'We Need Smarter Growth for a More Affordable Yorktown'

By Matt Slater

Yorktown is a place for families. I’m proud of growing up here and my wife and I are raising our family here too.

For Yorktown to be a place where young families grow and seniors can retire, we must have both a plan and a commitment to achieve smart growth.

As I’ve begun knocking on doors in my campaign for Town Supervisor, I’ve heard one overarching theme: Yorktown is just too expensive.

For starters, Yorktown’s commercial tax base continues to be the lowest in Westchester County. So when the town needs money, it looks squarely at our homeowners. Yorktown has fallen behind our neighbors who are welcoming new employers and new jobs. Traveling down Route 6, you see transformative projects underway expanding the commercial tax base in nearby towns and alleviating the pressure placed on their residential taxpayers.

Unlike Cortlandt, which quickly zoned, cited and approved a new ShopRite, the Yorktown Lowe’s took nearly a decade and an estimated $20 million to open for business. And while the rest of Yorktown lays dormant, there are exciting projects underway in Somers, Mahopac and Chappaqua.

We Need More Commercial Tax Revenue and Less Property Taxation

Yorktown has earned a reputation as hostile to new opportunity—and it’s crushing our homeowners. Look no further than the cancelled expansion of the Jefferson Valley Mall, which is one of Yorktown’s largest taxpayers. Beyond new jobs, the additional tax revenue could have helped alleviate the Town’s property tax burden, improve services for our seniors and enhance our schools.

I have a plan to get Yorktown moving again and the experience needed to deliver real results. We need walkable downtowns in each of our hamlets and complete streets that improve safety for pedestrians, cyclists and motorists. We need smarter, more efficient delivery of services. It’s time for our local government to be a leader in innovation and, considering the taxes we pay, it already should be!

I have the experience needed to reform Town government and I’ll work hard every day to get Yorktown headed in the right direction. I believe in public service and, for the past four years, I was privileged to serve our community as State Senator Terrence Murphy’s chief-of-staff. Together, we wrote and passed 50 new state laws benefitting local residents and delivered over $4 million in new state funding for Yorktown. We tackled a wide range of state and local issues, ranging from the heroin epidemic to the installation of a new traffic light at the intersection of Route 118 and Route 129.

Investing in Yorktown's Quality of Life

Working with Senator Murphy, we partnered with local officials and members of our community to enact important reforms, including new state laws requiring insurance companies to cover treatment for opioid addiction and ending the long-term prescriptions that helped flood our communities with Oxycontin and other dangerous narcotics. We also invested in Yorktown’s quality-of-life by delivering $1.9 million to rehabilitate local roads and millions more for our fire departments, school districts, libraries and vital community organizations that provide important services for local residents.

One such grant provided $700,000 to modernize town facilities. Yorktown has the best employees in Westchester, but we must continue working to ensure they have the resources and technology needed to move our community forward. Specifically, we must create an online system to streamline the permitting process and use Open Data to improve government transparency. The rest of the world is already doing these things and Yorktown’s dormant town government is not keeping up.

It’s time for new leadership for Yorktown. As Town Supervisor, I will bring my passion and experience to the job. Let’s make Yorktown a place that everyone can afford to call home.