The Inside Press

Magazines serving the communities of Northern Westchester

Andrew Vitelli

Elks Bring OLD GLORY to Armonk Recreation Center

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In 2019, Mid-Westchester Elks Lodge #535 received an unexpected gift from a local resident –a 59-inch-by-43-inch beautifully crocheted American flag.

When Elks member and Armonk resident Arthur Adelman saw the work, he immediately thought of the Hergenhan Recreation Center as a perfect destination.

“I knew right away that the seniors in the Hergenhan center would really admire it and love it,” Adelman tells Inside Press. “And in fact, I brought it there and showed it to them and they were all amazed and loved it.”

The Elks first planned to hang the crocheted work–whose origin is unclear–in the center but decided otherwise after realizing that it was not in the best condition. The episode brought to light, however, that there was no American flag in the building, which is used for a wide range of meetings, gathering and community events.

“We all thought that it was a great idea,” Adelman said. “We just needed a better condition flag.”

As of this January, a 4-foot-7-inch by 4-foot-6-inch American flag now hangs in the center thanks to a donation from the Elks lodge. The flag is displayed in a frame with plexiglass along with a plaque that reads “Donated by Mid-Westchester Elks Lodge # 535 Armonk, NY.” A commemoration ceremony was originally set for January 20 but was delayed due to snow. 

While the flag itself was not particularly expensive, the framing and plaque put the cost upwards of $1,000, according to Adelman. As a patriotic organization–one that supports several veterans’ organizations and initiatives–the Elks were eager to make sure a flag is proudly displayed at the center. 

The lodge also hope that the commemoration and the prominent display of Old Glory sparks further recognition for the 154-year-old Elks, a charitable and patriotic organization open to all American citizens, and leads local residents to think about joining the group. 

Increasing Awareness

“The two purposes are visibility and recruitment,” says Adelman. “Younger people these days don’t join organizations as much. So our priority, and the reason we are doing this, is to let everybody know in North Castle and beyond that the Elks exist.”

The Mid-Westchester Lodge was initially three separate lodges–one in Mt. Kisco, one in Port Chester, and one in White Plains–with each lodge having its own building. But in March 2009, with membership declining, the three lodges merged to form one central lodge. The Elks now meet on the second and fourth Wednesdays each month at the American Legion in Armonk. 

“Most Elks lodges have their own buildings,” says Adelman. “Some of them not only have their own buildings, they have swimming pools, they have tennis courts.”

The sale of the three properties, however, left the Mid-Westchester Lodge with a sizeable war chest. This has allowed the organization to fund a range of activities and initiatives. 

“The motto is ‘Elks care, Elks share.’ And fortunately because the three lodges that constituted our lodge all had buildings and sold them, we have a very nice treasury and we can afford to be generous.”

The Elks have supported dozens of local charities, fundraisers, and community events, including grants to The Mount Kisco Interfaith Food Pantry, Cerebral Palsy of Westchester, and the North Castle Public Library. The organization also supports several youth sports teams, including youth football and little league. The Elks are especially engaged in programs supporting veterans, participating in the Memorial Day and Veterans Day Ceremonies at the North Castle American Legion; providing a grant to the Montrose VA Food Pantry, and sponsoring long weekend cabin stays for 8 to 12 disabled veterans for Project Healing Waters Fly Fishing.

The pandemic initially forced the Mid-Westchester Lodge to move most of its meetings to Zoom in 2020, but once vaccines became widely available, they were able to resume in-person meetings while masked and socially distanced. 

“That’s worked out fine,” Adelman says. We’ve not really had a diminution in attendance.”

A changing world–one which the online metaverse has made smaller while at times weakening the bonds between neighbors–has challenged community-based organizations like the Elks. But Adelman hopes that anyone willing to give their time and service to help their community considers the Elks. 

