The Looming Shit Show: Monroe's Village Board Race

On Wednesday, March 18, Village of Monroe voters will face a difficult choice in a consequential election no one is talking about.

Lost in all the coverage of South Blooming Grove’s phantom election, which New York State Attorney General Letitia James refuses to address, and the potential opening of a concentration camp in Chester, is the upcoming Village Board election in Monroe.

For the record, if you are a resident of the Village of Monroe, you have an upcoming election on Wednesday, March 18, from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. You can vote at Village Hall, located at 7 Stage Road.

The following candidates will appear on the ballot:

Mayor – 4-Year Position

• Alex Melchiorre, the Scandal-Plagued Town of Blooming Grove Police Chief

• Neil Dwyer, Current Mayor.

Trustee (2 positions) – 4-Year Term Each

• Joseph Mancuso, Former Mayor and Friend of Tony Cardone

• Nancy Peifer, Friend of Tony Cardone

• Andrew Ferraro, Incumbent Trustee

• Martin O’Connor, Incumbent Trustee

Anyone connected to Tony Cardone, as far as we at The Monroe Gazette are concerned, is municipal poison.

If they are an elected official, such as current Monroe Town Councilman Sal Scancarello, they need to be voted out of office at the first opportunity.

If they are an employee or consultant who aided and abetted Mr. Cardone’s unethical and likely illegal activities while running the Town of Monroe—such as former Town Attorney and current Town of Blooming Grove and Village of Chester Attorney Brian Nugent—they should be relieved of their duties from those municipalities.

And if they are friends with Mr. Cardone (or Dorey Ghoul), they should be denied access to power at every possible opportunity.

So, you would think, under normal circumstances, this election should be a slam dunk for Neil Dwyer, Andrew Ferraro, and Martin O’Connor.

But not so fast.

There are two interconnected issues playing out in the Village of Monroe, both involving the Village’s significant Latino population, some of whom are here without documentation.

Remember: Everyone in America, except Native Americans, is here “illegally.” Regardless of your legal status, the 14th Amendment of the Constitution guarantees that the laws of the land are applied equally to everyone, without exception.

This is because the Constitution takes care to use the terms “people” and “person,” rather than “citizen,” in many of its sections. If you’re not aware of this, please feel free to consult your Constitution. All those people popping off about “illegals” have surely read their Constitution … Right?

… Right?

The first issue is that many landlords in the Village of Monroe — many of whom happen to be Satmar — are unhappy with Mayor Dwyer, Trustee Ferraro, Trustee O’Connor, and the rest of the board for ensuring that our Latino residents are not taken advantage of. There are a lot of code enforcement issues in the Village of Monroe, but as we mentioned elsewhere at The Monroe Gazette, there is a shortage of building inspectors across the region. So, if any of you are looking for a new line of work, that’s one field definitely open and looking to hire new people.

The majority political party in neighboring Kiryas Joel has decided to back the scandal-plagued Town of Blooming Grove Police Chief Alex Melchiorre and his Tony Cardone-approved team of Mancuso and Peifer. The idea is that Melchiorre will do exactly what he’s done in Blooming Grove regarding police enforcement in South Blooming Grove: nothing at all. Unless, of course, Isaac Ekstein or Joel Stern calls Melchiorre; in that case, a police cruiser arrives in no time in the Village. Funny how that works…

(We’ll get to that story when we get to this week’s long feature on the helicopter situation.)

Because so few people actually vote in Monroe mayoral elections — the last time we covered one in 2024, only about 370 people voted — it is very possible for the Satmar residents to come out and vote for the team approved by Hanhalah (Yiddish for leadership or administration).

I want to stress that this doesn’t mean every Satmar resident in the Village of Monroe will vote this way. Many community members prefer to live in Monroe and Woodbury so that they can enjoy more freedom than they would have if they lived within the confines of the Village of Kiryas Joel.

But enough of them could come out and easily flip these seats, given the typically low voter turnout in village elections.

The second issue is that Martin O’Connor made public statements at a previous Village Board meeting this month in support of ICE. Trustee Ferraro—whom I happen to like as a person, and the same goes for Neil Dwyer—both made comments at various points during that same meeting concerning ICE and the proposed concentration camp next door that were … Let’s say, if we’re being generous and I am, that they completely missed the mark and did not address the concerns being addressed.

