Vincent M. Tamagna

He was elected to the Putnam County Legislature in 1995 for District 1 — Philipstown and part of Putnam Valley, the river towns — and held the seat for six terms, until the end of 2012. By 2000 he was chairing a committee; he went on to chair the Legislature itself, the county’s governing body, in 2010 and 2011 — re-elected to the chair by a 7–2 vote in January 2011, a month after his own caucus had tried to replace him — and was in the chair during the difficult winter of 2010, when the county executive-elect withdrew and the Legislature had to guarantee the county an executive by New Year’s Day.

He describes himself as something of a maverick in those years: a Republican who worked across the aisle, who pressed for term limits for the county executive and the Legislature itself, who authored a domestic partner registry years before same-sex marriage was law in New York, and whose lasting work was institutional — the county’s first Industrial Development Agency, its first Economic Development Corporation, the Farmland Protection Board and Agricultural District, the Visitors Bureau. In 2005 he sponsored the open-space bond that gave Putnam’s voters a direct say over the protection of their own land and water. In 2010, as chairman, he began the county’s move to acquire the Butterfield property in Cold Spring from a private developer.

He left the Legislature at the end of 2012, having managed the campaign of the woman who succeeded him.

In 2013, a few months after leaving the Legislature, he took over the county’s transportation programme — a $2.3 million public-transit budget, a $2.1 million budget for busing the county’s pre-kindergarten and early-intervention children, and a planning budget for economic development and transit. His first presentation to the Legislature’s task force laid out the problem plainly: a third of the county had no bus service at all, 455 residents depended on paratransit, and the county spent more to transport a pre-school child than it did to educate one.

Over eleven years he cut the cost of operations by a fifth, brought the programme through five Federal Transit Administration audits, moved operations to a new contractor, added an accessible MV-1 vehicle to the paratransit fleet, and put GPS on the buses. The visible work was the Cold Spring–Beacon trolley, which took two years of untangling federal rules about crossing a county line and opened in August 2015 to a full car and coverage in the New York Times. The larger work was the Southeast–Danbury rail study: an $800,000 federal study he coordinated for the county with Metro-North, the Housatonic Railroad, Danbury and the Western Connecticut Council of Governments, which concluded in 2022 that the eleven-mile line — dead since at least 2007 — could carry passengers again without degrading the rest of Metro-North’s service.

He was one of the principal directors of the county’s Incident Command Structure during storms and evacuations, chaired the county’s Transportation Advisory Committee, served as the county’s Climate Smart Coordinator, advised the Putnam County Soil & Water Conservation District, sat on the East of Hudson Watershed Council, represented Putnam on the Catskill Regional Off-Track Betting board, made the case for the county’s Complete Streets policy in 2021, and in his last year launched an on-demand micro-transit pilot. He left the post in August 2024 for Florida, where he is Director and Program Manager of Paratransit Services for Broward County Transit.

He went back to school in his fifties, while directing the county’s transportation programme — a doctorate, he said, had long been on his life’s list, the example set by an uncle who had emigrated from Italy and taught at Columbia University: a bachelor’s degree from Marist College in 2015, a Master of Public Administration from Marist in 2017, and a doctorate from Concordia University Chicago in 2023.

The dissertation grew out of thirty years in elected and appointed office. A phenomenological study, it asks how state and national political leaders use values-based leadership — leading from stated principle rather than position or party — to pass the policies they set out to pass, to build consensus, and to build a following, through the lived experience of leaders in the Northeast and Midwest. Its own summary of what it found: leaders thought it important to spend more time reflecting during the decision-making process and to be proactive in communicating with their constituents, asking for input and feedback more often; and that leaders should be transparent about their values, treat others with respect and humility, and listen to the opinions and perspectives of others.

Read the dissertation (PDF, 136 pages) — also published open-access through ProQuest, no. 30311814.

In his own account, the foundation of that kind of leadership is four intelligences held together: intellectual, leadership, emotional and spiritual. Leaders at every level of government and business, he argues, need to be intellectually capable and emotionally conscious of their own behaviour.

The same question is the subject of his talks, including the 2023 presentation below.