How the Armonk Chamber Helped Businesses Weather the Covid Crisis

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Neal Schwartz, President, Armonk Chamber of Commerce Photo by Chad Kraus

When COVID emerged as a crisis in March 2020, many local businesses were forced to close their doors while others saw their revenues dry up. But for the Armonk Chamber of Commerce, this time was as crucial as any since Neal Schwartz became president more than a decade ago.

The chamber has historically hosted a range of community events, held regular meetings, and published a directory of members. But most chamber members, Schwartz says, are generally passive participants that changed when business owners found themselves in uncharted waters as COVID hit. Suddenly, their businesses’ survival depended on navigating a host of new federal programs and incentives like Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans and on finding ways to keep their business running through restrictions and panic over the virus. Some businesses, like dental offices, had help from their industry groups, but others turned to the chamber.

“We became a conduit for using information from the state, the county and the federal government,” Schwartz explains. “It was invaluable to those members who weren’t connected to some of those other associations.”

The chamber helped connect its members to Zoom calls and other events that helped members navigate the new terrain and explore their options. It also created an app to give residents up-to-date information about which businesses were open. 

When necessary, the chamber organized its own events, bringing in chamber-affiliated accountants who were well-versed on the available recourses to answer member questions. 

“A couple of chambers [elsewhere] almost stopped functioning [during Covid], because they had their set activities and those activities didn’t happen, and they were kind of at a loss,” County Executive George Latimer explains. “The Armonk chamber made the transition that you had to make once you realized that Covid was going to shut down the normal activities.”

Latimer continues, “What they did was they morphed into providing the information and to some extent material [such as] PPE that the businesses needed.”

Spotlighting the Armonk Chamber of Commerce, Top Row, L-R: Neal Schwartz, president; Bharti Gupta, board member; Ed Woodyard, member; Shari Ascher, Director of Policy & Programs, Westchester County; George Latimer, Westchester County Executive Second Row, L-R: Ken Sassano, board member; Catherine Censullo, board member; Tammi Ecker, board member    Photo by Chad Kraus

The county government had access to both information and resources to help businesses but did not have the manpower to connect with every business from Yonkers to North Salem. 

“Sitting at the county level looking at 45 communities, how do we reach the business communities and small businesses? We can’t do it on our own. We don’t have the bandwidth,” Latimer says. “But when we know that we’ve got a chamber of commerce that is working–that is having Zoom meetings and exchanging information–then we can channel through the chamber and the chamber has the relationships with the local businesses.”

The county, for example, had access to free masks and sanitizer to give to businesses. But walking up and down every street in every city, town and village in Westchester distributing it was not possible, Latimer says. 

Instead, the chamber determined the local needs and the county dropped off supplies at a central location. The chamber then worked to distribute these supplies throughout Armonk. 

When certain workers such as restaurant servers became eligible for the Covid vaccine before the general population, the county again worked through the Armonk chamber and other local chambers to inform businesses whose employees would qualify.

County Executive George Latimer / Photo by Chad Kraus

But perhaps the biggest role the chamber played was in working with business owners through the federal assistance available.

“The saving grace for a majority of businesses was how they navigated through the loan portion of the federal offerings that were there,” Schwartz says. “Depending where the numbers were for a business, they may have done reasonably okay if they took a PPP loan, which didn’t need to get paid back.”

Despite (or, in a sense, because of) their falling revenues and the uncertainty surrounding the pandemic, the chamber saw new businesses joining to take advantage of these offerings.

“We picked up more members than you would expect in the middle of a pandemic,” he says. “There weren’t a ton of them, but there were people who began to appreciate that this chamber stuff has value.”

Haves and Have Nots

The pandemic and resulting shutdown did not hit all industries with the same force, Schwartz says. Some industries thrived even through the lockdowns, while in other fields businesses struggled to stay in business or were forced to close their doors. 

Home improvement was a sector that thrived, he notes. Trapped in their houses all day, local residents decided it was a good time to put in a pool, or redo their lawns, or make long-needed home improvements.

“The businesses that did well were the businesses that supported home life,” Schwartz says. “Some of them saw years that they haven’t seen before.” But many other businesses, particularly those that depended on traffic flow, struggled. It is hard to quantify exactly how many businesses went under, Schwartz says; he estimates some 10% of their members. 

