Mt. Pleasant Settles the Sleepy Hollow Lawsuit By Agreeing to District Voting

By Barrett Seaman—

The subdued mood in the Mt. Pleasant Town Hall meeting room, on Tuesday, March 10, 2026 was a far cry from the electrically charged—and angry—tenor that Town Council members faced on November 16, 2023. Then, the proverbial torches and pitchforks were on display as speaker after speaker in the public comment section of the meeting rose to denounce the lawsuit brought by five Latino residents of Sleepy Hollow calling for a change in the way elections were held.

Charging that the existing “at-large” voting system systemically diluted the votes of Latinos, who make up roughly half Sleepy Hollow’s voting population, the plaintiffs asserted that the current method violated the state’s new John L. Lewis Voting Rights Act. If that system were not amended in a way that gave minorities at least a chance to put candidates favored by community members, they would sue.

Opponents, many residents of Republican-dominated villages and hamlets in Mt. Pleasant, urged the Council not to give in to the pressure. “Ninety-eight percent of the people wanted us to pursue [a vigorous defense],” Town Supervisor Carl Fulgenzi would recall two and a half years later. “A very small number wanted us to fall down and take it.”

And so they fought, rejecting calls to switch to rank-choice voting or some sort of ward system, and hiring the nationally prominent (and expensive) law firm of Baker Hostetler to fight the suit. In the end, following the capitulation of the Town of Newburgh NY in a very similar case brought by Abrams Fensterman LLP, the same law firm representing the Sleepy Hollow residents, the Mt. Pleasant board agreed to a settlement that will change the town’s at-large system to a system that will subdivide Mt. Pleasant into three districts—one of them essentially the Village of Sleepy Hollow—that will elect their own Council members.

“This was a very hard-fought case,” Fulgenzi explained to a hearing room occupied by no more than a third the crowd that had gathered in the fall of 2023. “We spent two years working on this. The Town board had a very difficult moment. It got to the point where we had to stop the bleeding,” the Supervisor admitted. “We don’t want to spend any more taxpayer dollars.”

Indeed, the ill-fated defense of the status quo cost the town $1.4 million for its own legal fees, plus another $1.46 million to reimburse the plaintiffs for their lawyers, as stipulated in the Voting Rights Act. A chunk of that bill will be picked up by the town’s insurers, the Supervisor stressed, but as one of the speakers commented, that was still a lot of money just to find out how such cases would be treated in the courts.

A handful of speakers who chose to address the Council Members seemed most interested in hearing an explanation of how the decision to fold came about. Only one, Carlo Valente of Hawthorne, a conservative Republican who had challenged Mary Jane Shimsky for her seat on the State Legislature, exuded more in body language than in words to convey his undiluted displeasure with the decision.

Another speaker probed Council Member Mark Saracino, originally a vehement  opponent of a settlement, for an explanation of why he wanted to pursue the case and what caused him to give in.

Saracino argued that because the Sleepy Hollow suit was one of the first, if not the first, municipality to challenge what was at the time a brand new law, he felt an obligation to put it to the test. “There was no way for me to fully understand that law,” he said, “without going through the courts.”

For him, the turning point was the Newburgh decision after which, he said, “we started to realize that the path to victory was very narrow.”

As the Council had voted unanimously to fight the case back in early 2024, so the five members present in March of 2026 voted unanimously to settle.

The agreement negotiated with Abrams Fensterman lawyer David Imamura calls for Mt. Pleasant’s population of roughly 45,000 to be subdivided into three approximately equal “districts,” each separately electing six (up from four) Council Members. Sleepy Hollow (or most of it, as a portion will be shaved off to bring it closer to the population of the other districts) will elect its own member, as will the Village of Pleasantville. The remaining communities—or hamlets) will be combined to form a third district that will elect four members.

The Supervisor and other elected administrative officials will continue to be chosen by the entire Township. As explained by the Town’s attorney, Darius Chafizedah, the adjustment to the new system will begin in the fall of 2027 elections, when the seats now held by members Danielle Zaino and Mark Saracino will (if they choose) vie for two of the four seats in the district comprised of the unincorporated districts. Separately, the Sleepy Hollow and Pleasantville districts will vote to fill one seat each. All these seats will be up for grabs again in November 2030 for terms beginning in January 2031.

In January of 2029, seats occupied by Thomas Sialiano and Joe Bonnanno will be up for a vote in the hamlet district. “These were 3-year seats because of the change in the election year to even years,” Chafizadeh explained in an email.  “That election will take place in November 2028.  The term is four years and the next election will be Nov 2032 for the term to begin on Jan 1, 2033.”

“This staggers the seats,” the attorney explained, “so there is continuity on the board.”

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