“Is The Town Supervisor’s Spouse Really The BDC Town Leader? Yes. Yes, She Is”
There are six (6) candidates running for the 4 slots on the Brighton Democratic Committee in the 5th Election District.
For an article on “What Is the Brighton Democratic Committee?,” click here.
Election Day is Tuesday, June 25. On that day, for ED5, the polling place is the Brighton Town Hall Auditorium, 2300 Elmwood Avenue, Rochester, NY 14618.
Early voting is happening now through June 23, and voters can use any early voting location. In Brighton, a popular early voting site is Empire State University at 680 Westfall Road. For information on locations and hours for early voting, click here.
Justice For Brighton is supporting a full slate of four (4) candidates for Brighton Democratic Committee in the 5th Election District. Rajesh Barnabas, Danielle Fraenkel, Rachael Hittinger, and Kathryn Kubiak-Rizzone are longtime BDC members who live in the district. Danielle Fraenkel’s 17-year tenure on the Committee is the longest of the six candidates.
In 2022, three of the candidates (Rajesh, Danielle, and Rachael) won primary elections to earn their seats on the Committee, having campaigned as candidates “who are committed to reforming the local Democratic Party to be more inclusive, diverse and equitable.” That messaging is repeated verbatim on their 2024 literature piece:
The other two candidates in ED5 are Bill and Barbara Moehle, the Town Supervisor and BDC Town Leader, respectively. Their candidacies are supported by Democrats for Brighton, an authorized multi-candidate committee with the dubious distinction of running an all-white slate of 31 candidates across Brighton, as documented in the article Whiter Than A Trump Rally. Although all 31 candidates bear some culpability for the committees’ segregationist structure, given their positions of power, the Moehles may be considered singularly responsible.
As Town Supervisor, Bill Moehle serves both as Chief Executive, with many political appointees (most notably the Chief of Police) serving at his pleasure, and, together with the four Brighton Town Councilmembers, forms the 5-member legislative body known as the Town Board.
Mr. and Mrs. Moehle also serve in myriad other roles, as befits party bosses: both are Judicial Delegates, who convene in August to decide which Supreme Court candidates will receive the Democratic nomination; both are members of the Monroe County Democratic Committee Executive Committee, where Mr. Moehle gets half a vote by dint of serving as the male State Committee member for the 136th Assembly District and Mrs. Moehle votes on behalf of the Brighton Democratic Committee in her capacity as Town Leader. Together, they wield unprecedented power in the Town of Brighton.
It is unusual, to say the least, for the spouse of an elected official to serve as Town leader for that elected official’s respective Democratic Committee. Mrs. Moehle has used her position to shape the Committee in service to her family’s political objectives, supporting political allies such as Meredith Dragon, the CEO of the Jewish Federation who has spent years attacking Brighton Town Councilmember Robin Wilt, and organizing petitioning campaigns to exclude incumbent members of color and uplift new members who she perceives as political allies. In ED10, for example, she passed over several longtime members to tap a new member who joined in January 2024 and who moved to Brighton from Illinois in 2021. Ms. Moehle also filed formal objections with the Board of Elections to disqualify Town Councilmember Robin Wilt, the only Black member of the Town Board, from continuing to serve on the Brighton Democratic Committee. After the objections were unsuccessful, she prevaricated about having known whether she was objecting to Ms. Wilt’s petition.
Ms. Moehle’s autocratic approach to petitioning, which she has said is “her prerogative” as Town Leader, has led to extensive counterpetitioning campaigns, especially by people of color who had adverse experiences petitioning outside their home districts, as documented elsewhere on this Web site. In the 2022 campaigns, four (4) election districts featured contested primary elections, with Justice In Action-backed candidates winning 9 of the 11 elections.
Despite that episode in 2022, Ms. Moehle doubled down on her autocratic approach to Committee composition in 2024; with the Committee slated to shrink by 28% due to redistricting, she unilaterally decided who would remain on the Committee, who would drop off at the end of their term, and which part of Brighton each member would represent. She also gave strong preference to incumbent members – akin to the infamous “grandfather clauses” used in the Jim Crow South to continue to disenfranchise former slaves.
As a result of this inequitable process, numerous Committee members decided to petition themselves onto the Committee, giving Democratic voters in their neighborhoods the opportunity to vote for the candidates who would represent them on the Committee. One of those neighborhoods is the 5th Election District, where voters will have a clear choice between democracy or continued autocracy.