(Mojgan Sherkat)
Politics has been a part of Kathleen Joy’s life from the moment she was born.
Her grandfather was the mayor of Fredonia, a small town in western New York, and her mother was pregnant with Joy while going door-to-door campaigning for him.
“I was born on the eve of his election for mayor,” Joy, now 49, recalled.
Joy, a Democrat and Syracuse Common Councilor, is running for the 50th state Senate District seat. She is challenging Sen. John DeFrancisco, R-Syracuse, an 18-year incumbent. The 50th state Senate District includes most of Onondaga County and parts of Syracuse. The election is Nov. 2.
The 50th Senate District is slightly more Republican, giving DeFrancisco a bit of an advantage. The New York State Board of Elections reports 65,952 voters enrolled as Republicans; 65,445 enrolled as Democrats; and 48,879 are registered as unaffiliated with a party.
In her campaign to unseat DeFrancisco, Joy highlights her experience in business, as a real estate attorney and as majority leader of Syracuse’s Common Council. In 2000, she started a small business in property management, but gave that up in 2006 to take a full-time job a s a real estate attorney. She began her political career in 2005, when she ran for the Syracuse Common Council. She was re-elected in 2007, and is now the Council’s majority leader.
If elected to the state senate, Joy pledges to go back to what she describes as the basics in meeting community needs. She also calls for more bi-partisanship in the legislature. “Let’s have legislation that crosses party lines that we can actually work on, negotiate and get a bill passed and not be so divisive and not be so combative. Let’s be collaborative,” she said.
She was born and raised on a farm in Fredonia, where her family grew vegetables. She attributes her environmental views to growing up on the farm. “We were conservationist before green was cool. We understood the environment because we were tied to it,” Joy said.
Joy attended Allegheny College, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in political science. She also received a law degree from Capital University in Columbus, Ohio.
Politics, she recalls, has always been part of her life. For example, as in grade school, she persuaded her grandfather, some other girls and the local Fredonia officials to create a girls’ softball league. In high school, she was elected president of her class during her sophomore and senior years. She also was the president of the ski club and band.
In college, Joy interned with Albany’s state legislature in New York, where she says she learned the “behind-the-scenes” of drafting legislation. She was captivated, she said, by “the art of negotiation and the study that goes into a particular bill before it even gets to the floor, before it’s even introduced — and I think even more importantly the level of constituent service that goes on.”
Debby Rybarczyk of Fredonia, has known Joy for 35 years. She praises Joy for an energetic enthusiasm to get things done. “She was very involved in everything, which she still is today. She hasn’t changed,” said Rybarczyk. Of Joy’s campaign for the state senate, Rybarczyk says, “She’s always been the one that wanted to fight for a cause that she believed in.”
Of her political accomplishments, Joy cites a contribution to an environmental clean-up measure for cleaning up Onondaga Lake. In the measure, Joy said, she persuaded the Common Council to include language to encourage emerging green technologies. Because of that, she said,
Syracuse has rain gardens and barrels.
“That’s the end result of a lot of hard negotiation and the ability to think outside the box a little bit,” said Joy.
Common Councilor Jean Kessner, D-Syracuse, praises Joy for building partnerships and collaboration. Kessner recalled Joy’s persistence in pushing her Common Council colleagues to find common ground on the city’s budget. During the passing of the budget earlier this year, members of the council had a hard time voting.
“It wasn’t easy for anybody. Nobody liked it. And Kathleen kept saying, ‘Now let’s go back to what we can agree on,’” said Kessner. She added, “She doesn’t let her ego get in the way of moving things forward.”
For her part, Joy stresses that collaboration and consensus-building as a lesson she learned from her grandfather’s political work in Fredonia. “It was,” she recalled, “all about what was best for the village and the community.”
(Mojgan Sherkat is a graduate student in broadcast and digital journalism.)
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