Utica Elections 2023 Megathread - Mike Galime elected Mayor Edition

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Calling the mayoral race for Galime. Still surprised Friend went down as bad as she did. Galime will be the youngest mayor Utica has had in some time, at only 43 years of age. He was considerably younger than either of his opponents.

Democrats will have a 5-4 majority of voting seats on the Common Council if current margins hold. Republicans retain the separately elected non-voting council presidency.

Republicans will retain their majority on the Oneida County legislature. Republicans currently lead in 17 districts to the Democrats 6, though one of the Republican seats is still too close to call.

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Today former Mayor of Utica Lou LaPolla and Superintendent of Schools Bruce Karam were arrested. This marks LaPolla's second arrest of the year, having previously been charged with multiple counts of wire fraud for running a fake scholarship fund. Both men were charged with larceny and corruption for having misused $15,000 in school district resources. Karam used district supplies to make campaign materials for Pro-Administration school board candidates (See prior in the thread: it made no difference lol), and also produced invitations to a fundraiser for a fake charity.

Between this and Frank Meola losing, Utica really seems to be turning the corner in terms of cleaning out the trash. OC Legislature-23 was a shame, but you don't win 100% of the time.

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Following his recent arrest, the Utica School Board has voted to terminate the employment of Superintendent Bruce Karam. The vote was 5-2, along "party lines"*.

This has been a long time coming. Turns out the years of corruption and treating everybody like sh**t came back to bite him in the end.

*School board races are officially non-partisan, but definite factions exist. Refer back to the second post in the thread for more details. The principle dividing line for the last 5 years or so has been whether a candidate was pro- or anti-Karam.

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The new Mayor of Utica Michael Galime (R) will take office on January 1, replacing Robert Palmieri (D), mayor for the last 12 years.

On the whole I'd say things have improved noticeably over his tenure. I've never been the biggest Palmieri fan, but I'll give him his credit. The decades-long population decline has finally reversed, and the city is fiscally healthier than its been in probably half a century. Downtown is better than it's been at any other point since I've been alive (low bar), and the last 3 or so years have seen a very welcome increase in the supply of housing. Under his mayoralty the Wynn Hospital and a new sports complex got built downtown, and the Harbor Point development (A redevelopment project based around Utica's terminal harbor which has been in planning hell since the 1980s) saw the beginning of actual construction in the last year. All together probably the most impactful mayor in decades.

He's had quite the electoral history. He won his first term in 2011 by a 3% margin with 41% of the vote, thanks to Bob Cardillo(R/C) splitting the Republican vote. In 2015 he beat the now-indicted former mayor Lou LaPolla in his comeback bid with over 70% of the vote.

The most entertaining election had to be 2019. He ran for a third term after getting a local term limit law (which would later be reinstated via referendum) removed. His opponent was councilman Joe Marino (D/I). Marino had tried primarying Palmieri, but he had his own controversy for getting in a physical altercation with another councilor at a common council meeting and narrowly lost. He ran as an independent against Palmieri, and the Republicans nominated Michael Arcuri (relative of the loony school board candidate from page 1 of the thread), an absolute nobody who made an active effort to not have any semblance of a campaign. Palmieri narrowly beat Marino despite the term limits problem because those were his opponents.

I've got to imagine that this is a wrap for his political career, but I do think it could be entertaining if he decides to make a run for Congress. I've heard nothing to indicate he has plans for that though.

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New Year, new mayor! Michael Galime became the new mayor of the city of Utica January 1. He is the first Republican to be elected to the office since Tim Julian in 2000/04. He is Utica's 3rd Italian-American mayor in a row, and continues a streak of Catholic mayors going back to 1956.
It's not yet clear how much he will differ from his predecessor Palmieri. He does have a 5-4 Democratic voting majority on the Utica Common Council to deal with, but it also isn't clear how much strict partisanship is to be expected.

He had one of his first public appearances today. He celebrated the Karen New Year at city hall, donning a Hsay Plo and raising a Karen Flag. He also read a proclamation declaring January Karen Heritage Month in the city. Utica probably has the highest concentration of Karen people outside of Southeast Asia. It's not the largest diaspora community in the US by absolute numbers, but the others are in larger metros. They account for nearly 1/10th of the city's population.


Since my last update Palmieri had two additional announcements of note, his final ones as mayor.

