The Scarsdale Citizens Nominating Committee Needs Serious Reform

This piece originally appeared in the Scarsdale Inquirer on April 6, 2018.

Imagine that you wanted to be on the board of a Fortune 500 corporation. One day, the chair of a 30-person committee of that prestigious corporation emails you and invites you to come in and give a brief presentation. You, the candidate, get to choose what you want to highlight about your professional, civic or personal life. You cannot discuss what plans or ideas you have to improve the corporation, because that would mean that you are discussing issues, which if the committee members disagree with your views, could affect you adversely in the selection process. In the email that you receive, there is no document that describes what the board role entails or whether there is any on the job training, but you like the corporation’s brand, so you accept the invitation to present.

On the appointed day, you present before the 30-person committee, which is comprised of a lot of people you know because they are your friends, neighbors or you have seen them about town. They were neither given guidelines as to what type of a candidate they are looking for, nor guidelines on uniform questions to ask your references.

You present and leave. No one is allowed to ask you a single question about your credentials. Before or after your presentation, no one conducts a credit or background check on you. As soon as you leave the room, the 30 people start to talk about you. If a couple of them really like you, they will sing your praises. They will make every effort to suppress negative information about you from ever seeing the light of day, and they will critique your competitors. If there are people in the committee who really dislike you, they will speak ill of vociferously. One person might even stand up and shout her oft repeated leit motif, “I am a third-generation member of this corporation,” and proceed to spin a tale that you are a bully. Do you, the candidate, get to come back for a second presentation to clarify any questions that may have arisen or to inform the third-generation spinner that heredity does not confer privilege? No, that is not allowed. A vote then takes place behind closed doors, and a person is selected. You are notified by the committee chair that you were not chosen, without any explanation whatsoever as to why you were not chosen.

Your competitor is now on the board, not once being required to take a course relevant to her role. And if something bad happens at the corporation, she will say that she is not responsible for the running of the corporation, but is only there to provide oversight. If people complain about her performance, she will simply call those individuals ‘loud,’ ‘uncivil,’ and a ‘minority,’ and carry on with business as usual, because she cannot be fired.

Surely, this scenario must be from one of Gabriel García Márquez’s surrealist novels set in an imaginary village in Colombia. No. This is how government has been operating in Scarsdale, New York for over 105 years. Scarsdale’s Non-Partisan system was created in 1911, at a time in the US when women did not even have the right to vote and racial and ethnic minorities’ right to vote was severely suppressed. In Scarsdale, Caucasian Protestant men would select the mayor and trustees. After Catholics and Jews were occasionally selected to be trustees starting in the 1940s, the system evolved to having elected members from all five school districts form a Citizens Nominating Committee (CNC).

Presently, CNC members, who are not given a copy of statutes that describe what the role of mayor and trustee requires, select Scarsdale Village officials. CNC members are not allowed to ever ask candidates a single question about their character, financial contributions to local foundations and charities, or require a single piece of evidence of what skills or expertise they would be able to contribute once at Village Hall. Also, CNC members do not receive any guidelines about what questions to ask when calling references provided by candidates and get to select individuals to call not provided by references.

Once in office, the mayor and trustees are not required to take a single course on municipal finance, property assessments, economics, risk management, or corporate governance. The Board passes budgets and is not required to put the budget up for a vote. And when residents disagree with CNC selected officials about a flawed property assessment, a library expansion that the majority of surveyed residents said they disagreed needed to be as large, excessive hiring of consultants, or a proposed burdensome tree code, these officials cannot be held accountable in any way.

In the last few weeks, a number of residents have written in these pages extolling the glories of the Non-Partisan system and how candidates are thoroughly vetted. Please stop insulting the intelligence of Scarsdale residents by telling us that the CNC process entails vetting. The reality is, that the key for anyone who wants to be in office is to join the Scarsdale Forum and not write a single report, so that no one can see that you ever expressed a view on anything. Then make sure that your friends, usually from the Scarsdale Forum, run for the CNC, which itself is administered by the Forum’s president and vice president. Also, it does not hurt if you contribute financially to the favorite cause of one of the Citizen Non-Partisan party campaign co-chairs.

After over a century, it is high time to reform significantly how the CNC operates. I encourage all residents to be engaged in how our village is run. How Village Hall operates greatly influences our daily lives and significantly impacts the amount of taxes that our great schools can count on. Please send in your suggestions to the Inquirer, the paper of record, on how to bring democracy to Scarsdale. I will be sending a few suggestions shortly.

Mayra Kirkendall-Rodríguez is a Fox Meadow resident and a finance professional who has to answer probing questions and go through credit and background checks as she is vetted by clients.