Albany County Dems to host attorney candidate forum
At a live-streamed forum Monday evening, three candidates for the vacant County and Prosecuting Attorney seat will field questions from party officials and members of the public.
In less than two weeks, Albany County will have a new County and Prosecuting Attorney, following the resignation of Peggy Trent earlier this month.
While that role is an elected position, Trent’s early vacation has triggered a party and county process to appoint a replacement who will serve the remaining 19 months of the four-year term.
The Albany County Democratic Central Committee has most likely identified the three candidates it will submit to the county government for final selection, as just three individuals applied during the party’s call for resumes last week.
But that doesn’t mean the party — and community members — are passive observers in the process. The party plans to announce those three candidates later this week, crowdsource comments and questions from community members, and host a candidate forum Monday.
A nine-member screening committee — originally convened for the ultimately unnecessary task of narrowing the pool of candidates to three — is now evaluating the three candidates and preparing for the upcoming forum.
“As Albany County Democrats, we believe in transparency and in hearing from the voice of the community,” Albany County Democrats Chair Carrie Murthy said. “The screening committee is going to focus on developing the questions for the public forum. We’re interested in public feedback: public input on what kinds of things are important to the community, and what kind of questions should we be asking.”
Murthy said the party will also soon release details and bios for the nine members of the screening committee, but adds that they have “unique perspectives and expertise.”
The party’s central committee, its governing body, will meet two days after the forum on May 19, voting on what candidates they will send to the Albany County Commission for final approval. The central committee is required by state law to send a list of “three persons qualified to fill the vacancy” to the county commission, meaning that the three current applicants are likely to be the three candidates submitted.
However, the county’s selection from among those three candidates is still in Democratic hands, as the Democrats hold a majority of the three-member county commission. The Commissioners have five days to choose who will fill the vacancy and step into the role of County and Prosecuting Attorney.
That role serves two main functions: bringing criminal, misdemeanor or juvenile cases on behalf of the state, and serving as legal counsel for the county, the commissioners and some other county officials.
The Democratic Party, both nationally and locally, is home to various factions with different visions for the future of their communities. The last county attorney, for example, was both praised by some party members and criticized by others for her handling of the Colling grand jury in 2019.
“We’re a big-tent party so certainly there’s people who have specific priorities in one particular area and others who might have slightly different priorities,” Murthy said. “Of course, generally, we find alignment on a lot of things.”
One of those areas of agreement, Murthy said, is supporting the reforms Trent was known for.
“One of the things Peggy Trent really got right was her work with juvenile justice,” Murthy said. “So we would like to see in our candidates their vision for the office, and what kind of alignment they might have with what Peggy Trent has done already — what they might build on, what they might keep, and that sort of thing.”
This is the second time in less than a calendar year that an earlier resignation has forced the county to fill a vacancy in an elected role. In November, former Sheriff Dave O’Malley — re-elected alongside Trent in 2018 — resigned from his role, triggering a similar replacement process for the county and for the Democrats.
“When Sheriff Dave O’Malley resigned, that was a big deal — and we had comments as we were going through the process that this was a once-in-a-lifetime challenge, and that sort of thing,” Murthy said. “And then six months later … it’s like when the 100-year flood hits two years in a row.”
The public candidate forum will be live-streamed May 17 at 7 p.m. Details on how to tune in will be released later this week, alongside instructions for submitting questions for the candidates.
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