Weekly Member Update - June 22, 2026

Written By Indivisible Albany Team

The South End Bus Depot: Dan McCoy Takes His Ball and Goes Home

We start this week off in Albany’s South End, where Dan McCoy’s grand vision for a “transformative” intercity bus depot in the abandoned McDonald’s at South Pearl and Madison came to a sudden and unceremonious end. As late as Wednesday evening/Thursday morning, it seemed like Danny was going to ram this project down the South End’s throat, despite widespread community opposition and notwithstanding (or maybe because of) a call from the Times Union Editorial Board for the project to be relocated. McCoy announced on his Facebook page on Wednesday that Advance Albany County Alliance would be pushing the development forward and, according to Albany County Legislator and growing folk hero Dannielle Hille, representatives of the Alliance met with residents of the South Mall Towers — without Hille being invited, of course — on Thursday morning to try and sell the bus station to the community one more time. And, then, seemingly out of nowhere, the bus station was kaput by Thursday afternoon; according to Times Union columnist Chris Churchill, State Senator Patricia Fahy and “other local state lawmakers” had asked that the project be paused, essentially pulling the plug on the state funding necessary to fulfill Danny’s bus stop dreams. Given the abrupt reversal that McCoy and the Alliance had to make — pushing forward in the morning, surrendering in the afternoon — it’s pretty clear that this was a humiliating and unprecedented defeat for Boss McCoy. All the better that the defeat came at the hands of a grassroots community movement led by an unrepentant and unafraid County Legislator willing to stand up for her constituents.

McCoy did not take it well. His Thursday afternoon statement began with a reference to the “letters of support and positive feedback through direct conversations with members of the South End neighborhood” that he had allegedly received before incongruously stating that, after “listening closely” to all that positive feedback, he had “decided to pivot in a different direction.” But McCoy’s statement wasn’t just nonsensical, it was also petulant. The Alliance would now put the property up for sale, McCoy declared, “Moving forward, there will be a ‘For Sale’ sign on this property. We will likely demolish the building and use the property as overflow parking for the MVP Arena, unless or until a buyer comes forward with a legitimate plan that serves the City of Albany and the County as a whole.” Later in the day, on WRGB’s Power & Politics news program and podcast, McCoy quadrupled down. There, McCoy again reiterated, without specifics, that most of the feedback he had received on the project was positive, including “people calling me up saying, ‘please don’t give up, please do it’” and others saying, “Dan, this is a great project, please get it done.” Ultimately, though, McCoy lamented that a “certain network” — you know, the “people that come out and criticize everything” — had become “the loudest voices in the room.” So, “since he has bigger things going on” like the College of Saint Rose and Central Warehouse, McCoy concluded that he was “wasting too much time and energy” on the bus station and that it was “not worth a pound of flesh” to move it forward. “If someone has a better idea . . . go for it,” McCoy charmingly concluded. Oh, and for good measure, McCoy also stated that he had been ready to announce a “really great project” for the historic but dilapidated Public Bathhouse #2 on Fourth Avenue but that, in light of the way the bus station project had gone down, he was “pulling the plug” on the Bathhouse project too.

There you have it. The People of the City of Albany just don’t deserve Dan McCoy. He just loves Albany too much, we guess, and the naysayers and the critics from a “certain network” just won’t let him prove it. Well, Albany, you won’t have Dan McCoy to kick around anymore — except at the College of St. Rose and Central Warehouse and everywhere else he plasters his smiling face — if the City of Albany won’t let Dan McCoy do what Dan McCoy has decided the City needs, Dan McCoy is not going to fight you on it. No, instead he’s going to exact his revenge. Dannielle Hille put it better than we can; “Dan put a punishment in there for speaking up,” she said. “You wouldn’t let us ram this down your throat, so now you get nothing.”

