I’m asking for your support for my third term on the Village Board, where I am the Environmental Specialist. Raising awareness about climate issues should be engaging and meaningful—and inspire action! The Village’s Climate Smart Task Force, which I lead, partners with school groups, the library, and other organizations to host workshops and events such as Climate Week, “Big Night” Amphibian Migration efforts, Walk to School Days, and more.

As a Board, we are a team dedicating all our might to improving the village:

● Updating the Comprehensive Plan

● Applying for funding for Safe Routes to School

● Seeing through the “plan B” for Municipal Composting

● Climate Action Planning

● Working towards Silver Climate Smart Certification

Since 2017, Vanessa Bertozzi has lived in the Village with her filmmaker husband and two kids, ages 8 and 11 (who walk themselves to school). She is serving her second term on the Village Board as your environmental specialist. For her day job, she works for a non-profit to develop support programs for other municipalities tackling climate change in the Hudson Valley. Her prior experience includes working for over a decade in tech in NYC, as well as consulting in organizational management, program design and grant management. She is a graduate of Harvard and earned a Master's degree from MIT. In her spare time she enjoys puttering in the garden and needle felting.

Since retirement Eleanor Pupko has regularly attended Town and Village Board meetings as well as public hearings, noting that the Hudson Valley Pilot has characterized her as being a “near constant figure at Village and Town meetings”.

Her focus is on sidewalk repair that includes a fair funding method, safe routes to school and affordability.  Two years ago, she was appointed to serve on the Comprehensive Plan Review Committee (where she also served on two subcommittees), and in fall she was appointed to the Rhinebeck Democratic Committee (where she serves on the Bylaws Subcommittee). Eleanor was born in the Dominican Republic and came to this country at age 4. Her family settled in upstate New York and eventually purchased a dairy farm near Boonville. When she was 18 and her brother 16, they took over the struggling operation, transforming it into a successful enterprise. Always ahead of the curve, they adopted a method to reduce weds without use of chemicals and stopped using Roundup on their corn crop in the early 1980s. After farming for 20 years, theysold the cows and Eleanor earned her master’s in mathematics. She taught upper-level mathematics courses at her local high school for four years before moving to Rhinebeck in 2001 to teach at Spackenkill High, where she was recognized by the New York State Master Teacher program.  She was also chosen to receive the National Blue Ribbon School Award on behalf of the high school. Eleanor Pupko loves living in Rhinebeck where she is a member of two book clubs at Starr Library, a long-time supporter of Upstate Films, and hikes and bird watches locally.