By Anne White
For the first time in years, Greenwich Republicans will decide their nominees for the Board of Estimate and Taxation (BET) in a contested primary… and it’s complicated.
The election on Tuesday, September 9 will determine which six of twelve Republican candidates advance to the November ballot.
Early voting begins Tuesday, September 2 at Town Hall, and absentee ballots are already available from the Town Clerk.
The BET is among the most powerful boards in town government, responsible for Greenwich’s $500-million budget.
The ballot is not simple. While six names appear with an asterisk to mark them as “endorsed” by the Republican Town Committee (RTC), those endorsements are split between two slates.
According to the official ballot, the candidates are:
Column A (endorsed RTC candidates): David Alfano; Nisha Arora; Sally Eddy Bednar; Harry Fisher; Lucia D. Jansen; Joe Pellegrino.
Column B (petition candidates): Joshua Brown; Alessandra Brus; Philip Dodson; John S. Hopley; Joe Kelly; Leslie Tarkington
The official RTC endorsements only tell part of the story. The actual slates are those described as aligned with the previous RTC leadership: David Alfano, Nisha Arora, Lucia Jansen, Alessandra Brus, Philip Dodson, and John Hopley.
And those described as aligned with the current RTC leadership: Sally Bednar, Joshua Brown, Harry Fisher, Joe Kelly, Joe Pellegrino, and Leslie Tarkington.
In a reported effort to unify the party, the RTC split its official endorsements between the two factions, endorsing three from each side. According to insiders, the group supporting Alfano, Arora, and Jansen were unhappy with this scenario and decided to force a primary.
In response, Bednar, Fisher, and Pellegrino prepared a slate that includes Kelly, Tarkington, and Brown and which has since been endorsed by First Selectman Fred Camillo and Selectwoman Lauren Rabin.
For voters, that means the actual September 9 ballot does not appear as a clean “slate versus slate” contest. Instead, the outcome depends on which six candidates emerge with the most votes.
For those involved, there are full slates worth supporting.
“Ours is a slate that can get elected in November, which is the important thing,” one campaign organizer said of the RTC leadership’s preferred team: Bednar, Brown, Fisher, Kelly, Pellegrino, and Tarkington. “It’s a slate that has listened to what’s gone on in the last year and realized changes need to be made, we need more bipartisanship and town unity. And it’s a slate that has broad town and financial experience.”
Education is one of the issue that most concerns residents. New candidate for the BET, Joe Kelly was chosen unanimously by both parties when he chaired the Board of Education. And Joshua Brown has chaired the RTM’s Education and Finance Committees and currently chairs the RTM Labor Contracts Committee.
In a letter published in the Greenwich Patch, the other faction — Alfano, Arora, Jansen, Brus, Dodson, and Hopley — is framing their own slate as “outsiders” and “independent thinkers” against those who are too friendly with Democrats. But critics describe their approach as divisive.
“I think we can certainly find synergies and savings within the school board, but you’ve got to work with them. You just can’t say, we’re cutting $4 million. And you guys f igure it out.”
Many in the party believe that the stakes are not just about who sits on the BET. They are about whether Greenwich Republicans emerge from September with a slate that emphasizes unity and bipartisanship — or whether the divisions that have marked the past two years deepen further.
