Editor’s note: In the next few days, we’ll be trying something new in our election coverage. Instead of one story about each race, we’re doing separate stories on all six candidates in the contested Democratic primaries: the Common Council’s Ward 1 and Ward 4 seats, and the mayor’s office.

Sara Pasti is a relative newcomer to Kingston, but the 69-year-old arts nonprofit administrator is no stranger to city government. Before moving here in 2020, Pasti spent two decades in Beacon where she served on a comprehensive planning committee and served three two-year terms on its city council.

Now, she said, she wants to bring that experience to bear in her new home as Common Council representative for the city’s First Ward.

“I like helping people, I like making the community, it’s a passion,” said Pasti.

After getting her start as a painter, Pasti moved into arts administration, including a 10-year stint as director of SUNY New Paltz’s Dorsky Museum. Currently, she works as a grant writer and project administrator for the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale. In the early 2000s she was living in Beacon just before the opening of the Dia Beacon sculpture museum. At the time, Beacon was a hardscrabble community with a Main Street full of vacant storefronts. Recognizing the likely impact of the new museum, Pasti said she joined a coalition of residents pushing the town to adopt a comprehensive plan to guide development. Later, she was appointed to the committee charged with developing it.

“I knew what was going to come with Dia and I felt that I wanted to be involved in channeling development,” said Pasti. “Knowing that it’s hard to stop development — the best you can do is channel it into areas where you want it, and also determine the kinds of development you want to see.”

Pasti said that experience, and her later stint on the Beacon City Council, taught her the value of community outreach, both in terms of public forums and informal one-on-one talks with constituents. It also taught her to appreciate the powers and limitations of local government, where slow, deliberative processes that can frustrate those seeking fast solutions often lead to better outcomes with more community buy-in.

“I actually came to appreciate the government process, as slow as it might be,” said Pasti. “What I found was that it allowed for a lot of input from the community and in the end, I thought that we made better laws because of that community input and if it took longer than we thought we at least came out of it with something that the majority of people could support.”

Pasti described Uptown’s First Ward as a residential neighborhood split between renters and homeowners, making affordable housing a key issue for her constituents. Pasti said she believed Kingston’s elected officials had taken the right approach through partnerships with RUPCO and other nonprofits to develop affordable housing and become a model for other communities in the region dealing with their own housing crises.

Pasti said she also supports efforts to boost affordable housing stock through “upzoning” — allowing for denser development in neighborhoods where it would not be out of scale and the promotion of accessory dwelling units in residential properties. Pasti added that she also supports stronger limits on short-stay rentals like Airbnb and Vrbo, as well as city-sponsored efforts to get vacant properties back on the tax rolls.

“There’s not just one way to address housing, there are multiple ways,” said Pasti. “And you have to use whichever ones work to meet that need.”

On public safety, Pasti said that she would lean on her experience in Beacon, where she helped lead a grant-funded initiative to orient the police department there towards community policing. The effort, she said, brought the Beacon police from a state where cops cruised the streets in vehicles with dark-tinted windows, rarely engaging with the public except to answer a call or write a ticket, to one where cops are more closely connected to the community they serve.

“I think that helped because now police know who the people on the streets are and people get to know them,” said Pasti. “They’re much more embedded in the community.”

Pasti said she also wants to increase mental health services by expanding the city’s mobile mental health response team to operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Pasti added that one of the major complaints she’d heard from would be constituents involved speeding and reckless driving. Pasti said she would support lowering the city’s speed limit from 30 to 25 while expanding education and awareness programs to address a recent spike in cyclist and pedestrian deaths.

Sara Pasti and Charlotte Lloyd are the candidates in the Democratic primary for the Common Council’s Ward 1 seat. For more about Lloyd, click here: https://kingstonwire.com/news/2023/06/18/candidate-spotlight-charlotte-lloyd-ward-1/184CBL For more about early voting for the June 27 primary, click here: https://elections.ulstercountyny.gov/early-voting/