KNOX — Knox Supervisor Vasilios Lefkaditis is not seeking re-election this year, stepping aside in December at the end of his third term in office. 

Lefkaditis, who is enrolled as a Democrat, was first elected supervisor in 2015 on the Conservative line. He had failed to get Democratic backing in that election and again in 2017 and 2019, running instead on the Republican line.

“I want to run, but I just can’t,” Lefkaditis told The Enterprise by phone on Tuesday. He said he would email a statement outlining his decision, but it was not received in time for print.

Supervisor race

So far, the candidates for supervisor as indicated by a list of filings received by The Enterprise from the Board of Elections on May 19 are Russell Pokorny, on the Democratic line, and Michelle Viola-Straight, on the Conservative line. 

Pokorny, formerly the town’s assessor, ran unsuccessfully for supervisor in 2019, losing to Lefkaditis. His wife, Amy Pokorny, who is a former councilwoman, also made an unsuccessful run against Lefkaditis for supervisor, in 2017.

Together, the couple own and maintain the Knox Octagon Barn, which serves as an event space. They formerly owned the Knox Country Store.

While campaigning for supervisor in 2019, Russell Pokorny told The Enterprise that “integrity and respect and honesty and transparency” were at stake in that election, stating that as assessor he had developed good relationships with many of the town’s residents. 

He spoke in favor of local business development so long as it was qualified by respect for the Knox’s bucolic nature, and wanted to establish a formal system for town employee performance reviews.

Viola-Straight, meanwhile, has had a high profile locally for her work in support of the military, first as president of the Guilderland Chamber of Commerce, a position she left in 2019 after two-and-a-half years to become director of community partnerships at the Veterans & Community Housing Coalition in Ballston Spa. She was able to move the chamber in a new direction, to “merge businesses, the military, and the community,” she said, in a way that expanded the chamber’s presence in the community and the region.

She was a supporter of Berne Councilman and Army veteran Dennis Palow, who, in 2019, along with other Republicans, accused Democrats on the Berne Town Board at the time of discrimination based on Palow’s veteran status. The accusation was largely unfounded, based on a misinterpretation of emails exchanged between board members, but drew a large number of supporters for Palow.

“Today, when I caught wind of this, I sat in the kitchen for two hours crying,” Viola-Straight said at the time.

She’s currently chairwoman of the Knox Republican committee, and formerly owned the Route 20 Cafe and Newsstand. 

Other candidates

Filings related to a primary — one of two nominative processes, the other being a caucus — were due in April. Parties holding a caucus can do so at any time so long as the results are filed with the board of elections by late July.

The only other Democratic candidate who appears in filings last week is Deborah L. Liddle, for town clerk. She will run against Traci Schanz, an incumbent who has secured the Conservative line.

Other Conservative Party candidates are: Incumbent Matthew Schanz for highway superintendent, incumbent Karl Pritchard for town board, incumbent Kenny Saddlemire for town board, incumbent Timothy Francis for justice, and incumbent Elizabeth Walk for tax collector. 

Lefkaditis

Lefkaditis will be leaving office at what seems to be the peak of his political career, overseeing a majority GOP-backed board that he had helped shuttle in. Before he was elected on the Conservative line in 2015, Knox, like the other Hilltowns, had been long dominated by Democrats. His opponent in 2015 was Michael Hammond, a Democrat who had served as supervisor for 42 years.

In 2013, Pamela Fenoff had come close to defeating Hammond, running on a platform that Knox residents were “ready for change.” Fenoff, an Independence Party member also running on the Republican and Conservative lines, garnered 46 percent of the votes.

By 2019, Lefkaditis, a hedge fund manager, managed to oust all Democratic board members, when GOP-backed candidates Dennis Cyr and June Springer joined Lefkaditis and board members Saddlemire and Pritchard at the dais.

On Election Night in 2019, Lefkaditis told The Enterprise, “Most people don’t care how the sausage was made; they care how it tastes.”

Small-party votes carried the day for the Republican-backed candidates; without the small-party lines, none of the victorious council candidates would have won in 2019.

Lefkaditis took exception to the reference “Republican-backed” to describe himself and the candidates who had run with him in 2017 and 2019 but were members of various parties. Knox, in which more than one-third of voters are enrolled Democrats, has about the same number of unaffiliated voters (26 percent) as enrolled Republicans (24 percent). The rest belong to small parties.

“Candidates shouldn’t be in any party,” Lefkatidis said on Election Night 2019. “Candidates should be U.S. citizens.” He said this should apply to elections from the local level to the national level, “even in the presidential race.” He went on, “The party system is dividing the country.”

The Lefkaditis slate drove home one of his primary initiatives since he came into office, which was the establishment of a new business-friendly district in the town. After four years of debate and failed votes on various iterations of the district, the board unanimously voted to establish an 80-acre Multi-use Recreation District at the junction of routes 156 and 157. 

However, Lefkaditis has been divisive among residents, some of whom have taken exception to what can at times be a blustering leadership style. 

Residents criticize Lefkaditis’s aggressive manner, calling him a bully or brute, while others praise him for directness. Still others have targeted him for continuously failing to file financial reports with the state comptroller on time.

In 2019, the Knox Town Board voted to censure Lefkaditis for stating previously that he had filed certain financial reports when in fact he hadn’t. Lefkaditis voted in favor of the censure, saying he wasn’t afraid to apologize, but has maintained that he didn’t lie and only made a mistake.

In January 2019, the town board’s GOP-backed members caused widespread public outcry when they replaced transfer-station workers, violating Civil Service Law in the process; the two Democrats still on the board had voted against the ouster.

Wary residents have also cast their eye on Lefkaditis’s work in the private sector as an investor. In 2017, a political foe brought to light three customer complaints that were made against Lefkaditis in the 1990s, when he was working as a stockbroker. The complaints related to apparent misrepresentation of investments. Those complaints led to out-of-court settlements.

Lefkaditis responded to that criticism at the time by saying that he himself had been lied to by investment bankers.

“I got lied to. You’re relying on investment bankers and public files. When it turns out they lied, they sued everybody,” he said in 2017 of the people who had bought stocks from him. “The investment bankers and underwriters were sued for a lot more.”