Tomorrow, Amherst residents will vote on a new town supervisor, who will succeed Democrat Brian Kulpa. Kulpa is leaving the position, having hit his term limit.
BTPM NPR’s Emyle Watkins spoke with both candidates in the race to hear more about the platform they’re running on. Here’s part of Watkins’ conversation with Dan Gagliardo, an area businessman known for his olive oil company D’Avolio. Gagliardo is running as a Republican.
Emyle Watkins: Tell me a little bit about why you decided to run for town supervisor.
Dan Gagliardo: I've been in Amherst for about 15 years. My wife was born and raised here. And when I came here 15 years ago, things were just amazing. Development was great and we had a business up here, so it was natural for us to come up here. My wife was pretty excited about it, but over the last eight years, things have changed drastically. I found that there was some financial decisions that I did not agree with, transparency, essential services were diminishing. I came from Lewiston, and I thought that Williamsville was Lewiston on steroids. I thought it was an amazing place, but it changed. You know, we went through quite a bit the pandemic, but it didn't appear that our leaders were listening to residents and not not engaging with what they wanted. So I hadn't been running my restaurant in a while. My wife and my children and my managers do that. So I had some I had some time, and I asked my wife, and she encouraged me to do it.
Emyle Watkins: Where do you see Amherst being a few years from now? Like, what is your ideal Amherst?
Dan Gagliardo: I want to be in a path for fiscal stability. I want to make sure that we're not borrowing more than we have, than we need, than we can. I would like to see our taxes come down. I have a 'ten-five-zero' plan, 10% cut in expenses and 5% cut in taxes and 0% unnecessary bonding. So I would like to be on that path. I'd also like to see, I'd like to see smart development growth that the residents are involved with at all times. I want to make sure that what we're doing is systematically approved by the residents, the developers. And I'd like to get our tax numbers, our tax base up. And I think we're going to do that. I think we're going to be very successful at that.
Emyle Watkins: Talk to me about other aspects of your platform. You've started to go into it, but what are some of the key things you want voters to know?
Dan Gagliardo: First and foremost, transparency. I want people to be informed about everything we do. I'm going to start an 'Amherst Channel,' where we're going to have news all the time about what's going on, good, bad or ugly, the good, the bad, the ugly. But it's gonna keep people informed. I also want to engage more residents to be part of the process. I want to change our town board meetings to give people more time to talk. I want to give them the opportunity to submit questions so we can answer them. I'd like to have the department heads out there so they can answer questions that people may have that's under the transparency line. Fiscal responsibility, I really would like to go and I would like to do a line by line budgeting. I want to do forensic audits on the departments. I want to centralize our purchasing department like we had once before. I would like to look at our exempt employees. I'd like to talk to them and see how many we have, what they do, and I'd like to make sure that we are taken care of and looking at our bonds, how we might be able to restructure them, maybe to save ourselves some money. And I'd like to look at the list of contractors that are working in the town and maybe add some so we can kind of get competitiveness in there and see if we can bring some of the cost down.
Emyle Watkins: If you had to summarize your campaign in one sentence, what would you say?
Dan Gagliardo: Inclusion, effectiveness and honesty, communication, yeah. Probably that those four things.
Emyle Watkins: Well thank you so much Dan.
Dan Gagliardo: Thank you, Emyle, thanks for coming in. Anytime.
You can listen to the entire conversation here:
