Shields won't run again for mayor, quits Democratic Party

John Shields is hanging it up in Nyack.

Mayor John Shields, who has served as the river village's mayor for eight years and who became one of the state's first openly gay elected officials, announced yesterday that he would not seek re-election.

"I think four terms are enough as mayor and three terms as trustee," he said yesterday. "I'm looking forward to new leadership and new ideas and new blood."

I've talked to just about every qualified Democrat in Nyack and unfortunately nobody wants the job (people in the village would elect a corpse before they'd elect a Republican). In fact, the reason why Shields was able to remain mayor so long was that he never had a serious challenger. And let's not kid ourselves, Shields was an extremely unpopular mayor who did a lot of silly and indulgent things while in office while ignoring terrible planning mistakes downtown.

Now that he's leaving, Shields thinks he's going to take the Democratic Party down with him:

The Mayor is also planning to leave the Democratic Party to be an Independent. He feels that neither party is supporting the GLBT (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender) community. He urges all in the GLBT to move away from the Democratic Party.

I take exception to Shields parting shots to the Democrats. Many local and regional Democrats now seeking office support gay marriage and the Democratic Party has, for years, fought for civil rights for gays.

I think that Shields is turning in his Dem badge because he was caught contributing campaign and financial support to Republican candidates, like NYS Senator Thomas P. Morahan. The Democratic Committee was prepared to boot him out if he didn't resign his committee membership (he resigned it last winter). Sorry, you can't belong to an organization that's sole purpose is to support Democratic candidates and ideals and turn around and support the opposition. Mayor Shields isn't being transparent in his reasons for leaving the Democratic Party, and his leaving seems to be to be a bad case of sour grapes!