Upper East Side Community Board Chair Re-Elected Over Challenge

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — The chair of the Upper East Side's community board was re-elected to a second term on Wednesday, overcoming a challenge from another longtime member.

Members of Community Board 8 chose Russell Squire to lead them for another one-year term in 2022. Squire defeated Ed Hartzog with 33 votes to Hartzog's 14.

Squire, an attorney, was first elected to the volunteer position last fall. Since then, he has been the face of CB8's opposition to the New York Blood Center rezoning, and said he has striven to run meetings fairly, tried to forge consensus and diversified the board's leadership with new members and people of color.

"A lot of this job is showing up from beginning to end, and I've done that every time," he told the board before the vote.

Hartzog, also an attorney, has co-chaired the board's housing committee for seven years. Board chair was not the first office he has sought: he ran for City Council in 2013, finishing in third behind winner Ben Kallos, and sought a neighborhood Assembly seat in 2014, coming in fourth in a race won by Rebecca Seawright.

In his own pitch, Hartzog did not lay out any issues with Squire's leadership. He said he would hold more executive committee meetings to foster discussion among committee chairs, work to facilitate debate rather than participate in it, and work harder to shorten the board's hourslong meetings. (Squire countered that full-board and land-use meetings have gotten 9 percent shorter in his tenure, according to his review of the board's YouTube videos.)

Besides weighing in on neighborhood issues like development and public safety, community boards have historically served as a launching pad for people with political ambitions. Kallos spent seven years on CB8 before his election to the City Council, and Squire has publicly stated that he will run for State Assembly if East Side lawmaker Dan Quart does not seek re-election.