VILLAGE OF FAYETTEVILLE – In addition to the mayoral race in the village and an uncontested election for village justice, three candidates are running for two open trustee seats in Fayetteville this month. Polls will be open from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Tuesday, March 19 at the village hall at 425 E. Genesee St.
Casey Cleary-Hammarstedt
This is Cleary-Hammarstedt’s third time running for trustee in Fayetteville, the place she has called home for 20 years.
The first time she gave it a whirl was in the form of a two-week write-in campaign in 2020, when the COVID pandemic resulted in the election being delayed from its usual time in March to mid-September. That late-stage debut effort putting out lawn signs and going door to door earned Cleary-Hammarstedt 318 votes, for her an encouraging turnout despite the loss to the incumbent candidates.
Her second try came in 2022, again in a three-way race for two open trustee seats, but that time she decided to run a full-fledged campaign.
On Feb. 22 of that year, however, Cleary-Hammarstedt was up on a hill and was just about to knock on a door when she slipped on ice on the stoop and wound up with a concussion, a fractured wrist, and injuries to her shoulder and neck. As a result, she could not bring herself to properly campaign in the crucial days between then and the March 15 Election Day that year, making the fact that she was only off by 47 votes in the end a better-than-expected outcome in her view and therefore another reassuring sign.
“Though I lost, I took stock of the fact that many people thought I had something meaningful to say,” Cleary-Hammarstedt said.
Cleary-Hammarstedt’s interest in participating in the political realm came initially out of the concern she had about Morgan Management’s Route 5 apartment complex proposal around 2019.
She said that during the years of COVID, she studied Fayetteville “like a graduate student would,” tracking village developments, reading through the village website, attending village board meetings and asking questions to increase her knowledge of the community.
She said her goals as trustee would be to “watch every penny” and “tighten the belt” when looking at the village budget, particularly so people who live on fixed incomes, senior citizens, young families and disabled folks feel more secure.
Cleary-Hammarstedt said that she wants to be forthcoming and resolute in getting information and relevant documents to villagers and that she wants the village to be as transparent and welcoming as possible to “make it easy to be a citizen.” With that, she said she wants to open opportunities for a wider swathe of the public to serve on boards and committees as vacancies arise, especially younger people that she would be willing to work with in preparation for fulfilling such decision-making roles.
She also seeks to do her part in making the village as walkable and as bike-safe as it can be while making fayettevilleny.gov more navigable. Commending the clerk’s office for progress made with the website and social media, she said she also wants to gauge residents’ thoughts on the effectiveness of the website as a tool.
Furthermore, Cleary-Hammarstedt said she wants to institute a more descript open podium segment at either the beginning or end of meetings.
“I know that there’s only so much that I as an individual can do, but I will aim to do my best, and I won’t just show up—I’ll work,” she said. “I’m gonna give it a good shot, but it will also be what we can do together as a team, as a board.”
She said she also sees importance in referring to Fayetteville’s now one-year-old comprehensive plan and taking into account its goals as well as the sticky note comments and survey responses of residents, all as a way to keep that document from “sitting on the shelf and getting dusty.” She added that the same goes for bringing up the village’s reconnaissance-level historic resources survey more often going forward.
Interested in “the human aspect” of governing, Cleary-Hammarstedt has spent much of her life prioritizing the needs of children and families, she said, and that has included putting an emphasis on affordability and accessibility in both childcare and housing.
She served as the executive director of the not-for-profit Girls Inc. of Central New York, an organization dedicated to inspiring all girls to be strong, smart and bold. She has also worked for Head Start in Cortland County in support of low-income families, and she was a district-wide parent liaison for the Syracuse City School District.
Locally, she was previously policy director for what is now Child Care Solutions, which is part of a network of resource and referral agencies, and within the SUNY Upstate Medical University Department of Family Medicine she worked with doctors to help educate students in their third and fourth years of medical school.
She believes her master’s degree in public administration from Syracuse University is perfect for someone in a trustee position, specifying that she is equipped to make nonpartisan, data-driven decisions.
Cleary-Hammarstedt is running as a Democrat with Fayetteville Forward as her second party line, the latter named as such because she wants to point the way to the incorporation of technological advancements and new approaches to governance.
Cleary-Hammarstedt said she loves living in Fayetteville with her husband, Van, calling her Brookside neighborhood “wonderful” and charming partly because of the small amount of through traffic and the proximity to Green Lakes State Park.
She also said that the Fayetteville-Manlius Central School District “can’t be beat” and that she appreciates the village’s “tremendous” public works department and its “first-class” fire department.
A mother of two daughters, Cleary-Hammarstedt said the board of trustees could use the perspective of another woman because she counts a total of only five female trustees in Fayetteville so far this century and only one at a time.