Armonk is now well on its way to recovery, he says. 

“We are seeing these empty spaces get filled pretty quickly, considering everything,” he says. “It is not all doom and gloom at all.”

Latimer sees a similar picture on the county level, with sales tax receipts above where they were in 2019 pre-pandemic. Still, businesses face ongoing challenges.

One is the difficulty hiring workers, which Schwartz attributes in part to generous unemployment benefits distributed under the latest Covid relief bill.

“It went too far, so it was hard for restaurants to keep the staffing everywhere across the country,” Schwartz says. “People said, ‘Listen, I am getting more money to stay home and not go to work.’”

Latimer attributes the labor shortage to several factors, including the unemployment benefits, ongoing concerns about Covid, and an increasing preference for jobs with regular, stable hours. 

A Decade Leading the Chamber

Schwartz, who owns Armonk-based College Planning of Westchester, joined the chamber after opening his business in 2004, looking for the networking benefits the chamber would bring to his then-fledgling franchise. 

“I had bought all this equipment, furniture, systems, and I had no customers,” he remembers.

The chamber was helpful to him as he got his business, which specializes in tutoring, college counseling and ACT/SAT preparation, off the ground. But its activities at the time were limited to a sidewalk sale or two each year. In 2010, he stepped in as president and worked to build the chamber into a bigger player in the community.

Before he took over as president in 2010, he recalls, chamber activity was mostly limited to one or two sidewalk sales each year. When Schwartz stepped into leadership, he and his colleagues on the board scaled up the organization’s activity. 

In 2012, he launched cider and donut events. It’s grown from there, with 11 music events this summer, a “citizen of the year” award, a much larger Cider and Donut Festival, and regular chamber meetings. The chamber’s website has also been greatly improved, and now publishes the “Everything Armonk” community guide and business directory.

To learn more about the Armonk Chamber, please visit www.armonkchamberofcommerce.com

The Examiner Media Comeback and the Resilience of Local News

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Adam Stone

When 42-year-old Mount Kisco resident Adam Stone founded Examiner Media in 2007, the prospects for local print was bleak and getting bleaker. When the global financial crisis hit a year later, and every day brought news of long-established publications across the country shutting their presses, Stone doubled down with the launch of his second newspaper, the Putnam Examiner. 

So the unprecedented headwinds facing Examiner Media, which now has four publications, in 2020 were nothing new for Stone. 

When the coronavirus pandemic hit, the company was already dealing with challenging terrain, Stone says. With its newspapers distributed for free, Examiner Media counts on ad money for its revenue and when COVID-19 shuttered businesses and wrecked the economy, that revenue dried up.

“It was already a challenging time,” Stone explains. “Once Covid became a crisis in March, it became immediately clear that the status quo would be totally unsustainable, and I’d have to make some serious changes.”

A year later, Examiner Media not only survived the pandemic crisis but emerged with a stronger digital operation and a more sustainable revenue model, Stone says. 

But in March 2020, as Westchester County emerged as ground zero in New York’s Covid outbreak, the paper’s survival was far from a sure thing. It required Stone finding the revenue to stay afloat in the worst economy in a century and restructuring his business on the fly, while the editorial team covered a one-in-a-lifetime pandemic.

The New Normal

As the impact of the global pandemic began to become clear, Stone recalls, his immediate priority was getting through the drop in revenues and surrounding uncertainty. To these ends, he took several steps to supplement the publications’ revenues.

In March, Stone applied for and received a $5,000 grant from the Facebook Journalism Project, an initiative to support local news. The papers also received a grant from Google as well as a loan from the Paycheck Protection Program, or PPP, established during the first COVID relief bill. 

Finally, Stone launched a community fundraiser to give readers the chance to support the publications, partnering with the non-profit Local Media Foundation. He calls this decision one of the toughest he had to make.