If there is a silver lining to the way the South End bus depot imploded, we hope it is that the People of Albany County and their local elected representatives can finally come to the realization that the County Executive wears no clothes. He’s a Trumpian bully and no one — save for Dannielle Hille and Albany Common Council Member Derek Johnson, apparently — is willing to say it out loud. We saw how quiet the majority of the electeds and wanna-be electeds in the City of Albany and Albany County got once the People of the South End started clamoring for something — anything — besides a bus station. No one was willing to dare cross McCoy, apparently, and even when Senator Fahy and “other state lawmakers” had decided that the project was probably no longer a good idea, none of them issued a public statement to that effect, at least as far as we can tell. Tellingly, it was only after McCoy had surrendered and given folks a permission structure to share their opinion that we heard from Racquel Saddler — the party’s preferred candidate to take Hille’s seat on the County Legislature — for the first time. Saddler used plural pronouns to imply that she had been anti-bus station all along, despite her prior silence on the issue, and that she had been part of the movement that had defeated the development; “Those of us who live, work, and invest in [the South End] don’t just deserve a seat at the table. We deserve to help set it. This time, we did exactly that, and our leaders listened.” Stolen community-organizing valor aside, at least Saddler had the good sense to recognize that McCoy’s new plan to sell the property and put up a parking lot in the interim was a nonstarter, calling instead for “a transparent RFP process that invites bold ideas and ensures the outcome reflects what [the South End] actually needs,” a call quickly echoed by Saddler’s ally, City Auditor Sam Fein. For the time being, however, the old McDonald’s property remains a satellite location of Dannyland, we’ll see if Saddler, Fein and the rest actually do anything about it once the news cycle moves on.

Ranked Choice Voting Albany Meets Its Mark, and Gets Knifed In the Process

RCV Albany announced this week that it has exceeded its goal and surpassed 3,000 petition signatures, well in excess of what it needs to get on the ballot this coming November in the City of Albany. Mindful that there is still more work to be done, we’re celebrating the hard earned efforts of our friends at RCV Albany. But, if we needed a reminder of how entrenched interests are not going to go quietly, we sure got one, in the form of a leaked “confidential” memo from Albany County Democratic Chair Jake Crawford and his Working Families Party counterpart, Andy Kaier. The memo was addressed to the “Albany Common Council” — we’ve come to understand that not all 16 members of the Council actually received it — and its purpose is to “register [Crawford’s and Kaier’s] united, firm opposition to the current proposal/petition to permanently amend the [Albany] City Charter to implement a ‘unified single election’ with ranked choice voting (RCV).”

First of all, the fact that this memo was marked “confidential” and was delivered to the Common Council warrants comment. What we have here is a misleading screed from party bosses designed to influence our elected representatives in the legislative branch of the City of Albany in the hope that the Council will do the party bosses’ bidding and kill the RCV proposal before it even gets presented to voters. And the party bosses don’t even have the courage to make this effort in the open. Instead, party bosses gotta party boss and work to circumvent the democratic process in secret. Maybe back-room deals are just their habit and they can’t help themselves. Or maybe their arguments against the RCV ballot proposal are so thin, so spurious and so transparently self-serving that they were embarrassed to present them in public.

We’re not going to reproduce the Crawford\/Kaier memo in full, we’ll let some news outlet reprint that dreck. But we will give you some snippets. Here’s the first:

The plan replaces separate party primaries with a single unified November election for all candidates. By eliminating primaries, parties lose the ability to choose their nominees, disempowering members, unions, and organized groups. This element of the proposal is highly likely to need state approval.

As should be expected from a pair of party Chairs, so many of their arguments center upon the rights of parties “to choose their nominees,” often disingenuously characterizing the current party-dominant system as “organized people-power,” as if the current two-party model isn’t actually a vehicle for advancing corporate hegemony. Noticeably absent from the party Chairs’ arguments, of course, is any discussion of the rights of unaffiliated voters to actually participate in the process, or the rights of all voters to select from an array of diverse candidates without parties first putting their thumbs on the scale. But the party Chairs are right about one thing; an RCV unified election would unquestionably diminish their power. Parties would no longer get to control who gets on the ballot and, instead, voters would get to choose, and rank, the individual candidates that move them. From our perspective, disempowering the parties is a feature, not a bug. And, as to the need for “state approval,” the party bosses ignore well-established Home Rule principles established by the New York Constitution and other state law. While the state Election Law generally applies to all elections in New York State, state law in the election arena must yield to “inconsistent” laws enacted by municipalities such as the City of Albany, and there is nothing to prohibit a City from doing away with primaries and the party-nomination process within that City’s borders if that is what the People of that City choose to do.

