Irondequoit supervisor sues to get on ballot, ordered to keep working remotely
Irondequoit Supervisor Andrae Evans is suing the Monroe County Board of Elections in a bid to be on the Democratic primary ballot.
Meanwhile, a judge ruled Friday that Evans must, for now, continue to work remotely, as he has been ordered to do by a resolution from the town board. State Supreme Court Justice Elena Cariola decided Friday that Evans could fulfill his duties remotely and that the actions from the town board don't hamstring him in that job.
Evans can successfully work remotely, whether in virtual meetings or addressing town issues, Cariola said. "He can do whatever he needs to from home," she said.
Attorneys for Evans have argued that he cannot carry out his duties from home and that the town board illegally placed the restrictions on Evans with a resolution. The law does not allow such severe steps from a resolution, attorneys contended, but Cariola differed and decided the town board was within its rights.
Evans is now battling both the town board, which decided he violated the town's sexual harassment and anti-retaliation policies, and the Monroe County Board of Elections, which determined he fell short of the needed petition signatures to be on the primary ballot.
Evans has pushed back against the allegations of harassment from town employees, who alleged in an investigation by a law firm that he made inappropriate comments, some laced with sexual innuendo. He also is accused of retaliation against complainants.
In his bid to be on the primary ballot, Evans needed 500 signatures of enrolled Democrats. He turned in 617, but the board decided, after objections to the petitions, that 128 were invalid.
That left Evans with 489 signatures. In his lawsuit he argues that his petitions do include at least 500 valid signatures.
Irondequoit Town Board member John Perticone is also seeking the Democratic nomination for town supervisor and has the backing of the town's Democratic committee.
The town board has called for Evans to resign, but he has refused.
This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Andrae Evans sues to get on ballot, ordered to keep working remotely
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It will ultimately be Congress, he said, that decides how much funding NIOSH gets. "These are things that were done by the DOGE people, and they were people who didn't have the same experience of dealing with the overall budget as we do up here," Risch said, noting that employees at the Department of Government Efficiency have admitted that they have made mistakes. "When we sat down with the DOGE guys, they said, 'Look, we were given a job. We went and did this job. We understand you guys are experts on this. When we're done, it's going to be up to you,'" Risch said. "What we're going to do is take a healthy look at what these jobs entail. It's going to be looked at seriously and responsibly through the appropriations process." Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, has been less patient with Kennedy and DOGE, which was spearheaded by billionaire Elon Musk before his public falling-out with Trump last week. In an interview on Wednesday, the Washington senator said she has repeatedly tried and failed to reach the HHS secretary's team, joking that they must have also fired everyone who answered the phones. "We are looking at all the options, obviously, for next year," Murray said. "Writing our appropriations bills, looking at language, working in a bipartisan way, to make sure that funds that we, Congress, decide are appropriated will actually have to be implemented by the administration." The Spokane Research Lab also has support in the House from Rep. Michael Baumgartner, a Spokane Republican who has written two letters calling on Kennedy to reconsider the termination of its employees and visited the facility on Tuesday. Baumgartner's office didn't say whether he had received a response to either letter from the HHS secretary. The Spokane facility's nationwide reach has earned it support from other influential Republicans in Congress, including Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota. In a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing on March 20, Rounds told Kennedy that terminating NIOSH jobs in Spokane had resulted in the loss of a $1.2 million mine safety grant to the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, which also relies on NIOSH for "critical technical support." "We need to protect our miners," Kennedy replied, pledging to work with Rounds' office. "We need to protect them because they are the future of our country." In a hearing of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, Murkowski asked Trump's nominee to lead the Occupational Safety and Health Administration — a regulatory agency that relies on NIOSH research — how he would do his job without data from NIOSH. The nominee, David Keeling, replied that it would be difficult, but he would consider replacing NIOSH with "private entities." Asked why she thinks the Trump administration eliminated the NIOSH jobs, Murkowski told The Spokesman-Review on Thursday, "They were looking for cuts, and as we've seen in many departments, it seems somewhat indiscriminate and arbitrary." "I think what we're working through still is some of the DOGE recommendations, where you're not fully appreciating the role and the function of many of these federal employees," she said. "My hope is that they're going to be actually looking at this now and realizing we need this information." Murkowski said she has stressed to Kennedy how important NIOSH is for Alaska's commercial fisheries. Another concern, she said, is that valuable researchers could choose to leave public service