In the spring of 2025, Rye’s Emily Baldwin led community activists opposing a plan backed by the mayor of Harrison to build a 140-unit apartment complex in the Beaver Swamp Brook flood plain.
Baldwin’s Glen Oaks neighborhood had suffered bad flooding over the years linked to that hydrologically sensitive area.
The protests Baldwin and others led proved so successful that Mayor Richard Dionisio, a Republican, was defeated in a June 2025 primary. Weeks later, a chastened Harrison Town Council approved zoning changes that killed the project and the proposed complex’s developer put the property up for sale.
Fast forward a year and Baldwin, now a member of the Rye City Council, represents the city on a new inter-municipal committee with Harrison, Mamaroneck, and the Town of Rye focused on collaborating to obtain flood relief funding.
The contrast — from fighting Harrison’s leadership to working closely with them — is not lost on Baldwin.
“We first met as a group in February in the office of the new mayor of Harrison and I couldn’t help but marvel at the change,” she said.
Disgruntlement among Harrison voters over Dionisio’s advocacy for the development project, which would have benefitted him personally because of land he owned in the area, was a major factor in Tom Scappaticci’s decision to challenge him in the Republican primary.
Soon after taking office in January, Scappaticci reached out to other local leaders saying he wanted to cooperate on flooding. Scappaticci’s interest in crossing municipal borders and party affiliations pleased his counterparts.
“My job is to change things from where they were before,” said Scappaticci. “I’m trying to be as user friendly as possible.”
After speaking with Scappaticci, Westchester County Legislator Anant Nambiar helped bring the Harrison mayor together with Rye City Mayor Josh Nathan, a Democrat, and Village of Mamaroneck Mayor Sharon Torres, also a Democrat. Since then, Town of Rye Supervisor Gary Zuckerman, a Democrat as well, has also become involved.
By working together, the leaders “are trying to help 100,000 people instead of 20,000,” said Nambiar. “They are not competing for funding, they are collaborating.”
The group is meeting about once a month, communicating with county, state, and federal authorities and supporting each other on grant applications, said Nathan.
In a time of division on the national political scene, Nathan, Scappaticci and Torres all voiced enthusiasm for their initiative. Torres posted to Facebook: “So excited to work with our neighbors to move flood mitigation efforts together. Water does not care about municipal borders and working together we can do this!!”
The group wasted no time in cooperating on a $2-million-dollar federal grant application to remediate problems caused by a footbridge that narrows Guion Creek from 33 to nine feet, Torres said. That bottleneck produces flooding in Rye when there is heavy rain. Mamaroneck authored the grant request while other municipalities sent in letters of support.
Why does such a small project benefit from intermunicipal cooperation? Because the town of Rye owns the bridge, Mamaroneck owns pipes running through it and ownership of the property is split between Mamaroneck and the town of Rye, Torres said.
“We need to be doing everything we can on flooding within Rye and working with our neighbors,” said Nathan. “It is great that everybody is starting to work together. It’s so much better than everyone trying to reinvent the wheel on their own.”