Here’s another excerpt:

Furthermore, candidates could qualify for the ballot using signatures from any registered voter, regardless of party. Critically, listing a party affiliation would no longer require party authorization, raising grave concerns for political identity. With no primary challenges or separate line counts, parties could not effectively disavow candidates. Scholarship has shown the most simple and effective way candidates communicate with voters about their values and platforms is through their party line. By prohibiting party members from selecting their own candidates, this change would corrupt and undermine our electoral system.

Under the RCV unified election proposal, candidates for City office would be affiliated with any party in which the candidate is registered to vote. So yes, candidates would no longer require “party authorization” and, conceivably, some diabolical Republican could register as a Democrat in an attempt to gaslight voters. But that gaslighting Republican would still need to persuade voters to vote for him or her by talking about their positions on the issues, most likely revealing their true colors in the process. The party Chairs don’t trust voters to decide for themselves, however, and would have you believe that the only true way for voters to divine a candidate’s values is via a party endorsement of that candidate. Aside from being ridiculously paternalistic, this view is simply wrong. For example, if we could truly rely on the endorsement of the Albany County Democratic Committee to tell us that a candidate espouses “Democratic Party values” — whatever those are — we wouldn’t have a host of conservatives in Democratic clothing currently holding elected office in Albany County. Simply put, a candidate’s membership in your club doesn’t tell us a damn thing about what that candidate believes, and voters shouldn’t have to abide by a party’s stamp of approval in order to choose which candidate will best represent their interests.

The party bosses also want to scare you. They imply that an RCV unified election would somehow imperil voting rights — for what its worth, the RCV proposal in Albany has nothing to do whatsoever with an individual’s right, eligibility or ability to vote — and the bosses wrap themselves in platitudes like “economic justice” and “diverse candidates and empowered communities” to suggest that an RCV unified election would somehow threaten those things. Of course, they don’t bother to explain how these things would be threatened, we’re just supposed to believe them, apparently. The argument also plainly ignores data from other localities that have enacted an RCV system which demonstrates that the RCV model consistently yields and elects more candidates of color than the existing two-party primary system. The party bosses also raise the spectre of “jungle primaries” like what we just saw in California, where the top-two vote getters in the unified primary advance to the general election. Trouble is, what has been proposed for the City of Albany is not a jungle primary. It is a unified election, but with ranked-choice voting, thereby insuring that no candidate can win with a mere plurality, as can happen in California.

We could go on, but so much of what the party bosses have to say in their secret memo is just too ridiculous to reiterate here. We’re confident that there will be robust public debate about the RCV-unified election proposal in the months to come and you can be assured that we’ll be willing participants in that debate. Unlike the party bosses, we also have confidence in the wisdom and discernment of Albanian voters; scare tactics and sky-is-falling hysteria about the end of the two-party system isn’t going to carry the day. In the meantime, RCV Albany’s ballot proposal will be introduced at the Common Council’s regular meeting on July 6. We’ll be there to make our voices heard. In public. Not in a secret memo.

New York’s Primary Day is Tomorrow, June 23

If you haven’t early voted yet, your last chance to make your own voice heard is tomorrow, polls are open from 6am to 9pm, find your polling location here.

