Democrats face off in petition spat in Falls
Dyster, Fruscione vie for party clout
NIAGARA FALLS — A flap over designating petitions for 14 people running for seats on the city’s Democratic Committee has exposed the first crack in what has been portrayed as a solid working relationship between Mayor Paul A. Dyster and Council Chairman Sam Fruscione.
Fruscione was angered this week after Dyster’s wife, Rebecca, notarized challenges to several petitions Fruscione and Gary D. Parenti, a fellow Democrat, filed to run friends and family for committee seats in seven of the city’s 30 committee districts.
Niagara County Elections Commissioners Nancy Smith and Scott Kiedrowski ruled Wednesday that two of the petitions sent in by Parenti are invalid because they did not have enough signatures. Five other petitions were left standing after review.
But Fruscione called the attempt to knock his committee candidates off the primary ballot a “direct attack” on him and questioned Dyster’s willingness to work with the all-Democratic City Council.
Rebecca Dyster deflected the notion that the petition challenges were anything more than part of a party election process in which both Dyster’s supporters and Fruscione’s supporters were attempting to gain voices on the city’s Democratic Committee.
Rebecca Dyster said her husband had little involvement in filing the challenges or helping his supporters and several good friends run for committee seats.
“He’s not really leading the charge. I am,” she said. “But we’re defending positions. We’re not in the offense here.”
She said Dyster’s supporters had made nominations only for vacant seats, but then discovered a challenge in seven districts by a slate of candidates whose petitions Parenti had submitted.
Dyster disagreed with Fruscione’s suggestion that Democratic Committee politics would affect the mayor’s ability to work with the Council. Party politics, he said, should be left out of City Hall.
When asked if the Democratic Committee contests would affect his ability to work with Fruscione, Dyster said, “No, not to my way of thinking.”
The city’s 60-member Democratic Committee has gone through a transformation since the mayoral election last fall in which it endorsed Dyster’s opponent, former Councilman Lewis “Babe” Rotella.
During his campaign, Dyster repeatedly criticized the committee for having “lost touch with its grass roots” ideals.
Now, Rebecca Dyster said, the mayor’s supporters have decided that time had come to gain a voice in the city party as a “civic duty.” Earlier this year, they had asked the committee to appoint about two dozen people to vacant committee seats.
All 60 seats in 30 districts are up for election in September’s Democratic primary, but most of the volunteer seats have remained uncontested.
Committee members are often asked to do political work, such as circulating petitions or hanging signs, but they also vote to endorse candidates in elections.
In seven districts, Parenti mailed in petitions to run candidates against committee members who had been appointed earlier this year. That set up a primary battle for 14 seats in seven districts.
Wednesday’s decision to invalidate two of the petitions submitted by Parenti and Fruscione left contests for 10 seats.
Like Rebecca Dyster, Parenti said he and Fruscione were trying to make the committee “better.”
“There’s been a split in this committee for a long, long time,” said Parenti, who coordinated Fruscione’s Council campaign and is a close political ally of G. Steven Pigeon, former chairman of the Erie County Democratic Party. “We just want to make it stronger and make it better.”
Fruscione called the petition challenges “petty politics” and said he considered them a sign that the mayor did not want to work with him.
“I wanted to have a voice. I didn’t want to have control,” Fruscione said. “If I can’t even get a small voice and I’m the chairman of the City Council, that’s a problem.”
But Dyster called the petition challenges a normal part of the election process.
“We felt as though the kind of reform-minded Democrats that we represented at the polls should have a voice on the committee,” Dyster said.
