Walsh Transitions from Aisle 7 to Mineola Village Trustee

Dennis Walsh sat on the dais for his first official meeting as a new member of the Mineola Village Board on April 10 – a budget hearing the previous night notwithstanding – and while congratulations were offered all around, his previous voting group from Aisle No. 7 in the village board room at the village hall – colloquially known as the “Gang on Seven” expressed their sentiments now that they are down to six members on the public side of the room.

“Mayor, our loss in Aisle No. 7 is your gain,” member Russ Sutherland said to Scott Strauss, who was also reelected in the March 2013 ballot. “We discussed who would take Dennis’s place and (they) suggested me and I said ‘no, that couldn’t be done.’ I said ‘perhaps maybe we could do it, we’re a committee of six who would do designated speakers, perhaps on the committee some would be designated to do the research, attend county-wide meetings, hearings and possibly we could do it. Dennis, we’ll miss you in Aisle 7, but we know you’ll be a very valuable addition to the board.”

Walsh and the rest of the members had been a staple at almost every board meeting, himself often serving as the group’s mouthpiece, a fixture at the public podium speaking about community matters, including most recently uncovered freight cars being hauled by the Long Island Rail Road that only recently started to have a brightly-colored mesh covering the cars – an issue he brought up again during his trustee report about speaking with the LIRR vice president of capital projects at a recent conference on March 28 in Suffolk County.

“It may be a coincidence, or I may have had the opportunity to speak to the right set of ears,” Walsh said. “I’ll keep watching.”

Another Aisle 7 member, Joe Grillo, said that “there’s six of us. To take the place of one, I think we can handle it.”

“Mr. Walsh didn’t go far, he’s just speaking from a different side of the bench,” Strauss said.

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