A Fired City Council Aide Takes Aim at Yonkers Democratic Machine

In February, a longtime Yonkers City Council aide announced her campaign for Westchester’s county legislature. She was fired the next day.

Her offense was to run against the local Democratic party’s pick for the seat. 

“If you are a political appointee, you live by the sword and you die by the sword,” Yonkers Democratic Committee Chair Thomas G. Meier told the Hudson Valley Digger, which first reported the firing.

The upstart candidate, Leslye Oquendo-Thomas, continued her bid against former City Council Majority Leader Wilson Terrero — and lost by only four votes in the June primary.

Next Tuesday, she’ll get another chance.

She’s running against Terrero as the Working Families Party candidate, hoping to become the third politician in New York to ever beat a Democrat on the progressive party’s ballot line in a general election.

The race will test the power of a political machine that has reigned over New York’s third largest city for decades. As New York Focus examined last year, Yonkers Mayor Mike Spano has built a far-reaching political network that has handed out city jobs to dozens of the mayor’s relatives, stacked the city council and party organization with allies, and racked up accusations of retaliation against political opponents.

Spano has endorsed Terrero and financially supported his campaign. “If you want to be successful you need good partnerships,” Spano said in an endorsement video this week. “I could have never accomplished the things I’ve accomplished here in Yonkers without his support.”

Oquendo-Thomas says her race is a chance to break the stranglehold on Yonkers politics.

“The Spano machine controls everything in the city. It controls people’s jobs, and if you control people’s jobs, that means pretty much everything,” said Oquendo-Thomas. “Instead of encouraging civic engagement, they wanted to bully people away from running.”

Neither Terrero nor Spano responded to requests for comment.

Westchester’s 17-member Board of Legislators is the county’s main decision-making body, responsible for appropriating county funds, approving the budget, and acting as a check on the county executive. The board, much like the county at large, is solidly Democratic.

Oquendo-Thomas and Terrero are competing for an open seat in the county’s 17th district, a largely working-class, Latino area in southwest Yonkers. 

“The thing about Yonkers is that it’s a center of gravity for Westchester County,” said Jennifer Cabrera, a state co-chair of the New York Working Families Party. “If she wins, it shows that the machine does not have the grip on Yonkers that people have believed it always does.”

Terrero, a city employee who served as majority leader of the Yonkers City Council before Councilmember Corazon Pineda-Isaac unseated him in 2013, does not have a website outlining his policy positions. Instead, a link on his Instagram page, which is filled with endorsements, including Spano’s, connects to a donation platform.

Oquendo-Thomas, a former United Nations employee, was a legislative aide to Pineda-Isaac for 12 years before she launched her campaign with a platform focused on affordability and free buses in Southwest Yonkers. 

Before publicizing her bid, Oquendo-Thomas says she approached Meier, the Yonkers Democratic Committee chair, in December to let him know she planned to run. According to Oquendo-Thomas, Meier asked her to stand down because the party had already planned to put its weight behind Terrero.

Meier did not respond to a request for comment from New York Focus. In the interview with the Hudson Valley Digger, Meier said Oquendo-Thomas had “gone against the party several times,” referring in part to the 2023 Yonkers mayoral election, when she collected signatures for her former boss Pineda-Isaac to run against Spano.

“You’ve got to keep your bosses happy,” Meier said. 

Oquendo-Thomas’s former boss emphasized that she was indeed happy. “I was happy with her and she did nothing wrong. She was not fired for performance reasons,” Pineda-Isaac told New York Focus.

While the majority leader in the city council is in charge of hiring and firing council aides, it’s been a long-standing practice for council members to choose their staff, according to former Yonkers City Council President Chuck Lesnick. 

But Pineda-Isaac was not notified before Council Majority Leader John Rubbo fired her aide.

“Legally, can it be done? Sure, but morally should that have been done? Absolutely not,” said Pineda-Isaac. “She had been with me for more than a decade serving constituents.”

Rubbo declined to comment on the firing, but sent a statement in support of Terrero. 

“Primary voters showed up. Democratic voters made their choice in the primary and I stand behind the Democratic nominee, Wilson Terrero for County Legislator,” said Rubbo. “As it relates to his opponent, I do not publicly discuss personnel issues.”

Fifteen of the legislature’s 17 seats are currently held by Democrats, while a Conservative and Republican hold one seat each.

It was somewhat of a gamble for the Working Families Party to endorse Oquendo-Thomas. The organization does not typically run its own candidates in general elections. Only two candidates in New York have ever won an election on its ballot line against a Democratic opponent, according to Cabrera, the Working Families Party state co-chair.

Those rare successes were now-Attorney General Letitia James’s New York City Council race in 2003 and Tamika Stewart’s Newburgh City Council bid in 2025. 

“Voters who may be accustomed to filling out the ballot on row A need to go to row D to find her name. That is the challenge,” said John Tomlin, founder of Taconic Strategies, a consulting firm in Westchester that worked on Effie Phillips-Staley’s progressive primary campaign for Congressional District 17. 

But the four-vote margin in the primary made a win feel possible, and the Working Families Party encouraged Oquendo-Thomas to stay in the race.

According to three Yonkers city officials, granted anonymity because they feared retaliation, Oquendo-Thomas’s firing elevated her profile as local voters learned about the context behind it. They said they were watching the race closely to see if a third party candidate could take on an entrenched party machine.

Late last month, Terrero had outraised his opponent by roughly $7,000, bringing in money from real estate, building, and other business interests along with contributions from Meier, Rubbo, and the local Democratic Party.

But as of Tuesday this week, Oquendo-Thomas closed that gap. She has notched noticeable gains, including raising funds from Building & Construction Trades Council and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers New York. Earlier this year, she received the endorsement of the influential health care union 1199SEIU. By Tuesday, she had raised $56,333 compared to Terrero’s $56,612.

Tomlin, of Taconic Strategies, thinks she has a shot. In hyper-local races like this one, the candidate that knocks on the most doors and engages with voters often wins, he said. 

“Leslye is doing that, Leslye is pounding the pavement,” said Tomlin. “This race means a whole lot more to this community beyond who is going to represent them in the county legislature. I think this is very much a generational question of: Do we want someone who is a fresh face or do we want someone who is connected to the establishment party who has been around for a long time?”