CANDIDATE FOR VILLAGE TRUSTEE:

JIM MILLSTEIN- Democratic Caucus Speech & Bio

(January 31, 2006) The intimate geography of the Village and the high level of resident participation in its life are what give Larchmont its special character. The Village Board of Trustees, which oversees everything from storm water drains to the Ragamuffin and Pet Parades, therefore, has a difficult balancing act to perform: it has a legal duty to protect the security of its citizens and the integrity of its physical infrastructure, but of equal importance, its members, and most critically the Mayor, must be cheerleaders for the residents, creating an environment in which volunteers are willing to continue to come forward to serve on the many committees, leagues and organized activities that make life in the Village so full.

Participating indirectly in our local government as member of the Board of the Larchmont Public Library these past four years has led me to conclude that we need to change the way the Village Board is run. We need a return to civility and a change of tone so that the Village Board becomes more of a forum for policy debate rather than pontification, for dialogue among our elected officials and the residents rather than a podium from which the Mayor lectures. Why a change of tone? So as to make sure we don’t squander our greatest resource: the volunteers on whom the unique quality of our Village life depends.

While the Mayor should properly be responsible for agenda setting for the Board and for supervision of the Village Departments to ensure that the Board’s policies are implemented, the reins of day-to-day administration of the Village Departments should be back in the hands of paid employees to ensure accountability and transparency. While we are a small Village, there’s still too much going on in Larchmont to permit a part-time volunteer Mayor to arrogate to himself complete control of the administrative functioning of the Village.

So, I am running in support of the ideas that have driven Liz Feld to announce her candidacy for Mayor: to restore a more civil tone to our municipal affairs, to create a welcoming forum at the Board level for expanded resident participation and to help make the Village government more effective and transparent in fulfilling its duties to the residents.

There are also a couple of specific issues of interest to me on which I think I can make a contribution:

First, one of the great distinguishing features of Larchmont is the magnificent, if limited, space that the early developers of the Village reserved for public access on the Sound and its inlets. But more than a hundred years have passed and, crowded as we are in one square mile between I-95 and the Sound, there remain few properties that are sizeable enough and in a location where conversion to new public use is even plausible, but there are some. As a trustee, I would like to try to find appropriate federal, state and county support, and to create tax advantaged structures for private contributions by residents who can afford to do so, to help the Village finance the acquisition of what little private property remains within our borders suitable for a new park on the order of Manor and Flint Parks. Public amenities support private property values and we will all regret if the few remaining parcels suitable for park development fall into the hands of a private developer.

Second, as in the private sector sometime later this year, the Village (like all governmental units) is shortly going to be required to estimate and put on its balance sheet its future liability for pensions and post retirement healthcare benefits. Having worked in my day job on these very issues (with particular reference to the automobile industry in the United States), I can tell you that we are all going to be shocked when we see how big our future liability for these items is. Indeed, as anyone who carefully scrutinizes the Village budget is already aware, our health care and pension costs have doubled in absolute terms in the past four years and now constitute 21 percent of the Village budget (up from 13 percent of the budget a mere four years ago). The longer we put off trying to find creative ways to balance our employees’ legitimate need for health care and retirement support with our own financial constraints as a small Village, the greater the future burden on our property tax base these costs are going to become, potentially squeezing out all other discretionary spending in the not too distant future. This is a problem affecting all municipalities in the State, so we need a Mayor and a Village Board that can work with our elected officials in Albany to deal with this issue for what it is: a municipal crisis in the making. On these issues and others, I think I can make a difference for Larchmont.

In doing so, I look forward to working with Liz, Marlene, Ann and Mike.

If elected as a Trustee, this would be my first elective office of any sort. I have spent my entire working life in two places: from 1982 to 2000, I was first an associate and then a partner at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton and since 2000 I have been a Managing Director at Lazard Freres & Co. LLC working as an investment banker. I did my undergraduate work at Princeton, received a Masters from the University of California at Berkeley and graduated from Columbia Law School. Currently, in addition to serving as a member of the Library Board, I am chair of the Finance Committee and a member of the Executive Committee of the Board of Governors of the Sound Shore Medical Center. I also coach my daughters’ recreational basketball and travel soccer teams. I sit on the Board of Directors of two private companies and am Vice Chairman of the Board of InMotion, a not for profit organization in NYC that provides legal and counseling services to victims of domestic abuse. Born and raised in Rye, when my wife Carolyn and I embarked on parenthood, we moved out of NYC to Larchmont in 1993, and remain certain in the belief that, while there may be a better place on earth to raise our two daughters, we haven’t found it yet.