While the City of Buffalo’s mayoral primary dominated news headlines, there were dozens of notable races across Western New York.
"Sometimes it's just a shelf life issue. They just want to change,” said political science professor Laurie Buonanno, Ph.D. on BTPM NPR's live primary night coverage.
Buffalo wasn’t the only city with a mayoral primary. Olean in Cattaraugus County also saw an interesting upset.
Amy Sherburne owns Eade’s Wallpaper and has not held political office before, according to the Olean Times Herald. But she beat out current mayor William Aiello with 58% of the vote to win the Republican nomination.
Aiello is tied for the second longest serving Olean city mayor, having served since 2013.
He’ll still have a spot on the ballot in November, through an independent line.
“A lot of these villages and towns were struggling, and the only reason they righted themselves was all that flush with COVID money," said Buonanno. "And now it's over, and they're going to have to make decisions. They're going to have to either cut services and staff, or they're going to have to raise property taxes.”
Other small cities, towns and villages are thinking ahead to those difficult cuts as they decide on Republican candidates for their town supervisors. Town supervisor is essentially the CEO of a town — they’re responsible for overseeing all decisions, personnel, and budgets, in conjunction with a town board.
In Orchard Park, Joseph “Joe” Liberti won with 77% of the vote. He defeated Eugene “Gene” Majchrzak and will face businesswoman and Democrat Marie Mahon in the November supervisor race.
In Amherst, current supervisor Brian Kulpa is term-limited, and a fresh supervisor will have to be elected in November. In last night’s GOP primary, Dan Gagliardo defeated Dennis Hoban with 56% of the vote. He’ll face Democrat Shawn Lavin in the general election.
But in Hamburg, the vote was too close to call for sure, and candidate Joshua Collins says he will call for a recount. Beth Farrell Lorentz had 930 votes and Collins received just 25 less at 905 votes at the end of the night. He had this to say about the turnout in Hamburg.
“I wish more residents would have shown up, because it was just under 15,000 registered Republicans in Hamburg, and less than 2,000 showed up for this primary," said Collins. "And this is going to have a very large impact."
