(Credit: Courtesy Mike Parwana campaign, 2023)
The campaign picture on the Mike Parwana for Supervisor At-Large Facebook page.
“The Warren County Board of Supervisors is dysfunctional,” said Mike Parwana, a local Democratic activist and blacksmith, when asked why he is running for county supervisor. “Warren County is not functioning in the best interests of everyone, and that stems in large measure from a form of government that does not effectively represent the people, rather it reinforces the parochial interests mainly of Republican Party leaders.”
44% of the county population resides in Queensbury, yet the town only has 5 seats on a county board of 20 seats. Too many of the committee leaders are from the northern reaches of the county instead of the more populous southern end, he said.
If elected, he would work to change the board in two fundamental ways, he said.
One of Parwana’s goals is to change Queensbury from an At-Large system to a ward system similar to Glens Falls, so that town residents know who their representative is. Queensbury has five representatives. Four are elected at-large for the county board and the fifth is the Queensbury Town supervisor who chairs the town board. Under Parwana's change, the four would each represent a section of Queensbury.
In addition, Parwana would also like to change the county to a legislature form of government, ending the supervisor form altogether, and removing what he sees as a conflict of interest.
In a legislature form, the county board members would not represent a town or portion of a town, but each representative would have the same number of constituents in the county, and the geography each board member represented might spill over town lines.
“When they [board members] meet for county business they are typically still wearing their town hat. How can they make the best decisions for the county if they may conflict in some way with their town?” Parwana asked. “It puts people in a position of moral conflict...leaders making decisions from a position of moral conflict are often not good leaders."
The legislature form would remove the need for weighted voting since each board member would be representing the same number of people and would not be representing a town but people in the county, perhaps in more than one town, he said.
This is better since the weighted voting in the county is confusing to the general public, he said.
Parwana co-owns the Chicken Coop Forge, a blacksmithing business on Corinth Road in Queensbury.
“I usually tell people my main skill is to hit stuff with a hammer until it looks right,” Parwana joked.
More seriously, he likened governance to his years owning horses.
“I have a Rule of Ponies: nothing good happens with a pony except by mutual consent,” he said. “It’s a good rule for good politics and good government.
“A good leader finds strategies that allow everyone to move forward towards a goal through mutual consent. Boards that cram decisions down the throats of those who disagree with them tend to make bad policy,” he said.
He was arrested for trespassing in 2002, as he and a small group of activists protested the closure of Fuller Road in Queensbury and the alleged illegal collection of state highway aid by the town.
His group fought in and out of the courts for about 10 years, he said.
Through that political engagement, he “learned a lot about how the whims of local elected or party bosses can negatively affect the public and public policy.”
“Politics is inescapable for me, but until recently I’ve never considered running for public office,” said Parwana, who has been an active participant in the local Democratic party and served as Queensbury Democratic Committee chair for years as he worked to get others elected to office.
He has previous board experience from serving on the Board of the Lake George Arts Project. He also served as chair for a time.
Born in Afghanistan in 1961, Parwana described his childhood as being “surrounded by an international community of optimists who felt their efforts could change the world for the better. My life has been wallpapered by war and international intervention in Afghanistan, all of it a reflection of various public policy decisions.”
His father was an engineer who worked on the Helmand Valley Project, an irrigation and resettlement effort to harness the water reserves of the Helmand River in Afghanistan.
Parwana will run for the seat in November.
However, current Supervisor At-Large Rachel Seeber has announced that she will resign from the county board later this month to pursue her college teaching career. This will leave an opening to fulfill the remainder of her unexpired term.
[Read about Rachel Seeber's retirement announcement here and reaction to it here.]
It will be up to the Queensbury Town Board to fill the vacancy and appoint someone to serve the rest of Seeber’s term, said Don Lehman, the Director of Public Affairs for Warren County.
Parwana said he will be sending a letter of interest to the Queensbury Town Board to serve in Seeber’s stead.
Seeber has not yet sent her resignation letter to Warren County, officials said.