Dan Kinsella
Kinsella is now in his 44th year on the Fayetteville Village Board.
It was in 1978 that he first started attending village board meetings on a regular basis, he said. In 1980, however, his trustee friend Jim Lannon decided to run for mayor as Russell Parnell was stepping down from that seat, and Lannon suggested to Kinsella the idea of going up for the trustee spot he would be leaving behind.
Kinsella took his friend’s advice and proceeded to secure one of the open trustee positions on the village board. He said what helped was that he knew everybody in the village because that was back when it was smaller, with no Signal Hill, no Briar Brook, and no Brookside in existence yet.
Kinsella said he knows what’s important to the residents of Fayetteville as far as what the municipality side can provide.
“It comes down to the basic things,” Kinsella said. “If we have a fire, the fire truck shows up. If we have an illness, the ambulance shows up. If we put trash out, the trash gets taken. Plus we’ve got our events and celebrations to go to too.”
Kinsella said he has had every liaison appointment possible in the village, some for multiple years and some for shorter periods of time.
Looking back on his involvement with some of the other boards and committees in the village, he said the toughest included being chair of the ethics committee starting in the early 1990s due to the difficulty of handling conflicts of interest, and then his part in instituting the deer committee a few years ago because of resistance from people who considered culling too cruel a practice. He added that going to recreation committee meetings tends to be more laidback in comparison because it’s “laugh after laugh” with never any conflict.
As far as serving with numerous trustees and multiple mayors over the years, Kinsella said he likes to hear new ideas and come to solutions even after periods of disagreement with those he sits alongside.
He said he has learned not to be opposed to change but that it has to be change for the good of the residents with all potential consequences considered.
Kinsella said he also puts trust in the department heads and tries not to micromanage, adding that he thinks of the efforts of the municipality as a team effort.
He said his accomplishments include making sure that fire and DPW services could grow where it was deemed necessary while continuing with efficiency. He has also overseen different sidewalk projects and the addition of parks over time, and he said he’s always on the lookout for what decisions will benefit the most residents.
If reelected, Kinsella said he wants to see Fayetteville remain a place people like to be. He said a part of that is maintaining the activities Fayetteville residents and people coming in from elsewhere enjoy, like Symphoria concerts in Beard Park and the summertime parties in Limestone Plaza.
He also said that he wants to see the village’s vacant buildings be made viable again.
On the question of his age, Kinsella, now 84, said he believes he’s “as sharp as ever” and that with age comes wisdom, a wealth of experience, and a hefty amount of valuable information about the history of the village that he can supply.
“I don’t really think that age is a deterring factor,” he said. “I know the village as well as anyone. I know what has happened, what hasn’t happened, what I feel good about and what I feel bad about.”
Kinsella has lived in the village of Fayetteville his entire life, his 84 years all spent residing within the same block. With his wife of 60 years, Joan, he put three sons through the F-M school district and has five grandchildren.
“I like everything about the village,” Kinsella said. “I’m in love with it, truly, but it’s really the people who make it what it is.”
Kinsella is running on the Perspective Party line. He said his wife came up with that name because as an art teacher she talks frequently about perspective as it relates to drawing three-dimensional objects with realistic depth. He added that it’s key to have a positive perspective and be ready for what lies ahead in the next day.
In years past, Kinsella worked at Chittenango High School teaching upper-level mathematics along with one basic math class from 1962 to 1999. He said that job taught him how to express himself and keep people’s attention, as well as the importance of being able to answer someone’s questions as fully and as accurately as possible.
At that same high school, he coached football and boys and girls basketball for almost that entire 37-year stretch.
A life member of the Fayetteville Fire Department, Kinsella said both his time as an interior fireman from 1965 to 1995 and his role as an athletic coach gave him a better sense of how to work with a group of people and depend on one another.
“It becomes a matter of dependence, everyone meshing together and doing what they’re supposed to do,” Kinsella said. “It’s the same with a board of trustees and village departments.”
In serving as trustee day in and day out for nearly four and a half decades, Kinsella said, “What I do, I do not for myself. I do it for the village.”
Jane Rice
Rice was appointed to the Fayetteville Village Board in September 2022 by then mayor Mark Olson to take the place of Dennis Duggleby, who moved to North Carolina.
She then reclaimed the trustee seat by way of an uncontested election the following March to finish out Duggleby’s term of office.
Looking back on the past year and a half she’s spent on the village board, Rice said she has learned that if there’s solid communication between the department heads, the trustees and the mayor, the village can provide quality services “like a well-oiled machine.”
“The point is there has to be good communication,” she said. “One arm of the village doesn’t work as efficiently, as consistently or as fluidly without the other arm.”
After experiencing firsthand more of what goes on behind the scenes, she took greater notice of how important the trustees are in terms of making changes to operations in the community and addressing the minutiae of the issues residents and businesses may be facing.
