Tangney officially wins school board seat

By a count of 150 votes, incumbent school board trustee Darlene Tangney officially clinched the second seat on the Board of Education following a special election on Tuesday.

Tangney was one of two incumbents up for re-election this year who ran against challenger Stewart Mininsky, who had received the largest number of votes on May 15.

On May 16, however, school officials said that the race for the second seat was too close to call: according to the final vote count, incumbents Gina Guma and Tangney — who campaigned as a team — finished behind Mininsky’s 1,691 votes with 1,618 each, a tie.

A day after the election and the recounts, Tangney disputed the validity of one absentee ballot for Guma, challenging that it was unclear which candidate the voter checked off. On May 16, after District Counsel attorney Neil Block met with the school board to explain their options under election law, all five trustees — including Tangney and Guma — voted to validate the tie and other vote outcomes, however, at the public works session the following week, a teary-eyed Guma announced that she was calling it quits.

“It was easy for me to walk away knowing that she is going to be there,” Guma told the Herald last week.

While Guma decided to forgo the run-off election, effectively making trustee Tangney the de facto winner of the seat, state law required that the district hold the run-off election, which was held on June 26 from at East School. Tangney received 150 out of 162 votes cast, which included 12 write-in ballots that were cast for Guma or left blank, according to district clerk Carole Butler.

Tangney was officially declared the winner at a special meeting held at the school following the election.

“I’m glad it’s over; I’m going to miss Gina terribly, but we’re very good friends and we see each other a lot,” Tangney said.

Tangney will serve a second, three-year term alongside Mininsky starting July 1.

“I’m very excited and we have the vision, we know what we have to do to move the district forward,” Tangney said, adding that she’s looking forward to working and advocating for the kids. “That’s always my priority, and then the taxpayers — we have to look out for them as well — so it’s a fine balance.”

School officials said that changes were made to normal polling procedures in order to limit the cost of the election, reducing expenses from the usual $40,515 for a regular election to only $1,825 for the special election.

To limit costs, the district said that it decreased the polling hours, using only one polling place instead of the usual eight, replacing voting machines with paper ballots, and forgoing the use of BOCES Election Services. The district said the move also limited the size of legal ads and reduced the number of election clerks used to count the election, resulting in additional savings.