I am writing in the enthusiastic support for Ernie Gentile, a lifelong resident of New Hyde Park, to be the next fire commissioner of the New Hyde Park Fire Department!
Ernie is a real treasure for our village, our school district, our county as well as our state and nation! He has been a 35-year veteran of the FDNY and retired with the rank of lieutenant.
He has served the city of New York with such obvious high quality and diligence that he was made citywide interagency coordinator of the city’s Office of Emergency Management. A clear recognition by the city’s professional civil service leaders of Ernie’s skill, his leadership, his professionalism as a lifelong firefighter and trainer of firefighters!
He is recognized as an expert in the city’s regulations and state laws on fire training and fire prevention and fire evacuation protocols for privately held buildings.
Those qualifications as well as his extensive knowledge and experience of the city’s interagency myriad of distinct and diverse functions as well as strengths of the different agencies- in the area of responding to emergencies! (Emergencies of the kind that so imperiled the city on Sept. 11, 2001!)
Ernie is a veteran of that awful event and the weeks afterward to search for the remains of the victims of that evil event. He and his fellow firefighters did what was heroic and necessary even as they were working through the grief of the loss of their brothers on that fateful day!
I must tell you that in my professional opinion as an expert who has been a consultant to the NYPD on civilianization, and a former two-time nominating jury member of the National Municipal League’s All-America Cities Award Program that Ernie Gentile would be the kind of civic leader that the National Municipal League would look to as a compelling reason to award this honor to his home town.
I tell you that in my 44 year career, in research, government and academia, that Ernie Gentile is an excellent public administrator, an excellent and beyond comparison keeper of the taxpayers’ trust, and when I tell you that Ernie was a great success in protecting and promoting the public interest of the children and parents of the NHP-GCP School district. I know what I am talking about!
In addition to the other fine qualifications that Ernie has that makes him a wonderful candidate for this position, is the fact that he served as a School Board Trustee on the NHP-GCP Union Free School District Board for ten years, and was selected by his fellow Trustees to be the President of that board for six of those years. Finally he was a former Captain of the Rescue Company of the very same New Hyde Park Fire Department that he is currently running for the Fire Commissioner position.
What my research, my experience and my own participation in government, as well as my teaching, has prepared me to assess and evaluate the bona fides of Ernie Gentile.
What I know about nonpartisan professional governance in terms of excellence — and in terms of studying and observing many examples of local voluntary public community leadership — I am confident that Ernie Gentile has been, is and will be a responsible, effective and accountable executive in the public interest!
Ernie Gentile will make a great if not the greatest fire commissioner in our village’s history!
In fact I congratulate the people of the Village of New Hyde Park for the fact that such a public spirited leader of the quality and knowledge of Ernie Gentile has chosen to keep serving our community.
I recommend him enthusiastically and I can tell you that Ernie is the kind of private citizen, as a natural leader, who creates community out of his peers!
The advantage of this is that Ernie not only is a person of superlative work effort and a very ethical person, but also the kind that is able to motivate and gain the confidence of people he works with – to serve the greater public interest.
Natale “Nat” H. Cipollina.
New Hyde Park