while their jobs are in limbo. "When you are sending the signal to that federal employee that maybe what you've been doing is not what we want to continue, people are making their own determinations and leaving, and now we've got all these vacancies," Murkowski said. "I think you're going to see a resettling. I just don't know when." After earning an engineering degree at the Colorado School of Mines, Stazick worked in the private sector before she took a job with NIOSH at the Spokane Research Laboratory in 2020. She knew it would mean taking a pay cut but liked working to improve workers' safety, not just a company's bottom line. "It was a really big incentive for me to go and take a big pay cut and go into the public sector," said Stazick, 27. "With this engineering degree that I could be using to make someone a bunch of money, it just felt nice that the work I was doing was affecting people's lives and safety." NIOSH named Stazick one of its "rising stars" in 2022, and she developed her expertise in the corrosion of metal support structures for underground mines. She worked with miners to replace bolts that were corroding within six months — causing roof failures — with more durable materials. "It's just upsetting," she said of the mass layoffs. "I'm at a career transition point again. I had found something I was really passionate about. So, yeah, the whole thing has been upsetting." Stazick's colleague Brad Seymour, another mining engineer and union steward, is at the other end of his career. When he started at the Spokane facility in 1986, it was run by the now-defunct U.S. Bureau of Mines. He planned to work for about one more year, to make it an even 40. "The thing that's discouraging about it is that I don't think it was discussed well within the leadership," Seymour said of the mass firing. "So it came as a shock to everybody. And because of that, the cuts were not handled in a very thoughtful manner." Seymour has dedicated his career to helping miners prevent collapses and "rock bursts" caused by the extreme pressure in deep underground mines. That's in the interest of mining companies, but he said the engineers working for companies don't have the time or the incentives to do the kind of research that happens at NIOSH, which benefits the whole industry. Coeur d'Alene-based Hecla Mining was forced to close its Lucky Friday Mine in Mullan for more than a year and spend over $30 million in improvements after accidents killed two miners and injured seven more in 2011. A spokesman for Hecla declined to comment on NIOSH research. Early in his career, Seymour worked to improve cemented backfill methods — where miners fill underground voids with mill tailings and other material to prevent cave-ins — at the Cannon Mine in Wenatchee. Those improvements, he said, were adopted by mining companies around the world and helped fuel a gold-mining boom in Nevada in the 1990s. Just like those benefits to the mining industry, the negative effects of ending NIOSH research could take years to be borne out, the workers in Spokane warned. Art Miller, who retired from the Spokane Mining Research Division at the end of 2020, started his career by working to reduce diesel emissions that were harming miners deep underground, then the government paid for him to go back to school and earn a doctorate in particle science. He became the resident expert in silica dust, the airborne form of the mineral also called quartz, which is abundant in hard-rock mines. When inhaled, it can cause silicosis, an incurable lung disease that leads to severe breathing problems and sometimes to death. "When you're drilling and blasting and crushing these materials, you're going to have a lot of silica in the air, but you don't know how much, because there's no way to measure it easily," Miller said. "You can take a sample and send it to a lab, which is the current, standard way of doing it, but most people often don't bother to do that, because it's a pain in the butt and takes a long time. By the time they get the results back, it might not be meaningful to what they were doing the day that it happened." For years, Miller sought support to develop a portable, real-time silica monitor, similar to the gas monitors commonly worn by coal miners. He finally secured funding soon before he retired, and hired an engineer to continue the work. The project had made good progress, Miller said, but that work is "man-on-the-moon kind of research" that the mining industry won't fund on its own. "The private sector is dollar-driven," he said. "There's no way they're going to do it unless they absolutely know it's going to make money for them. Normally and historically, they're not motivated to do it." The work of preventing diseases like silicosis also falls on the public sector, Miller said, because the worst symptoms often don't emerge until years after a worker retires. While people can die from silicosis — 12,900 do each year, a 2019 study found — it more commonly causes disability and makes affected people more susceptive to other diseases, like tuberculosis. "They usually just have a horrible life and maybe die early, so it's not a real problem for the operator, for the mining guy," Miller said. "He's not going to see the ugliness of it. That's going to be when they're my age, and they're having trouble breathing, and they end up dying 10 years earlier than they otherwise would have. By then, they're long gone from where they worked, and there's no responsibility tied to the people who put them through that." Orion Donovan Smith's work is funded in part by members of the Spokane community via the Community Journalism and Civic Engagement Fund. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact our newspaper's managing editor.
