Vaccaro, Martin, Weeks

defeat SaveMonroe candidates in primaries Monroe - For the moment, Tuesday's primary in the town of Monroe did little to narrow the field of candidates running for supervisor and town board. But what the primary results may have done is clarify what's at stake in a town and its three villages. Those stakes include how will the Town of Monroe deal with growth, traffic and taxes, what role do the residents of the Village of Kiryas Joel have in town affairs and how consensus can be built at a town hall where a state trooper is needed to sit in the back during meetings. Here are the results: According to unofficial results from the Orange County Board of Elections, Republican town board incumbents Peter J. Martin and Donald F. Weeks received 787 and 781 votes, respectively. Katherine G. Parrella and Theresa Budich, two SaveMonroe candidates who petitioned for the GOP primary, received 683 and 677 votes, respectively. While there are absentee ballots, they are not expected to change the final result. Meanwhile, Alicia M. Vaccaro, the Monroe Town Democrats' endorsed candidate, defeated Robert W. Purdy, SaveMonroe's president, by a vote of 779 to 247 in unofficial results. The Democratic candidates for Town Board are Audra Schwartz and John Rios. Purdy, Parrella and Budich remain on the ballot as candidates of the town's Conservative Committee. But even before the primary, the three lost their SaveMonroe line on the November ballot. Without a party line of their own, the SaveMonroe candidates must look to carry Conservatives while attracting the 7,000 people in town who are registered as blanks, or independents. One issue SaveMonroe candidates focused in on during their campaign was how Republican town board incumbents, including Supervisor Sandy Leonard, benefited from the bloc vote out of the Village of Kiryas Joel. Budich, in an interview after the primary, offered this assessment of the town board primary vote: She said that out of the 781 votes Weeks received, 180 came from outside of Kiryas Joel, while 194 of the 787 votes Martin received came from residents living outside of Kiryas Joel. On the other hand, she and Parrella received nearly 90 percent of their support from voters who do not live in Kiryas Joel. "I don't have a problem with KJ," Budich said. "I don't have a problem with bloc votes. I'm looking for a bloc vote. It becomes a problem if you trade for it, what you are giving away. "What this election comes down to," she added, "is who is stronger in KJ -— the Republicans or the Democrats — not who is stronger in the rest of the town." Martin, in an interview Thursday, said the SaveMonroe candidates had their ballot lines challenged because they petitioned for the primary. And based on the Board of Elections ruling last week, the only local candidate whose name will appear under the SaveMonroe line will be county legislator Spencer McLaughlin. "The primary has served a purpose, for starters, to make it clear to the community that the rhetoric preached by SaveMonroe doesn't match reality," he said. But Martin also acknowledged that "it's not well understood what Weeks and Martin have accomplished" during their tenures on the town board. "In today's world, an incumbent can't be any good. But the record shows just the opposite." Martin, who has been on the board for 16 years, also talked about the change in how politics and public life are being played out in this campaign — more signs and more confrontations. "There have been all kinds of differences of opinion, but there was always discussion — give and take (at town board meetings)," he said. "That stopped happening with SaveMonroe shouting up from the audience. There's just a different attitude." As for losing their SaveMonroe line on the ballot, Budich said, "Election rules and laws are against grass-roots organization. The deck is stacked by the rules and election law. As a grass-roots organization, you don't have a machine to fall back on. "We've been accused of being inexperienced in running government," Budich, a 12-year member of the Monroe-Woodbury school board, said. "That's not true. The only thing we are inexperienced in is politics."