“It was a very humbling thing, to go out there, hat in hand and say, ‘We are dealing with this existential crisis for the business,” Stone says. “But it dawned on me that it would have been very selfish to let the Covid situation just wash The Examiner away. There were employees counting on us, but also readers.”

Within 10 days he had raised more than $15,000, mostly through small donations. In the end, the papers received more than $30,000 in support from roughly 400 donors, most chipping in $100 or less. 

“There was just this outpouring of love for what we did,” Stone says. “People were really worried that we would go away, and they wanted to play their part in helping to rescue us.”

Stone’s team of reporters and editors, meanwhile, faced their own set of challenges. The changes at the paper, including a greater amount of shared content across the four publications, came as the pandemic became an all-consuming focus while upending traditional reporting approaches. 

“In the first three months, it was all Covid, all the time,” says Martin Wilbur, the editor-in-chief of The Examiner. “Whether it was how the local funeral homes were handling their business and dealing with families who can’t have a funeral or a viewing, or local businesses that were on the brink or couldn’t get their PPP loans.”

In the months following the shutdown, Wilbur estimates that 95 percent of stories were related to the pandemic–a product of both the extensive fallout of the virus and the fact that virtually all community events, a staple of local news coverage, had been cancelled. Wilbur would spend that Spring sitting in front of his computer, making phone calls and tuning into virtual meetings and events.

“There have been some days where I am on the phone for six, seven, eight hours, with only maybe five minutes to run downstairs to get a sandwich,” he says. “Between incessant phone calling and a lot of Zooming and a lot of watching of meetings and press conferences, it was a change, obviously.”

Wilbur, Stone, and editor Rick Pezzullo began holding frequent conference calls to coordinate coverage. Reporters began to increasingly focus on posting up-to-date news online.

“We are traditionally a weekly community newspaper, but we became a daily in a sense,” says Stone. 

Readers depended on the Examiner papers more than ever as their local news outlet amid the crisis. Online readership has grown dramatically, Stone says, in part due to an added emphasis on the digital operations. 

By the second half of 2020, Stone says, the publication had turned the corner. Six months after he was forced to make layoffs to stay afloat, Stone was able to start hiring again, bringing back Anna Young, as the company’s digital editor in September. Sports editor and columnist Ray Gallagher resumed his regular writing duties as high school sports returned. 

“The resurgence of Examiner Media in the aftermath of COVID-19 is a testament to the insatiable thirst people have for professionally-reported local news,” Stone says. “I’m grateful we came out the other side of this crisis a more nimble, more modern local news outlet, benefiting from a stronger, sturdier business model.”

Adam with Alyson, Maddie and Mia PHOTOS BY DONNA MUELLER

Family Time 

Stone has two daughters, 14-year-old Maddie, and Mia, who is turning seven in April. While the publisher is used to working from home, his daughters and his wife, Alyson, a schoolteacher, were suddenly home with him (and Daisy, a six-year-old Maltese). “It’s been a bit of an adventure, everybody carving out their space and figuring out how to get their work done and schoolwork without running into each other,” he says. “But by and large we’ve figured out how to do it successfully, and I really love it. It’s really great to be able to go downstairs, get a cup of coffee and have my family right there.”

The Stone family passed much of the time during the height of the pandemic as most Americans did: playing video games and binge-watching Tiger King. 

“Thankfully, last Christmas we had given the girls the Nintendo Switch as their joint Christmas present,” Alyson Stone says. “Little did we know it was going to become the savior in our home. So we played an awful lot of Mario.”

Maureen McArdle Schulman: Trump Supporter Offers a Conservative Agenda for NY17

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Another first-time candidate for office, Maureen McArdle Schulman is a 61-year-old retired firefighter and Yorktown resident.

She joined the New York Fire Department in 1982, when women were first entering the department. Out of 10,000 firefighters, less than 50 were women.

“You could imagine what that could have been like,” says McArdle Schulman, who served for 21 years in the department. “And I just worked really hard to gain people’s respect.”

McArdle Schulman says she first considered running for office after New York State passed the Reproductive Health Act allowing abortion through the third trimester.

