Unfair Editorial in Yorktown News

December 31, 2018

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

I read the December 28 Yorktown News' Government “Business Debate Rages on in Yorktown” with great disappointment. We are entering our 50^th year as Yorktown residents and have been active participants in a wide variety of local groups and organizations. As such, we are always looking for objective information on what is happening in our community. We had hoped the Yorktown News would become a source of such information.

Instead of providing information on business activities in Yorktown, this article simply criticizes the current Democratic Town Board. There does not seem to be even a pretense of an objective analysis of the retail store vacancy situation. The two sources quoted are the Yorktown Chamber of Commerce, and the former six year Republican Supervisor Michael Grace. For most of its history, the Chamber of Commerce was an independent voice of Yorktown's business community. It was carefully apolitical, strictly adhering to a policy of refusing to make any political endorsements or affiliations. However, recently under Eric DiBartolo's leadership, and with the changing composition of the Chamber's Board of Directors, the Chamber of Commerce now appears to function as an appendage of the Yorktown Republican Party.

This Yorktown News article appears aggressively anti-Democratic, repeatedly critical of Supervisor Gilbert and the Democratic Council people. A focus is the vacant Food Emporium site, vacant since 2010. Supervisor Gilbert is criticized because he has not found a tenant in the less than one year he has been in office. Somehow the fact that Supervisor Grace failed to find a tenant during the entire six years he held the office seems to be acceptable. Also, nowhere is there any mention of businesses coming into Yorktown in the past twelve months.

The article references a tax abatement plan adopted by Supervisor Grace and the Republican Town Board in 2017. The 40,000 square foot building being constructed near Town Hall, on property owned primarily by Michael Grace and Terrence Murphy (then Republican NYS Senator), is expected to benefit from this new tax abatement. It seems that enacting the new tax abatement in 2017 prior to this building construction is, at best, a conflict of interest.

Further, it appears that the prime tenants moving into this new building are currently tenants in existing Yorktown buildings rather than new businesses coming into Yorktown. This will result in increasing, rather than decreasing the number of vacant retail and office spaces in Yorktown.

In summation, this December 28^th article seemed more like the opening press release for the Republican candidates for 2019 rather than a reasoned editorial.

Sincerely,

Howard Ellison