Harckham and Arena to Square Off in 40th Senate District

WESTCHESTER COUNTY, N.Y. - When voters head to the polls on Nov. 5, they will decide the race for a seat in the 40th Senate District, with Sen. Pete Harckham (D, WF) once again being challenged by Gina Arena (R, CON). 

Before Election Day, Halston Media is offering readers the opportunity to learn more about the candidates and to hear in their own words what they see as the most important issues facing the district. (Candidates are listed in alphabetical order.) 

GINA ARENA 

Arena was born in Mount Kisco and grew up in Bedford, Pound Ridge, and Vista. The mother of eight works as an administrative assistant with Westchester County. She lives in the Lake Purdys area of Somers with Her husband, Jim, a volunteer firefighter.

Prior to her current job, she ran a plumbing business with her spouse. She graduated from John Jay High School in Cross River and secretarial school. She is working on her college degree.

Her community activism began with the Girl Scouts. When her autistic daughter wasn’t getting the education she needed, Arena developed a program for her. This resulted in the creation of the Foundation for Educating Children With Autism and the Devereux Millwood Learning Center.

When her 6-year-old son died of brain cancer she and her husband established the Just Imagine Making Miracles Yours (J.I.M.M.Y.) Foundation, which provides the families of seriously ill children with financial assistant for non-insured medical costs, transportation, food, medical resources, and more. One of her daughters served in the U.S. Army in Afghanistan.

Arena, who calls herself an “old-fashioned Roosevelt-Eisenhower Republican,” has also advocated for the rights of veterans and seniors.

Proposition 1 has been a divisive issue among residents. Please explain your position, and why you view this as a key issue for voters. 

Prop 1 isn’t what it purports to be. It’s a carelessly worded ballot proposal that was passed by progressives without a single public hearing. 

Legal experts warn that adding new, nebulous discrimination categories to our State Constitution will open up a Pandora’s Box of Constitutional legal challenges based on age, national origin, gender identity, gender expression, and other added categories. 

As a mother of six girls, my biggest concern is what this amendment would do to Girls Sports in New York. In short, it would end them, providing a Constitutional mandate for boys and biological males to compete in Girls Sports. (The State Board of Regents is actively trying to merge Girls and Boys Sports as well.)

Girls work hard to get on sports teams, and many dream of earning athletic scholarships to college, but that will all be jeopardized if they are forced to compete against boys and other biological males. This is a clear issue of common sense and fairness; there is nothing logical or fair about what New York State progressives are planning.   

Please summarize your stance on our country’s approach to immigration, and how it affects your constituents. If elected, how will you approach this issue in the coming year?

New York officials just acknowledged that the illegal migrant crisis will cost New Yorkers an estimated $12 billion (tax dollars) over the next three years alone. If you add up every penny that SD-40 voters pay annually in state income taxes, the total dollar amount fails to pay for a single year of New York City migrant hotel and housing costs. Think about that. 

New Yorkers have enormous hearts, but we have real needs of our own. Our road infrastructure is a mess, special needs families aren’t getting enough help, senior centers need rebuilding, and vital school projects go unfunded. At the same time, our taxes are through the roof; healthcare, energy, and insurance costs are some of the most expensive in the nation, and the price of everyday goods remains stubbornly high. 

The obvious solution to New York’s migrant crisis is ending the Sanctuary State policies that are attracting migrants here — approximately 200,000 in the past year alone. 

The growing Venezuelan gang crisis is another reason to wake up. Billions of tax dollars, needed for other things, are now funding illegal migrant gangs throughout the state. Police officers are under siege in some precincts. And we’re paying for this? It’s sheer lunacy. 

What else do you consider to be the most pressing issues within the 40th district? How will you address them during the next term? 

Affordability. Affordability. Affordability. New Yorkers have a 27% higher cost of living than residents of other states - and that’s New York as a whole. The cost of living is far higher in Westchester, Putnam, and Rockland, three of the most expensive counties in the state. The cost of housing statewide is 80% higher than other states. It’s worse in the Hudson Valley. 

It’s no surprise, then, that the cost of living is the number one concern of New Yorkers, just as it has been for more than a decade. So what have our current crop of elected leaders done about it? They’ve made it worse with ever-higher taxes and fees.

The failed $15 Congestion Pricing Tax was their latest attempt to squeeze more hard-earned money out of us. That fiasco cost taxpayers more than half a billion tax dollars in license plate reading technology that will never be used.

We’ve also got to get illegal handguns off the street again. Just a generation ago, New York employed the most effective crime-fighting strategy in modern memory. “Broken Windows” policing focused on smaller crimes to forestall larger ones. When we stopped these smaller crimes, police officers were able to take thousands of illegal handguns off the street during the arrest process. We need to bring back common sense — on everything.

PETE HARCKHAM

Harckham was elected to the New York State Senate in 2018 and re-elected in 2020 and 2022. Previously, he was elected to the Westchester County Legislature, where he served for eight years and was a two-term Democratic majority leader.

