The ‘machine’ is alive and well! Do the right thing, Rob, or you will be a one-term wonder.

Hello, it’s politics. Anyone who thinks the Westchester County government will change is having a bad dream. It’s just politics.

Only three days in and the ride is already beginning. Don’t believe me? Wait and see. As bad as (County Executive Andrew) Spano was, it unfortunately is going to get a lot worse. Good luck fellow residents. We’ll need it.

Mr. Astorino, I truly had high hopes for you in your new position, but I feel you just made your first mistake. You might want to reconsider, just sayin.

Rob, Please don’t let us down. We voted for you and are supporters with great hopes for your future. Please do your homework before making decisions in the future on who you will sleep with.

You are all nuts! The county exec-elect picked the non-paid head of his transition team to look at staffing. How can you complain already? If the transition team puts forth unqualified candidates for position in Astorino’s administration, and Astorino goes along with the recommendations, then have it.

Surprise? Not for me. I could not wait to get in that booth and vote him out!

Thank you, voters, for waking up and doing what should have been done years ago.

Astorino will not be able to lower our taxes in any significant way, as the county portion of our tax bill is small. School districts are responsible for most of the taxes. I voted for Astorino anyway. ... What Astorino giveth, the local school districts taketh away.

As a new voter in the county, reading this newspaper’s coverage of Mr. Spano’s private security detail expenses was shocking enough to never vote for the man. Now, I expect to be reading in this same newspaper, by February, how Astorino has reduced budgets by 70 percent or more across the board. If not, I won’t be flipping his dilly switch in the booth come next election.

Great job everyone! Let’s keep it going, let’s vote ALL incumbents out and try some fresh faces. The madness has gone way out of control. Glad people finally stopped voting down party lines. Now let’s get the message out to the school boards, that’s where the real taxes are. No more using kids as an excuse to accept high taxes.

Here’s what I wrote in January 1998: 

When Andrew J. Spano arrived last week to take over the helm of Westchester County government, he found that he had inherited little from his predecessor’s once-elegant office except a few dusty cabinets and a couple of ill-tended potted plants. The sumptuous leather couch and handsome walnut desk and matching chair and refrigerator were gone. 

Thus, Mr. Spano, the first Democrat to be elected Westchester County Executive in 15 years, began his tenure sitting behind a squat rented desk in an anything-but-power chair.

But as his first order of business, Mr. Spano used the laptop computer he brought from home to change the law that allowed his predecessor, Andrew P. O’Rourke, to buy his office furniture at a discount and take it with him when he left.

Mr. O’Rourke paid $5,075 for 16 pieces of furniture and a fax machine, said Susan Tolchin, Mr. Spano’s director of communications. The county also gave Mr. O’Rourke his computer, which he had received from the county’s General Services Administration in a trade for a personal computer. 

Mr. Spano would like to see that county officials be allowed to take only ‘’mementos’’ of their service, not fax machines, personal computers or brass candlestick lamps. ‘’What’s at issue is what constitutes furniture and furnishings and what is a fair appraisal,’’ Ms. Tolchin said.

I guess that means that incoming County Executive Rob Astorino can expect to walk into a fully furnished office come January.

Now comes the post-mortem. We’ll spend today looking at voter turnout, district by district and talking to experts to figure out the why behind the numbers.

Visit our elections page as a jumping off point to find the races that are important to you and get basic information about who’s running, why and what they plan to bring to their community. There you will also find our candidate database where each candidate writes in their own words about the issues and their experience.

To see a replay of the endorsement interviews with The Journal News and LoHud.com’s Editorial Board, go to Editorial Spotlight, click “on demand” at the bottom of the video player and select a session from the list on the right.

The well-informed voter, the ones who know their neighbors and where all of the bodies are buried, will probably find less utility in our assessments than the voter who is more detached from it all. My colleagues on the Editorial Board don’t profess to know more about your community than you do. However, because we have been at this for some time, we do have some sense of who actually knows of what s/he speaks and who simply takes up ballot space. We simply recommend; mercifully, you decide.

