A Roslyn Rescue Fire Company trustee plans to run for one of two trustee positions up for election this March in the Village of East Hills.
Scott Fishkind, a volunteer firefighter since 1999 who joined the Roslyn Rescue board in November, told Blank Slate Media Friday he will contest incumbent trustees Gary Leventhal and Brian Meyerson for a seat on the board.
“My reason for running is now that I’m raising a family here, I feel it’s important to start shaping our future today,” said Fishkind, a four-year East Hills resident.
Leventhal, a financial consultant by trade, has been a trustee since 1994. He is also a member of the Roslyn Rescue Fire Company.
Meyerson, a partner at the litigation firm Meyerson & Levine, LLP, was appointed to the East Hills board in early 2014 to fill the remainder of the term vacated by former Trustee Peter Zuckerman, who is now a North Hempstead town councilman.
“They do a lot of good, but there’s a lot of good that still has to be done and some young blood would bring a lot of good to the table,” Fishkind said.
The positions occupied by Village of East Hills Mayor Michael Koblenz and Village Justice Gino Papa are also up for election in March.
In a contested trustee election, the candidates with the two highest vote totals win positions. Trustee and mayoral terms are for four years.
The East Hills election will take place on March 18, but by press time the village board had not yet set voting hours, a polling location or election inspectors.
Fishkind, who works in construction, grew up in the Links at North Hills and is a lifelong North Shore resident.
Among his primary goals if elected is a reform of the village’s communications systems.
He said he’d like the village to modernize its website, establish an emergency text-messaging program and send regular e-mail notifications about upcoming events and board meetings.
“The problem is consistency,” Fishkind said. “We get e-mails but we get them sporadically, like one in one week and then one in three weeks and then one in 12 weeks. If we’re going to keep people engaged with what’s going on in the community, the board needs to regularly engage with its residents.”
He said he would work to reforms of the village’s building requirements, using his professional expertise in construction design to seek safer practices and hold contractors more accountable for their work.
“A lot of building techniques that are cheap and quick and very profitable are unsafe for the people who are living in that house,” Fishkind said. “Some of those practices, though they’ve been mitigated, still take place, even though they are considered structurally sound by an engineer.”
