Mineola Trustee Paul Cusato and Deputy Mayor Paul Pereira have announced they will run for re-election to the Village Board this year to serve their first four-year terms.
The New Line Party endorsed Pereira for a fifth term as trustee this week, and Cusato said he’ll run for his seventh term with the Home Party.
Both said they see each other not as opponents, but as partners on a Village Board of “five people trying to do what is best for the community that they grew up in, and that they raise their families in,” Pereira said.
“If it wasn’t for the March elections, the political names would never come about,” said Cusato, who’s sat on the board since 2004. “… We work so well together, it’s a shame that it’s got to be a political party involved with these things.”
There’s no talk of the pair running together under one party as there was in 2014, but the New Line Party has not endorsed any other candidates to take another seat on the board.
No other candidates have said they’d run for a trustee seat, but former Mineola Mayor John Colbert said people had approached him about entering the race.
Colbert, a trustee from 1989 to 1994 and mayor from 1994 to 2003, said he is still weighing whether to run, but is “talking to various people to see what they have to say.”
Candidates must file a petition with signatures from Mineola residents between Feb. 2 and Feb. 9.
Regardless of whether more candidates enter, Pereira said he will stand by his record and his message to voters.
“My vision for the next four years is still going to be the same,” he said. “It’s not going to change, and I’m still going to communicate that to our residents whether or not it’s a contested election.”
Both Pereira and Cusato said that vision centers continuing redevelopment of Mineola’s downtown and the improvement village infrastructure and services.
In the time since they last ran, the Village Board has seen three “transit-oriented” apartment buildings near Mineola’s Long Island Rail Road station move forward, and is considering a fourth at the site of the former Corpus Christi Elementary School.
If all four are built, together they’ll contain more than 1,000 apartments in the downtown area, representing significant progress in the “Master Plan” Mineola adopted in 2004.
Both Cusato and Pereira said they aim to continue driving downtown development by growing the business presence there.
With more retail stores, Cusato said, “(m)aybe we can make Main Street (like) the Seventh Street in Garden City.”
Pereira said he sees a connection between downtown development and recent rises in property values, and the number of applications for new downtown businesses the board has heard in the past two years shows further promise.
“That means people are coming here, they’re investing and they see the potential in the village,” he said.
The trustees also touted improvements to Memorial Park; a new handicap-accessible bathroom and concession stand at the village swimming pool; and the completion of a project to fix major flooding problems on Bruce Terrace.
Studies of parking and water infrastructure in Mineola are projects the trustees said they’d like to see to fruition in their first four-year terms.
Pereira and Cusato will be the first to serve the longer terms, as provided by a 2013 measure increasing the length of terms from two years.
As trustees noted then, Cusato said the change will allow future trustees to get better acclimated before having to run another race.
“You get elected, you can lock yourself in and you’ve got four years to learn,” he said.
A resident of Argyle Road for 66 years, Cusato is a 48-year member of the Mineola Fire Department and a former Little League president and head of the Mineola Athletic Association.
He has four adult children and four grandchildren.
Pereira has lived in Mineola since 1977 and has taught at Mineola schools, which he attended himself, since 1993.
A husband and father of three, Pereira also coaches varsity soccer at Mineola High School and is a member of the Lions Club and the Mineola Portuguese Center.
Both are graduates of Mineola High School and are active in its Alumni Foundation, which Cusato co-founded and co-leads.