He secured the sale of a 2 acre empty lot in the Bagg's Square neighborhood to the Masonic Medical Research Institute, who plan to use the site to build a new laboratory facility employing 100 people (if they secure the expected state and federal funds). Some skepticism is warranted: There have been many planned revitalization projects over the years that ended up going nowhere. It would be great if it actually came to fruition though. That area is sad, even by Utica standards. It was cut off from the rest of downtown by a completely pointless arterial roadway in the 1960s, the construction of which required leveling multiple blocks along Oriskany St. Then the original Baggs Square and multiple surrounding blocks were leveled in 1971 to build a probably-needed modern bridge to North Utica.  Those 2 questionable planning decisions combined with 50 years of population loss means that an overwhelming majority of the area is now surface parking, empty grass fields, or abandoned and decaying buildings. Who knows, maybe this time things are finally turning around.

The larger announcement was that Palmieri managed to secure $80-100 million of investment by a private hotel group to develop part of Harbor Point. They plan to construct 2 new hotels, an entertainment complex, and 120 units of housing on a 15 acre plot north of the harbor currently named "Dredge Spoils Area 1". I don't know what kind of blackmail material he's got on Vision Hotels to make them agree to this, but it seems that after more than half a century the whole Harbor Point redevelopment thing is actually happening. I figured the city would get enough grants from the state and federal government to plop down 2 or 3 buildings at the harbor and declare victory; I have no clue how they actually managed to sell private investors on it.

[Kleine Scheiße]

My interactions with Celeste Friend were very much not positive. That's all I can say for personal and professional reasons, but I'm not surprised she lost.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

New Year, new mayor! Michael Galime became the new mayor of the city of Utica January 1. He is the first Republican to be elected to the office since Tim Julian in 2000/04. He is Utica's 3rd Italian-American mayor in a row, and continues a streak of Catholic mayors going back to 1956.

What would happen if I moved to Utica and ran for mayor?

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New Year, new mayor! Michael Galime became the new mayor of the city of Utica January 1. He is the first Republican to be elected to the office since Tim Julian in 2000/04. He is Utica's 3rd Italian-American mayor in a row, and continues a streak of Catholic mayors going back to 1956.

What would happen if I moved to Utica and ran for mayor?

You might do better than Friend, but I doubt you'd win. I don't think religion would directly be involved, moreso the fact that you'd be a recent transplant running against an incumbent.

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The stupidity of local government drives me crazy sometimes. One of the issues that's had people from South Utica losing their minds the last couple months has been the installation of a traffic island off Oneida St. People got more worked up over this one intersection than almost any issue that actually matters, and it played a part in Friend losing the November election.

This is the offending area. In late 2023, a small curbed traffic island was built in the large open area at the center of this intersection as a traffic control measure. This was done at the behest of Celeste Friend, who as the councilor for South Utica had been given the power to disperse $200,000 of American Rescue Plan funds.

The locals went absolutely ape sh**t, complaining about the fact that the islands supposedly made the road too thin to accommodate simultaneous two-way traffic at the intersection. That doesn't seem to be the case from my personal experience, but it also doesn't matter because it's in a relatively sparse suburban neighborhood with very low traffic. People also complained that there wasn't enough public consultation and about the fact that the city council didn't vote on it. As if the city council votes on every individual curb installation in a normal city.

This stupidity culminated in the first meeting of the new city council this January, in which councilman Mark Williams proposed suing both Rob Palmieri and Celeste Friend for the crime of installing the island. Neither of them are currently serving officials-- he was proposing to sue them in their capacity as private individuals for this. This is the level of intelligence we're dealing with here. After a city lawyer explained that this course of action is impossible (you can't sue government officials acting within the powers of their offices for doing things you don't like), the council then decided to debate removing the island, and measures to preventing anything like it from being built without council approval in the future.

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Well, the controversy of curb placement has abated, mainly because actual political issues have come up again.

New mayor Mike Galime (R) has proposed his budget for the fiscal year 2024-25. He claims that, contrary to the outgoing mayor's claims, Utica is in a very precarious mid-to-long-term fiscal position. To account for the budget shortfalls, he is proposing the first property tax levy increase since 2019. In his proposal, tax rate increases from 27.03189360 to 31.4921560. This is a 16.5% increase on last year's tax level.

To say this has caused an uproar would be an understatement. I suppose that he thinks he can push this given the overwhelming majority he got last November, but I don't know what the odds of this actually passing the council though.

Hilariously enough I've seen multiple commenters on local news sites saying that they should've voted for Celeste Friend because she wouldn't have increased taxes like this. The re-alignment is alive everyone.