Harckham now chairs the Senate Environmental Conservation Committee and is a member of a number of other committees including the Alcoholism and Substance Abuse, which he chaired for four years and worked to expand prevention and treatment.

Harckham lived in Rockland County for most of his childhood. He attended Clarkstown High School North and graduated from Dickinson College.

He lives in South Salem with his longtime partner, Jin-Hee Stevens, and has two adult daughters.

Harckham served on the President’s Council for the Northern Westchester Hospital and was a board member for the United Way of Westchester and Putnam, the Junior League of Northern Westchester Community Advisory Council, and the Livable Communities Council.

Prior to assuming elected office, Harckham was president of a not-for-profit housing corporation in northern Westchester. He had also served as vice chair of the Clarence E. Heller Charitable Foundation, a San Francisco-based private foundation that supports the sustainable management of natural resources.

In 2015, Harckham was appointed by Gov. Cuomo as assistant director of the Office of Community Renewal, responsible for the rollout and implementation of a special allotment of $4.3M in Community Development Block Grant funding for Westchester municipalities. He later served for two years as the director of Intergovernmental Affairs for the Gov. Mario M. Cuomo Bridge project.

The 40th Senate District includes the towns of Carmel, Kent, Patterson and Southeast, and the village of Brewster in Putnam County; the town of Stony Point in Rockland County; and the city of Peekskill, the towns of Bedford, Cortlandt, Lewisboro, New Castle, North Salem, Somers and Yorktown, the towns/villages of Mount Kisco and Ossining, and the villages of Briarcliff Manor, Buchanan and Croton-on-Hudson in Westchester County.

Proposition 1 has been a divisive issue among residents. Please explain your position, and why you view this as a key issue for voters. 

Proposition 1—the Equal Rights Amendment—will prohibit our state government from passing laws or regulations that create barriers to women’s reproductive healthcare freedom. Simple as that. When New York’s Reproductive Health Act was passed in 2019, anti-abortionists said it was unnecessary because federal protections already guaranteed a woman’s right to choose. In 2024, we know better.

The Equal Rights Amendment also makes sure the state government cannot discriminate on the basis of gender, age, disability, pregnancy status, national origin, ethnicity and sexual determination. Right now, the state constitution only provides protections based on race, creed (or set of beliefs), color and religion. Expanding this list makes perfect sense: there should be no place in New York for state-sanctioned discrimination of any kind. 

Girls Sports don’t need saving; they are protected by a federal law, Title IX. The Equal Rights Amendment will not eliminate single-sex sports and open locker rooms to the opposite sex. Claims otherwise are not supported by facts. 

Lastly, the fear mongering and transgender phobia stirred up by Proposition 1 have certainly revealed an ugly, hateful side of humanity. Let’s strive to be the better angels in our communities.

Please summarize your stance on our country’s approach to immigration, and how it affects your constituents. If reelected, how will you approach this issue in the coming year?

The migrant situation that New York faces right now cannot be ignored. But it is entirely the federal government’s responsibility, not the state’s, to control the influx of people coming into our country.

Meanwhile, where was the outrage when Republican governors were illegally sending tens of thousands of people against their will to New York? Where was the outrage when Republicans who represent New York in Congress refuse to provide funding to care for people who are coming to our municipalities, which would provide relief, in turn, to the taxpayers? 

And where was the outrage when the Republicans in Congress, on Donald Trump’s orders, refused to pass the bipartisan immigration reform bill that would have finally fixed our broken immigration system?

So, as a person of faith, when we have people living in our community who are in need, I feel I have an obligation to provide them with food, clothing and shelter. That’s what we do in New York.

This is a problem completely generated by a broken federal immigration system and cynical politics, where people put political gain ahead of human pain and suffering.

What else do you consider to be the most pressing issues within the 40th district? How will you address them during the next term? 

Affordability remains an important issue for residents, and it will continue to be a top priority. I have been tackling “pocketbook issues” all along—like cutting middle-class taxes five times in the past six years, giving middle-class New Yorkers their lowest tax rates in 70 years. I have doubled the senior property tax exemption threshold to $50,000, added $350 million in child tax credits and increased state aid to Senate District 40 schools by $210 million while delivering $30 million in discretionary funding to local municipalities, first responders and nonprofit service providers—all of which has helped to hold down local property taxes.

Keeping our communities safe is another top priority. I will continue to support our local police, firefighters and EMS with discretionary funding while helping to enact bills like the Red Flag Law to remove guns from people deemed to be a threat to themselves and others. Extended background checks, ghost gun bans, safe storage, violence prevention programs—all initiatives I have helped to pass.

Fighting climate change and protecting our environment means transitioning to clean energy sources. As chair of the Senate Environmental Conservation Committee, I have protected our fragile drinking water supplies and wetlands, stopped radiological waste dumping into the Hudson River and helped municipalities jumpstart community renewable energy projects.