LOCAL LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS GROUP TO DISBAND

After nearly six decades of serving area voters, the League of Women Voters of Northeast Westchester (LWVNEW) will cease operations at the end of the fiscal year. The LWVNEW Board has voted to disband the organization, effective end of business on June 30.

“This decision was not made lightly,” said LWVNEW President Lisa Pizzurro. “For several years, LWVNEW has been punching above its weight. We’ve provided extensive local voter services, such as candidate forums and voter registration drives, but it has been difficult to get it all done.”

Several members of the LWVNEW Board decided to move on at the end of their terms. Said Pizzurro, “No one is resigning or quitting. But several of us decided not to serve again when our terms expire at the end of June.”

In the wake of the vote to disband, the group has continued to fulfill its remaining voter service commitments, including two local school board candidate forums and student voter registration at two area high schools. LWVNEW also sponsored a student participant in the League of Women Voters of New York State’s Students Inside Albany conference and welcomed new citizens at this month’s Naturalization Ceremony in White Plains.

LWVNEW began as the League of Women Voters of Bedford. Over the decades, it grew to encompass Bedford, Lewisboro, North Salem, Mount Kisco and Pound Ridge, with some additional voter service in the town of Somers in recent years.

“I cannot adequately express the sadness many of us are feeling,” continued Pizzurro. “This group has been around in one form or another since 1966 and this marks the end of an era. Our members were notified at the end of April. Now that our spring voter service activities have concluded, we are notifying the community. If this comes as a surprise, that’s a credit to our organization and its volunteers.”

Although LWVNEW will cease to exist on July 1, current members have been instructed that they will be able to join another area league or become members-at-large of the New York State League. “It remains to be seen if the communities currently served by LWVNEW will be covered by other League entities,” continued Pizzurro. “We cover a large part of the county and it is a tall order to expect other leagues to fill all the voter service gaps left in our wake. This is part of what makes our decision so difficult.

“That said, I’m proud of our group. We accomplished a lot and we kept our focus very local; it was always important to us that we concentrate on informing and educating the voters in the towns we cover and I think we were pretty successful at that.”

LWVNEW’s social media accounts will soon become inactive but the group’s website, www.LWVNEW.org, should remain active for the foreseeable future, pointing visitors toward available voter services.

Concluded Pizzurro: “There are too many people to thank individually but let me take this opportunity to publicly thank my fellow Board members and Nominating Committee members for their hard work. We are grateful to all our members, past and present, for their contributions. Everyone who is, or was, a member has helped make a difference in the communities we serve. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”