I personally felt everyone at that Board meeting came off looking defensive and out of touch with the larger national situation. In their defense, I doubt anyone on that Village Board ever thought they’d have to deal with an ongoing national emergency. But here we are. And we need our leaders to rise to that occasion.

For example: Trustee Ferraro explicitly called out the Satmar landlords who want to oust him and Dwyer for enforcing the rules to protect our Latino residents (good), but then suggested that local activists focus on that instead of the larger issue of ICE entering the community and effectively kidnapping people. Bad. Ferraro then asked, “What if someone gets out?” about the concentration camp, which … I literally did the Picard meme upon hearing.

A Tricky Situation

So what do you do?

Martin O’Connor claims he supports ICE, but Mancuso and Peifer want to bring back the bad old days of Monroe government—those we saw under Tony Cardone and Dorey Ghoul—where the person who pays the largest bribe gets their projects approved and everyone looks the other way on matters of code enforcement.

Do you want that in the Village of Monroe? I certainly don’t. This is bad for every Village resident, but our Latino residents in particular who are being taken advantage of.

So again: Anyone linked to Tony Cardone is municipal poison and must be defeated. Full stop.

The solution here is to vote for Ferraro and O’Connor, with the stated intention of finding and recruiting individuals to run for Village Board and to replace O’Connor in his next election, and Debbie Behringer in the upcoming one in March of 2027.

Behringer sat through three Town Board meetings as a Village Trustee and did not once bother to fact-check the relentless factual misstatements coming from Cardone and Houle about expanding the Village PD presence into the town. Instead, Behringer spent more time complaining about how unfair it was to point out that Sal Scancarello’s son threatened to murder two Satmar men at the local Target in order to garner views on his TikTok account.

So, Debbie is done in our book.

A Town Councilman being asked to comment on his son threatening to murder two Jewish men during a time of national rising anti-Semitism is absolutely the kind of thing the Councilman should have addressed. Given how prominent the yellow streak is on Scancarello’s back, he chose not to.

Given that O’Connor is one vote out of five and rarely says or does anything, I don’t think most of us will notice a difference if he gets another term. That doesn’t mean I like it.

I hate that the Monroe Democratic Committee has offered no candidates (everyone running, except Ferraro, is a Republican), but that’s not surprising. The Monroe Democratic Committee, like the national Democratic Party, seems to want to do the least amount of work for the most praise. That has been the M.O. of the Democratic Party since George McGovern lost in 1972.

This is why I keep saying to anyone who will listen that the Democratic Party, like the Republican Party, is essentially dead, and it’s time to replace both with something new. If you think for a second that anyone who isn’t white—soon to be the majority in this country—will ever trust the Republican Party again after Trump, you’re mistaken. That party is dead on arrival. They will never recover from the current situation. Everyone is going to view the Republicans as the party of dangerous white supremacists, akin to the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the National Rally in France. The Democrats will be remembered as “The Loyal Opposition” rather than a party that stands for something. (Go ahead and ask Congressman Pat Ryan how he feels about universal Medicare coverage. He doesn’t support it. You know why? Because Pat Ryan only works for the wealthy, which has been the focus of the Democratic Party for the last half-century.)

As for Alex Melchiorre and Neil Dwyer, that one is easier to discuss. Neil Dwyer is a nice guy, in my opinion, who does try to do the right thing for his residents whenever possible. When it comes to local politicians, that’s how you measure them: Are they going to do the right thing for themselves, like Tony Cardone, or are they going to do the right thing for the people who elected them?

However, it’s very clear from the last meeting that Mayor Dwyer, if re-elected, also needs to be pushed. There is a lot this board needs to do to properly address the ICE situation in the village. These are things they may not like politically.

But.

That’s where you and I come in. If Melchiorre, Mancuso, and Peifer win, life will become immeasurably worse for all village residents, not to mention town residents hoping for the Village Police to expand its presence into the town (not to mention any other cooperation between the two municipalities).

But if Dwyer, O’Connor, and Ferraro win, while they may not be right about ICE and what needs to be done in the village to protect Latino residents, we can at least have that conversation.

And that is where the opportunity lies. Not enough of us attend these village meetings, and my goal is to encourage you to start packing the room and demanding change. I believe that if you do, you will have a better shot at improving conditions on the ground for our most vulnerable residents than with the Tony Cardone friends in charge.