“I actually got sick to my stomach that a woman can have an abortion up until her due date, and that really upset me,” says McArdle Schulman, who says she would make unborn children a federally protected group. “I am very pro-life, which might be a problem for some people.”

McArdle Schulman says she agrees with most of President Trump’s policies, pointing to the strong pre-COVID economy, though she adds that she tries not to pay attention to his tweets. She supports the effort to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border, but would also consider a path towards legalization for some immigrants who entered the country illegally.

“I feel bad for these kids who came here as children and don’t know any other country,” she explains. She highlights the New Way Forward Act, which would remove some drug crimes as deportable offenses, as one initiative that she strongly opposes. “You have to go through a background check. Have you gotten in trouble? Then you’re gone.”

McArdle Schulman says she supports Trump’s 2018 tax reform, though she would like to move towards a flat tax.

“A tax code that encourages home ownership is important,” she adds.

And while she favors cutting waste, she would not make significant cuts to Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid.

To lower healthcare costs, McArdle Schulman would allow people to shop for insurance across state lines.

The former owner of a small boutique dancewear shop, McArdle Schulman stresses that the economy must be restarted following the COVID-19 shutdown.

“It is killing small businesses,” she says. “We should get the economy going as soon as possible. If there are certain people who need to be protected, let them self-isolate.”

McArdle Schulman says she did not get involved in politics until after she retired. She stressed her honesty – “I am not going to promise things that I can’t deliver,” she says – and her willingness to work with a broad range of constituencies.

“Governor Cuomo is saying that there is no place in New York State for conservatives,” she adds. “I’ve been a New York State resident my entire life. Don’t tell me I don’t belong here.”

McArdle Schulman has been endorsed by the Westchester Republican Committee.

For more information on her platform, visit www.maureen4congress.com.

Yehudis Gottesfeld on Policies she Favors (and those she doesn’t) in a Run for the 17th District Seat

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Yehudis Gottesfeld, a 24-year-old Rockland resident, says her decision to run for office came after a meeting with a policy director for New Consensus, an advocacy group backing the Green New Deal.

As a chemical engineer working on nuclear and environmental issues, Gottesfeld agreed to meet with the group. But she says she was put off by what she describes as their unrealistic views of quickly transitioning to renewables and their flippant attitude towards the cost required.

Gottesfeld went home and reached out to Republican groups including Empower America, a conservative advocacy group, which encouraged her to run.

“I’ve always been involved with the community and given back to the community,” she says. “I never thought I’d run for office. I’ve been involved in policy, not politics.”

Gottesfeld says the most urgent concern facing the country is getting the economy back on track following the COVID-19 shutdown.

“At the end of the day, if you want to recover you need to empower people to get back on their feet, get their small businesses back and running, reopen the economy so people can provide for their family,” she says. “Once the economy is open, we have to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

To ensure that the country’s economy and security is not dependent on China, Gottesfeld supports incentivizing businesses to return production to the US through tax breaks.

Gottesfeld favors a flat tax at a rate that would be revenue neutral against current tax law. While she says she understands the decision to cap the SALT deduction, she said help is needed to alleviate the tax burden residents in Westchester and Rockland face.

To cut spending, she says she would address waste in the federal budget. Gottesfeld points to large omnibus bills as part of the problem, as these massive spending plans impede a sufficient examination of government spending.

Gottesfeld sees competition as the key to lowering healthcare costs and would like to see insurance sold across state lines. To lower drug prices, she favors enacting a “most favored nation” policy which would force drug companies to sell price at the lowest price they are sold abroad.

Gottesfeld also sees the free market as the key to reducing carbon emissions.

“A lot of companies are going green, and the free market is allowing that,” she says.

In foreign policy, Gottesfeld favors maintaining a strong alliance with Israel and standing up for U.S. interests abroad.

Gottesfeld has the backing of the Rockland Republican Committee, and is endorsed by the Westchester Conservative Party and Rockland Republican Party.