Phillips bid for ‘Tax Revolt’ ballot line denied

Elaine Phillips, a Republican seeking to win the 7th Senate district seat, had her petition to run on the Tax Revolt ballot line denied last Thursday, Nassau Board of Elections officials said.
Phillips submitted 1,729 petition signatures but the state requires 3,000 signatures to run on the ballot line.
She is set to face off with Democrat Adam Haber, a Roslyn school board trustee and former commodities trader from East Hills, in November to replace outgoing state Sen. Jack Martins.
“Not only is Elaine Phillips trying to pull one over on the voters by hiding her abysmal record of raising their taxes, she is also trying to skirt around the rules. This is business as usual for a candidate hand-picked by a corrupt political machine,” Haber’s campaign said in a statement. “The facts are that Elaine Phillips not only voted to raise taxes, but also voted to ignore and break the state’s tax cap meant to protect homeowners from out-of-control tax hikes.”
Both the Haber campaign and Phillips campaign are in a dispute as to whether or not the Flower Hill Village Mayor had voted to override the state-mandated 2 percent tax cap and raise taxes.
Haber’s campaign cites a published report from January 2012 that said when she was a trustee, she voted to override the tax cap.
But Phillips’ campaign argues that she was in fact the only trustee of the seven-person board to oppose piercing the tax cap.
A copy of the minutes from the Jan. 9, 2012 meeting provided by the Phillips campaign show that she was the lone trustee to vote against overriding the tax cap.
“It’s no surprise that Adam Haber doesn’t want Elaine Phillips’ name to appear on a tax cut line on the November ballot considering his own record of raising taxes year after year as a member of his local school board. But it is shameful that he would distort Elaine’s record as a true champion of taxpayers,” said Chris McKenna, a Phillips campaign spokesman. “The truth is that as mayor, Elaine Phillips never raised taxes — in fact, she cut them. And Elaine never voted to override the tax cap law; when her village board attempted an override, Elaine cast the only no vote, and the board eventually decided against it.”
“That’s a matter of public record,” McKenna added.
Haber’s campaign contends that the newspaper report cited a unanimous board approval to override the tax cap and that the copy of the minutes the Phillips campaign references raises more concerns.
“This document, previously not available to the public, actually raises more questions than answers and is just an attempt to distract from that fact that voters rejected her efforts to create a bogus “tax revolt” party line and she was over a 1,000 signatures short of what was required by law,” it said. “That’s because Elaine Phillips’ time on the board was a fiscal disaster.”