Our journalists are digging into important issues you’ll read about soon: housing affordability, food insecurity, how Yonkers responded to ICE, and a profile of a public school mentoring program.

Four young reporters are on these stories.

Anisha Kumar, a recent Brown graduate, is looking at the city’s new program to help first-time buyers with a down payment.

Judah Silverman, a Fordham student, is talking with the groups that feed Yonkers families, from Yonkers Community Action Program to Feeding Westchester, about what federal SNAP cuts mean for them.

Christina Katzen, also at Fordham, is working through federal data on ICE arrests in Westchester and asking experts what the numbers show.

Kenneth Morales, a City College of New York student and our longest-serving intern, is reporting on My Brother’s Keeper, a mentoring program in the city’s public schools.

Training young journalists like them is part of the Ledger’s mission. It’s the newsroom we’re building, with an editor to guide them.

The city’s consultants, BFJ Planning, showed residents their preliminary zoning plan for South Broadway last Thursday. It would allow more housing.

Some new sections of the street would allow large apartment buildings. A “transitional zone” would add more housing. And the “commercial core” would allow shorter apartment buildings, including apartments above stores.

The plan also calls for wider sidewalks, more trees, better lighting and a renovated park. One drawing shows a “community hub” with a theater and space for meetings and service providers.

The consultants expect to make recommendations in the coming months and finish the plan in mid-2027.

Read the story →

Ken Jenkins isn’t laughing. The county executive calls what happened on Election Day “completely unacceptable” and says he’ll convene a bipartisan review once the results are certified. James Nolan isn’t laughing either. He says the election was “stolen.” He hasn’t offered evidence.

Somebody should laugh. Or cry. The race for the 15th County Legislature District wasn’t an election. It was a tragicomic opera.

Act One: The Bathroom. A candidates’ forum at the Beczak Center. Three women in the ladies’ room with the door shut: Kisha Skipper, the Democrat; Donna Nolan, the Republican’s mother; and a former Skipper campaign worker who had gone over to Nolan. Screaming. Skipper leaves in handcuffs. (Not funny: a candidate for office on a perp walk.) She is released that night without charges. Nolan says his mother was the victim. The police are still investigating.

Act Two: The Money. Skipper’s pre-election campaign finance report, due Oct. 2, still hadn’t turned up weeks later. She blamed staff turnover.

Act Three: The Donuts. A Dunkin’ on Tuckahoe Road. A Facebook page reports that Skipper argued with the staff over her order. Answering a records request, the police quickly release the bodycam footage and the 911 recording. Meanwhile, a monster truck rumbles around Yonkers, campaigning for Nolan.

Finale: The Election. The scanners start spitting ballots back at the voters, the best election detail since the hanging chads. A week later, the county Board of Elections says it has finally scanned every emergency ballot. In its latest count, Skipper leads by 314 votes out of more than 21,000. Nolan isn’t conceding.

Every great opera ends with someone dragged down to hell. This one is still casting. The overture, it turns out, was a race nobody ran for. Ardsley’s village justice, David Rifas, didn’t file for another term, and neither did anyone else, so the county added a write-in line. That one line changed the coding on every ballot in the county, the USA TODAY Network reports. Only Ardsley’s scanners were updated to read the new code.

Through all of it, one machine never missed a beat. (See next item.)

Every candidate the Yonkers Democratic Party endorsed won, Phil Zisman writes, most of them by wide margins. All of the city’s state officials are Democrats. So are all 17 county legislators. In city government, Mike Breen is the last Republican standing, and his term ends in 2027.

Turnout in the Skipper-Nolan race jumped to more than 21,000, from about 13,000 in 2023.

Phil says the race that matters now is the June 2027 Democratic primary for mayor. The names he hears most are Council President Lakisha Collins-Bellamy and Majority Leader John Rubbo. Mayor Mike Spano hasn’t said whether he’ll run for a fifth term, which would mean suspending term limits again.

Read Phil’s column →

Two weeks ago we promised you a video of Marie Rama making her caramelized-apple pie, start to finish. We said it would be out the next week.

Ledger staff concluded we needed to make a few more pies to eat in our test kitchen before releasing the video.

Video online any day now.