CANDIDATE FOR VILLAGE MAYOR:

KEN BIALO - Republican Caucus Speech

(January 31, 2006) Thank you all for coming out tonight and thank you for allowing me to serve as your Mayor for the last four years. It has indeed been an honor and a privilege.

It sounds so trite to say that our right to choose is precious -- but Steven Formaro, with us after a year in Iraq, can safely attest to that.

In coming here tonight, many of you may have already made your choice. Unfortunately, in the last weeks, you have been exposed to overheated rhetoric and false rumors characteristic of Washington, not Larchmont.

But I will use my four minutes to offer the truisms that hard work, dedication, and trust are the key ingredients to success. Anywhere, any time. Especially in the Larchmont way of doing things.

Serving as the chief elected official in this Village takes hard work. It takes hard work if you care to uncover the real facts, and to learn what real facts are important in seeking to make the best judgments. I mean genuine facts, not the rumor, not the subjective impressions, not who you like and who you don’t. And it takes dedication during the budget process to find the choices that will keep our taxes as low as reasonably possible. It takes hard work and courage to distinguish between what we really need and what we just want.

And it takes caring dedication to be available all day, every day to respond to residents’ problems, large and small. At the end of the day, the Mayor is responsible. It’s the people of this Village who must be served. It’s the people who count. No one wants to hear excuses.

It also takes lots of hard work to lead the development of new ideas for the larger vision of our Village, in order to stay ahead of the trends materializing all around us. The fight to protect this Village from the motor vehicle onslaught that would have been IKEA in New Rochelle was a notable success. But so is the great Flint Park Expansion project and pulling together the sports leagues and the environmental groups; and the zoning code revision, the rebuild of our streetscape and the new railroad station. These are all part of that broader effort for our people.

I feel like my hard work has led to many, many improvements around the Village, with the generous help and support, of course, of our very capable Staff, and our many energetic volunteers serving on our important Village committees. And though we’ve come a very long way on many fronts in my four years as Mayor, it’s all still – as it must be – a work-in-progress.

Trust is another critical ingredient to success, trust, both given and received. Trust in our diversity. Trust in our own decency. Respect for our Larchmont way of doing things. Respect for our people.

I feel like I have earned your trust and respect. You know I will listen to any idea. You know that I’m a tough negotiator in protecting your interests. You know where I stand on things. You know that with me, what you see is what you get.

I spent 11 years as Trustee in this Village, winning six contested elections and serving in the minority on the Village Board, before becoming Mayor. We have benefited from those 15 years of dedicated hard work, and building of trust, with a party that has prevailed in a Village where it has a minority enrollment. I urge you not to throw that away.

A few months ago, Larchmont was named by Money Magazine as the 11 th Best Place to Live in the Nation, just ahead of Greenwich.

Whatever you think about that, you know that we are lucky. We are privileged. And we are blessed.

I ask for your vote to keep it that way, and to make it even better.

Thank you for listening.