We’ve already lamented the lack of hot local primary action tomorrow but, fortunately for politics junkies everywhere, there are some intriguing Congressional primary contests outside the 518 to keep our attention. First, we’ve got the race to succeed Elusive Elise Stefanik in NY-21; on the Democratic side, establishment favorite Blake Gendebien will keep reminding people that he’s a farmer and try and fend off a challenge from self-styled “Independent Democrat” Stuart Amoriell. No matter who wins that primary, they better be prepared to get in the mud, because the two Republican options are in a totally bonkers race to the bottom to prove that they each love the Orange King more than the other. In one corner, you’ve got retired Marine and current Assembly Member Robert Smullen, who boasts the lion’s share of establishment NY-Republican support but still heralds his appointment by Trump to the “President’s Commission on White House Fellows” as proof of his MAGA bona fides. That may not be enough because, in the other corner, you’ve got the Trump-endorsed Anthony Constantino, who also has the support of luminaries like Roger Stone, Rudy Giuliani and Congressman Jim Jordan. Ick.

To our south, we’re also keeping our eye on the race to take on Mike Lawler in NY-17. Hudson Valley voters get to choose from five Democrats in that race; the perceived front runners are Rockland County Legislator Beth Davidson and Cait Conley, a combat veteran and Biden Administration counterterrorism official. To their left is Tarrytown Village Trustee Effie Phillips-Staley, who already has the Working Families Party Line. Rounding out the field are attorney and television reporter Mike Sacks, and Air Force veteran John Cappello.

We’re also keeping a watchful eye on New York City, where there are a host of candidates we wish we could vote for who are challenging the establishment in a variety of ways. Our comrades in the NYC Democratic Socialists are looking to bring a bit of Mamdanistan to Washington. Socialist Assembly Member Claire Valdez has Mayor Mamdani’s backing in her race against Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso and City Council member Julie Won in a race to replace retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez in NY-7. In NY-13, Darializa Avila Chevalier has Mamdani’s support in her effort to unseat longtime Rep. Adriano Espaillat. Mamdani is also supporting another Congressional incumbent challenge, with former City Comptroller Brad Lander looking to unseat Rep. Dan Goldman in NY-10. Mamdani has not weighed in on the free-for all in NY-12, where four men — Kennedy scion Jack Schlossberg, former Republican and TV talking head George Conway and Assembly Members Micah Lasher and Alex Bores — fight to succeed the retiring Jerry Nadler. In all of these NYC races, Republicans stand no chance in November, so Tuesday’s winners will likely have a glide path to be sworn-in next January. Not so out on The Island, however; C-Street resident Rep. Tom Suozzi hopes to fend off a primary challenge in NY-3 from public defender Danielle Welch. If Suozzi survives that, he’ll face either personal injury lawyer Greg Hach — who promises to be a “warrior” for Trump and to “deport illegals and defeat the left” — or Trump-endorsed, America First Assembly Member Mike LiPetri. It’s hard to make Tom Suozzi look appealing, but Hech and LiPetri are doing a pretty good job of it.

Finally, the Times Union has laid out 15 Democratic primaries from across the state that could reshape the State Legislature. As is the case in the races for seats in Congress, Democratic Socialists are looking to expand their footprint in both houses.

A Few Words About Waymo

We’ve talked previously about legislation proposed by local politicos Senator Patricia Fahy and Assembly Member John McDonald that would unleash robotic cars on the streets of Albany and Rensselaer Counties. Although the bills didn’t make it out of committee this past legislative session, we have every reason to believe that they will be reincarnated next year. If you want to educate yourself for the coming fight against driverless cars in our community, a good starting point is the two-part series by Freakonomics Radio. Part one of the series — Are Human Drivers Finally Obsolete? — discusses the rise of Waymo as a secret project at Google in the aughts, while part two — In a Driverless World, Who Loses and Who Wins? — talks about the arrival of Waymo in Boston and Waymo’s cross pollination with the lobbying efforts of the American Foundation for the Blind and Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Speaking of Waymo’s lobbying efforts, the Times Union reported this week that Waymo has formed a political action committee called “Upward NY” to assist it in its future persuasion efforts here in the Empire State. Meanwhile, Reuters has reporting that Waymo is recalling nearly 4,000 robotaxis after nearly a dozen episodes in Arizona and California where the automated vehicles failed to recognize road closure signage and drove into freeway construction zones with active work underway.

Odds & Ends:

Indivisible Albany Team
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Weekly Member Update - June 15, 2026