Rice said that beyond that the people of Fayetteville need to feel heard and comforted enough that solutions to any problems will be coming their way.
She added that it’s critical for every member of the board of trustees to fulfill their role to the best of their ability and stay involved with happenings around the village.
“If you have only one trustee out of three being active, that’s not such a great balance,” Rice said. “If you have four active trustees and a mayor who’s just as active, then you have a really strong balance and that works real well.”
Rice said her highlights as trustees have included the adoption of a local law to allow all board members to participate in meetings remotely as needed, assistance to the Fayetteville Senior Center to update its property, and time spent working closely with the village’s parks commission to help it gain traction in service to the community.
She said part of her help to the parks commission has involved conveying to them just how important they are, something that has “put a little wind in their sails” in their completion of tasks like putting up new signs in every village park and getting other things on the docket done, she said.
Rice said her goals if reelected include seeing the senior center through renovations to its cottage so it can be used as a seasonal arts and crafts room as well as upgrades to the community gardens.
She also seeks to lend guidance for the Syracuse Metropolitan Transportation Council’s pedestrian and bicycle mobility study that will play into ongoing efforts to focus on connectivities in the area for functional and recreational purposes.
Something else in her sights is to have a committee of village representatives convene to update Fayetteville’s zoning regulations so they accurately support the village’s updated comprehensive plan.
“That was intended to get started, but for various reasons it just hasn’t,” she said. “I’ll be trying to get that off the ground and focus on that because as trustees it’s our responsibility to make sure our systems are set up, supported and aligned.”
Formerly the principal lead in charge of community planning for landscape architecture firm Environmental Design & Research, Rice spent 28 years on Fayetteville’s planning board and 15 as its chair, a position she resigned from when she became trustee.
At the time she joined the planning board, she was offering private consultations as a community and urban planner already more than familiar with zoning regulations and land-use laws. She said the board gave her a chance to both give knowledge and gain knowledge.
“I thought it would really benefit me in my private consulting world to serve on a public board so that I could understand decisions from that perspective,” Rice said. “I thought that I could then bring to that board in my village some experiences and knowledge that I had. I knew about permit applications and all the processes that developers had to go through to achieve what they wanted to do.”
While also working full-time and raising three kids through F-M schools, she started out as an associate member on the planning board. She would later take on the role of chair just as the development world happened to be slowing down in the 2008-2009 range.
As the amount of applications dipped, Rice saw that as a time to “do some good housekeeping” and make sure all of the board’s internal procedures and regulations were satisfactory, thus easing the application process since she knew the development world would eventually speed up and become busy again.
“It’s the same thing on the trustee side—just because it’s winter doesn’t mean there’s no work to be done,” Rice said. “You just need to maintain a consistent pace so that you can stay ahead and ensure we have the comfortable village that we have.”
Rice said that moving from the planning board to the board of trustees was a bit of a change because she’s “not a politician at heart.”
“It was another awesome set of responsibilities, but completely different, and I thought. ‘Let me give it a try,’” she said.
Though she had to learn a thing or two about actually going out and campaigning for a position, Rice said Olson and the other trustees were gracious in alleviating any hesitancy and intimidation she felt.
“The other board members have been very easy to work with,” Rice added. “It doesn’t mean we all always agree, but everybody’s comfortable voicing their understanding of whatever a situation is based on their experience and based on what the community members are saying to us.”
Unlike the last time she ran to refill a trustee seat, Rice has a contested election in front of her this March, but she said her approach to running for office has not changed.
“When I was running unopposed, instead of just sitting back and saying, ‘Okay, all I need is just one vote,’ I said at the time, ‘Let me manage my campaign as if I had an opponent,’” Rice said. “My overall message remains the same too: I have proof that I do as I say and I stay committed throughout the year.”
Beyond that, Rice said she’s an ideal candidate because she cares for the village and she considers the different positions that are out there before reaching a decision of her own and acting on it.
“I’m a strong critical thinker, I’m decisive and I take action—you need all three,” she said.
Rice is running on the Fayetteville Voices ticket, which she said signifies that everybody in Fayetteville has a voice worth listening to, whether they reside there or own a business in the village.
“I’m here to listen to what the villagers like and what their concerns are and hear about the opportunities they’d like to see us go for,” Rice said.
Rice has lived in Fayetteville for right around 33 years with her husband, Steve.
Hailing from Nebraska originally, she saw Fayetteville as a mini urban center with a selection of small businesses, a school close by, and churches of any denomination.
“Anything was available to us, and it was all right here,” Rice said. “I think that there’s some great neighborhood friendliness and respect that exists here and I just would like to be a part of holding onto that for as long as we can and carry it into the future.”
