Talley, Phillips most likely won’t serve
It appears that despite an overwhelming number of votes electing them to the Town Board, both Desiree Talley and Gary Phillips will not take the seats in January.
A very frustrated Town of Highlands Republican Party Chairman Jim DiSalvo said this week that both Talley and Phillips “will be reaching out to Supervisor Bob Livsey noting they will not be able to take the duly-elected position of town council members”.
It’s because of the federal Hatch Act, DiSalvo explained. The Hatch Act, written in 1939, “forces government employees to refrain from participating in political activity”, specifically ‘partisan’ activity.
“Unfortunately, due to their employment at West Point, and to protect that employment, they feel it necessary to not accept their seats on the board,” DiSalvo said.
Talley says it was “upsetting” to have something she worked hard for “taken away immediately”.
“I was upset when I got the call … I felt like I’d done something wrong, even though I didn’t know that I did,” she said. “We put in a lot of hard work, and that hard work paid off.”
But, she says she will continue to serve the community in volunteer positions she’s long held, and won’t run out the opportunity to run for an office not affected by the Hatch Act in the future.
“It was a motivating experience,” she said, explaining that people registered to vote and then voted for the first time solely because she was the candidate. “That was really awesome to help more people see that voting does matter.”
Phillips, too, is disappointed that he’s not going to have the opportunity to serve the community that he loves.
“People wanted change and I wanted to help make that change,” he said this week. “Even though we won the election — the people spoke — I feel like I was kicked in the stomach, that I let the community down.”
He says he will definitely consider running for public again, either once he retires from his job at West Point or in a non-partisan election, like for the Village or School Board. “It was a neat experience,” he said. “I do not regret that at all.”
How Talley and Phillips got to this point goes like this:
DiSalvo explained that prior to Phillips deciding to run for the board he inquired about his ability to run: “He was told it was not a problem.”
When Talley decided to run and filed the necessary paperwork to get on the ballot, she did not work at the military academy. Once she took a job there in late September, even if she had known about the Hatch Act, he said, there would have been no way to get her name off the ballot.
On November 6, both were elected — Phillips with 26.85% of the vote, or 602 votes and Talley with 29.93% of the vote or 671 votes. It was several days later, he said, that a call was made to West Point legal officials that the two were in potential violation of the law.
That’s when DiSalvo got involved, working with local elected officials — “Assem-blyman Colin Schmitt has been very helpful in getting us information,” DiSalvo said — as they tried to figure out how to proceed.
“I believe we have legal grounds to let them take the seats,” he added, “but we don’t want to jeopardize their employment.”
He said that regardless of what happens in the immediate future, he will be working to get the Town of Highlands exempted from the Hatch Act. That has happened, including in Washington DC, he said.
“Due to our proximity with West Point, I think it would be a fair request,” he said. DiSalvo said he will be reaching out to Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney for help on that matter.
“It’s really just a shame,” he added, “because they won resoundingly. They worked hard with a very community-minded, simple platform. They were exemplary candidates, and, quite obviously, people crossed party lines to vote them into office. I am frustrated, as are they. This is a case of having the wind knocked out of our sails immediately after we crossed the finish line. They just got caught up in the bureaucracy of government.”
Supervisor Livsey said he has not yet been notified about the matter by Talley or Phillips. If he is, he said, he and the two seated town councilmen, Richard Parry and Richard Sullivan, would have to wait until after January 1 to appoint two people to the board. Those who appointed council members would have to run the remaining three years on the board in November 2020, if they so choose.
