. He is the former President and Coach of the Valley Stream Mail League Baseball League and Blessed Sacrament Athletic Association board member.

Affordability remains a central concern among residents, particularly in reducing the village property tax burden while preserving quality-of-life services.

Wright sympathized with the financial crunch families are under.

“No one wants to pay more. I get it,” said Wright. “The last thing I ever want to see is good friends and neighbors leave because of affordability.”

The village he argues has sought ways to spare the spending of taxpayer dollars by seeking out alternative sources of funding. The current administration has “a great track record” of seeking out and applying for inter-governmental funding to pay for village projects to lessen the burden on residents.

The village has turned a corner on its financial situation, noted Tufarelli, as it strives to keep a tight financial grip on its spending. The same way one would run a household on a strict budget noted Tufarelli, is the way village officials “act as good stewards of public trust: we must constantly seek ways to do more with less.” As an example of a key cost-saving strategy, he mentioned “utilizing a lot of part-time employees and employing local youth whenever possible” to bring down the cost of full-time work.

He also noted that village taxes, despite the strain on residents, help maintain a stable suburban style of living.

“The Village taxes are between 21- 25 percent of the overall property tax bill,” noted Wright, and those taxes fund a host of critical services “such as sanitation, roads, library, and of course fire protection, among others.”

Concerning improving road safety and pedestrian walkability, Wright argued that good road conditions first start with good infrastructure.

“I can say without hesitation that this Village administration has been very proactive about maintaining the condition of the 95 miles of roads that wind through the Village of Valley Stream,” said Wright. “At a cost of more than $ 1 million per mile, we obviously cannot pave every road every year. This is why the Village, working closely with our skilled workforce, follows a carefully thought-out road maintenance schedule, so paving and necessary repairs are constantly underway on a rotational basis.”

He touted his fervent support for investing in “state-of-the-art pothole repair equipment” that’s fast-tracked village crew’s pot-hole repair initiative.

“I have been listening and involved in the lives of so many of my fellow Valley Streamers over the years, that I consider this community to be my big, extended family,” said Tufarelli. “I know the beat of the village, its needs and wants.  It is part of the fabric of who I am.” 

As far as launching new traffic-calming initiatives, Tufarelli asserted that any new proposals are taken up with “traffic experts, county, town, and village advisory boards, who will often conduct traffic studies to see what is going on and offer solutions to fix the problems.”

But Tufarelli is, nevertheless, attuned to “serious safety issues” on traffic corridors like Hendrickson Avenue and promised to work closely with Nassau County on extensive traffic calming initiatives to address the problem.

Anthony Bonelli

In his plan to earn a seat at Village Hall, Bonelli is recycling many of the same themes he’s run on in previous village contests — the latest being last year’s unsuccessful bid for the mayor’s seat — transparency, integrity, efficiency.

This may not be surprising for a man who spent decades of his working life across various city services, optimizing systems, and improving working standards.

When asked how he would reduce the tax burden on residents while maintaining quality-of-life services, Bonelli said: “Firstly, you must be honest with the public.”

Bonelli took direct aim at village officials for, in his view, irresponsibly downplaying the extent of the village’s fiscal troubles, at least where its credit worthiness is concerned.   

“The administration denied that Moody’s Investors Service had rated the Village’s credit to the lowest level in its history,” said Bonelli, citing a village board meeting in which village officials disagreed with characterizing the village’s credit status as “junk bond.”

“In 2023, the Village’s Ba1 rating was a junk bond which means non-investable, meaning investors should not buy the Village’s debt.”

Bonelli, the Brooklyn-born and District 13 school board trustee, promises to run a tighter fiscal ship to save taxpayer money. His first order of business is to stop what he describes as the rampant hiring of politically connected family members and associates at Village Hall.

“It’s legal thievery that the residents must pay for these people’s salaries and benefits with their tax dollars when these expenditures could go for enhanced park maintenance and expanded park activities,” argued Bonelli.

On the issue of improving road safety and pedestrian safety, Bonelli again went on the offensive, arguing that the tied-up traffic on village streets was a direct result of more people and more cars brought in by “the unprecedented increase in apartment building construction.”

“These apartments increase the population density which directly affects the traffic loads on our streets, the school taxes due to possible increases in student enrollment as well as other village services that get paid for by the taxpayer,” noted Bonelli, who would push to halt any further apartment construction. He’d also repurpose certain village-owned property into parks and other public service sites.

But more than anything Bonelli says he vows to bring “integrity” to the office of the trustee as a check on the mayor and break away from decades of United Community Party dominance.

“When people say, ‘elections matter,’ how true it is,” he said.