Beacon council member challenging Dutchess appointee
The Dutchess County comptroller job is on the ballot in what has become a heated political battle.
The comptroller is the county’s chief accounting officer and is responsible for auditing its departments and outside agencies funded by the county. Only eight counties in the state, including Dutchess, have elected comptrollers.
The position is open because Robin Lois, a Democrat, resigned Dec. 30 to become the state’s deputy comptroller for local government and school accountability. The race will determine who holds the position through Dec. 31, 2025, when her four-year term was set to end. It will again appear on the November 2025 ballot.
The incumbent is Gregg Pulver, a Republican from Pine Plains, a town of about 2,300 people in northern Dutchess, who was named comptroller by then-County Executive William F.X. O’Neil to succeed Lois. Pulver served 10 years in the county Legislature, the last six as its chair, before losing his re-election bid two weeks before the appointment.
He is being challenged by Dan Aymar-Blair, a Democrat who is serving his third term representing Ward 4 on the Beacon City Council. Aymar-Blair began his career with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley before moving into the public sector. He has worked for the New York City Department of Education for 15 years and oversees business operations for its special education program.
Aymar-Blair has been endorsed by state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli. He said he would resign from the City Council if elected.
He is a co-founder of the Article 20 Network, a nonprofit that “defends and advances the right to freedom of peaceful assembly worldwide,” and was among the founders of Grannies Respond, which provides care for asylum-seekers and other immigrants. In 2017, before his City Council election, Aymar-Blair was an organizer for the People’s Committee on Development, which questioned the pace and scale of construction in Beacon.
Pulver is a grain farmer who was the Pine Plains supervisor for 12 years before his election to the Legislature. He says he has been “in the municipal finance world for my entire adult life.” He cited an audit of Family Services, a nonprofit that provides behavioral health and other services in Dutchess, Ulster and Orange counties, as a key accomplishment of his year in office. The investigation revealed that $825,000 in federal pandemic relief had been incorrectly claimed by the agency, resulting in an overpayment by Dutchess County.
While Aymar-Blair said Pulver lacks the financial experience for the job, Pulver countered that his knowledge of government operations, coupled with his ability to solve problems, “brings a great balance to the office.”
Aymar-Blair said he is running for the position based on his experience in operations and finance. “Wherever I go, people are telling me that they cannot afford to maintain their quality of life,” he said. “As comptroller, I will call attention to any time county decisions raise costs for people, because that’s not appropriate now.”
Referring to the nonprofits Aymar-Blair helped create, Pulver alleged that “one of them is to defund the police” while another supports “illegal aliens.” He called Aymar-Blair “an extremist” and noted that the Mid-Hudson Valley Democratic Socialists of America endorsed his City Council candidacy in 2021.
Pulver also criticized the challenger for voting to increase Beacon’s property tax levy in each of the last four years.
Aymar-Blair said that mandatory payments to the state pension system led to the levy increases, “not a conscious decision by the council to spend more money. Look at my record and tell me if I’m an extremist or a socialist. It’s a boring argument that they make to scare people away from Democrats.”
Democrats took issue with a last-minute, $25 million allocation approved by the Republican-led Legislature in 2022 to fund upgrades at Dutchess Stadium (now known as Heritage Financial Park), as well as amendments to O’Neil’s 2024 budget that significantly increased salaries for some elected officials. Aymar-Blair emphasized that Pulver, as a legislator, twice voted to increase Dutchess Community College tuition and, after losing the election last year but before he left office, voted to increase the county sales tax from 3.75 percent to 4 percent.
Dutchess County and Beacon have each lowered property tax rates over the past decade, and the county’s 2024 levy of $99.4 million is the lowest in 15 years. Pulver said the sales-tax increase was in this year’s budget but never enacted because state Senate and Assembly members representing Dutchess never “carried it to the state.” Regarding the salary increases, “I had no position,” Pulver said. “I was not going to be a legislator, and Robin Lois had not resigned yet.” The raises were necessary because “we want to get good people to run” for elected office.
