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SCHENECTADY -- With Schenectady County Democratic leaders surrounding him, City Council President Gary McCarthy announced Tuesday he will run for mayor to succeed Brian U. Stratton.

Comments made by former another former Democratic mayor, Karen Johnson, and McCarthy himself at the 11 a.m. rally gave an indication of how the campaign could be framed -- a behind-the-scenes workaholic running against a retired college president, Roger Hull.

McCarthy said neighborhood revitalization will be his administration's focus if he's elected, attaching himself to an issue that many residents complain is ignored in favor of downtown's resurgence.

The candidate said he will take an unpaid leave from his job as an investigator for the district attorney's office in July to focus on campaigning and his new role, that of acting mayor after Stratton left April 3 to work for the state.

Quoted from bumblethru

How many seats does McCarthy sit on in the city? The plex is one of them....yes?

Quoted from rachel72

This was a DEM rally?!? There's more people waiting in line at the hot dog vendor at the DSS building.

McCarthy lacks much McPersonality.

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More McCarthy Abuse of Power
August 7, 2011

Is Gary McCarthy using his office and Taxpayer money to campaign?

I was fortunate to run into friends who let me know of their surprise at receiving the following “birthday greetings” from the Office of the Mayor.

The card was obviously paid for by Taxpayers. The postage was obviously paid for by Taxpayers. Most likely the written greeting and well wishes were made on Taxpayer Time.

In my opinion this too is an abuse of Schenectady Taxpayers by Gary McCarthy who in his capacity as “Acting Mayor” he is actively campaigning on Taxpayer Time with the Taxpayer Dime.

And so I appeal to everyone. Let our acting mayor know of your displeasure with this abuse of taxpayer funds. He has used OSM as a springboard to the election, he is obviously using his temporary office for the same reason.

* * *

Pat Zollinger

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McCarthy should have quit his DA job long ago

Re Aug. 6 article, “Interim mayor makes it full-time”: Gary McCarthy is a man with “two” many jobs in a time of high unemployment.
Gary’s job with the Schenectady County district attorney’s office couldn’t be all that necessary if [it allowed him to] play at being mayor. No man can serve two masters.
Gary, like a good Democrat, needs to give up one of his political jobs so another person can have a job.
How many people can use leave time (if they have that much) to perform another job? Only in government and academia. The rest of us, in the real world, live by a different standard.
It’s time government workers — small w — came down off their mountain.

EDMOND DAY
Rotterdam

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SCHENECTADY
2 men, 2 viewpoints, 1 goal
Mayoral hopefuls see city’s present, future differently
BY KATHLEEN MOORE Gazette Reporter

....................>>>>....................>>>>..................http://www.dailygazette.net/De.....r00100&AppName=1...............

IN WITH THE NEW
like McCarthy, he’s focusing on people willing to move to “distressed” parts of the city. He has promised to privately raise money to offer his own incentive to those new homeowners: he wants to pay for their children to attend Schenectady County Community College.
    McCarthy’s plan focuses on pragmatic decisions that would draw more middle-class residents to the city, arguing that their presence could have a wide-reaching impact.
    “As you shift that, you begin to stabilize these commercial districts, who rely on people who live within a close distance. They’re supported by a customer base that lives close by,” he said, adding that the city’s neighborhoods will otherwise continue to turn into rental property.
    “We have a good portion of senior citizens. Who’s going to buy their houses?” he said.
    As the lead investigator for the Schenectady County District Attorney’s Office, McCarthy has seen the city’s neighborhoods at their worst and is familiar with the intense poverty found in certain parts of the city. On some streets, entire blocks of houses that were lovingly cared for by longtime residents have fallen into decay after those residents died. Now those streets are filled with deteriorating, mostly vacant rental housing.
    He wants to create a targeted marketing campaign, saying that the effort to bring in Guyanese from New York City would have been more successful if it had been focused on the middle class. At the time, Republican city officials emphasized the city’s cheap housing. While thousands of Guyanese moved here and have renovated many city homes, many others bought up houses and turned them into rental property.
    “People saw it as a get-richquick where you could get a higher value of rent by dividing a two-family into a four-family,” McCarthy said. “Some of that has been what we recruited. We need to shift that to the middle class, people who have a sense of community, who want the convenience of living in Schenectady.”
    In his short tenure as acting mayor, beginning April 4, he has focused on providing better roads and better recreation.
ROADS TO THE FUTURE
    As a career politician who led the local Democratic committee and more recently was council chairman, he easily persuaded the City Council to temporarily stop rebuilding sidewalks, so that the money could instead be spent on repaving roads. He also adopted his city engineer’s plan for a new type of pavement that does not last as long, but costs much less. With that system, and the sidewalk funds, he was able to repave parts of the city’s 20 worst main roads this summer, paving roads in nearly every neighborhood.
    With help from county grants, he also added supervised park programs at Hillhurst and Steinmetz parks, located in two middle-class neighborhoods that have seen a disturbing increase in minor crimes. Residents near Hillhurst said vandalism and fights in the park fell dramatically this summer.
    He is also marshalling volunteers, who have so far been organized to clean up parks, bring emergency information to their elderly neighbors, and help flood victims clean up after the storms.
    “The reality becomes, you’re going to pay for some of it but if you can supplement with volunteers — the PTOs do it all the time,” McCarthy said. “It allows the city to do things it can’t afford.”
    And it gives residents a sense of “pride and ownership,” building their ties to the community, he said.
    There’s one project he won’t continue — building luxury “green” houses for low-income homeowners. He supports more practical environmentally-friendly houses.
    “I’m not going to build $200,000 houses we sell for $80,000. Things have to be sustainable by the market,” he said.
    McCarthy and others also organized last year to get a new slate of school board candidates elected after the previous board was mired in scandal. McCarthy wanted a new board to improve graduation rates as a way of attracting middle-class residents. The candidates won the election and have made substantial changes, although the results are not yet clear.

Quoted from Admin

http://patzollinger.us/2011/08/07/more-mccarthy-abuse-of-power/

Quoted from DemocraticVoiceOfReason

another pathetic stunt so that she gets to see her name in the newspaper