In a good number of elections—we do this for school board, local, state and federal campaigns—our recommendations and voters’ choices align quite a bit; in a recent vote, our views and voters’ were in accord in roughly 85 percent of the races.  In another election, that figure dropped to just under 70 percent. Sometimes, as it turns out, we’ve picked too many Democrats; other times, it’s too many Republicans; still other times, we’ve gone with challengers when voters weren’t yet through with the incumbents. We check afterward because we’re curious, but we have no “dog” in these fights, as a famous politician from Chappaqua said once or 20 times. Our sole interest is in picking better candidates, not winners.

It used to be that the Editorial Board would spend weeks interviewing candidates behind closed doors, where we would be treated to a steady barrage of cliches about “giving back to the community” or “going line by line through the budget” or “thinking outside the box.” Days before the election, we would make our selections known, usually in short, unsatisfying bursts of “we think.” Then it would all be over.

That dynamic changed several elections back, when we started streaming candidate interviews live on the Internet and, using blogging technology, allowing voters to ask questions of their own. Doubtless the candidates  get more out of the new form, as they get to speak directly to voters; a few make plain that they could not care less what we actually think. We’re just happy that they’ve participated .

Frankly, if readers/viewers did nothing else, I’d rather that they watched at least snippets of the candidate interviews, which are available in short form here and in long form here. It is not scintillating “television,” by any stretch of the imagination; but it is democracy, and often the messy sort. We are grateful for it.

and unloading their young passengers. Here’s today’s report from our Albany Bureau on the result of a 40-day program that put cameras in school buses in Brewster, Bethlehem and Canandaigua. Each district had just one camera. That camera recorded 22 illegal passes in Canandaigua, 20 illegal passes in Bethlehem and four illegal passes in Brewster, according to today’s article.

When this program, called Operation Safe Stop, was unveiled in April, I looked into the issue for an editorial we published under the headline, “What’s the rush?” The statistics were pretty shocking.  Around New York, motorists pass stopped school buses at least 50,000 times each year, safety officials say. That’s 50,000 potential tragedies. Another way to slice it: Every day, an average 1.72 vehicles pass a school bus during its stops, according to data collected from drivers by Peter Mannella, executive director, New York Association for Pupil Transportation.

Jack Coxen, transportation supervisor for Brewster schools, explained that the motion sensitive cameras was to be installed on a bus that would take alternate routes. Four drivers snagged in Brewster may seem like a small number, but that’s just on one bus a day, in just 40 days.

Dr. Berezin was the first pediatrician to open a practice in Rockland County, his family said. He retired just four years ago, at age 85.
Dr. Elliot Siegal, president of Clarkstown Pediatrics, said that he considered it a privilege to work with Berezin. “He was really an old-school doctor,” Dr. Siegal said today, between seeing patients. “He really loved what he did and did it very well.”

Dr. Berezin joined Clarkstown Pediatrics, one of the county’s largest practices, when he was in his mid 70s. That way, he could ease up on the night and weekend calls. In the guestbook for his obituary on LoHud, though, several remembered his house calls, and kindness (and lollipops).

One former patient wrote:

For many years as a child I was sick with asthma and had to make many trips to Dr. Berezin and every visit he made me feel better with just the way he used to make me laugh and his incredible way that he would calm my fears. ... My mother and I both cried today learning of his passing.

Yet everybody knows that our tax bills are an outrage. I thought about this last night while watching the baseball playoffs. Every other commercial featured a politician blaming a politician for the sorry state of our financial affairs. How confusing this must be to voters: year in and year out,  their tax bills creep higher and higher, defying all the expensive campaign advertising. If only there were some correlation between the ads and reality.

There would be less room for false promises if the media (who else?) did a better job of fact-checking and providing voters the basic  information they need to separate the campaign bunk from the real dollars and cents. But in most places, even before the recession claims scores of newsroom jobs, that kind of watchdog campaign coverage was more the exception than the rule.

Hence, even casual baseball fans know A-Rod’s batting “record” in the playoffs or Ryan Howard’s RBI record in post-season play, but when it comes to truths about politics and governance, they mostly have to rely on those grainy advertisements sandwiched in between innings and men’s “bedroom” ads.  Sorry about that.

Here is today’s schedule of Editorial Board interviews with November candidates:

• 2 p.m. North Castle

•  3:15 p.m. Somers

• 4:30 p.m. Putnam County Sheriff

You can watch online at LoHud.com/editorialspotlight.