Party over people

In April 2024 the City of Troy published a rule about how it would treat people who disagreed with it.

Our pages must be made available to everyone, regardless of their personal opinions… People should not be punished for that.

Here is what the same administration has published since, on the same channels, about the people who disagreed with it.

The residents

About 150 people came to the council meeting on March 19, 2026 to talk about the cameras. Every resident who spoke was against them. Her own sworn answer concedes it: “most speakers from the general public opposed authorizing the contract with Flock,” and the speakers in favour were “from the Administration and the Troy Police Department.”

No resident has ever spoken for the cameras at a Troy council meeting. The support has come from the people who run the city and the people who operate the system.

Four months after that meeting the mayor described the residents to a judge, in a document she signed under penalty of perjury.

I was elected to serve more citizens than the three dozen or so paranoid souls who spoke at the City Council meeting.

Residents who said at that meeting that they had been followed or tracked appear in the same document as people making “wild unsubstantiated claims of being tracked and stalked.”

Before that, in March, she had described residents who wanted the camera contract to end as trying to “defund our police department,” and on March 31 as “a small but highly vocal group” using “intimidation tactics and misinformation.”

On April 1, at a news conference at police headquarters announcing the emergency declaration, she told them their turnout did not count.

If they truly felt that their crowds spoke for the 49,950 other folks here in this city, why didn’t they vote?

She would “not cave to what is a vocal but small minority.”

What the paranoid souls came to object to, and what the records show about it, is set out in Mayor Carmella Mantello supports Flock.

The council

Troy elected an all-Democratic council in November 2025. Two days later she posted that Troy would “not become a socialist city,” and described some of the people who had just voted as backing a “socialist agenda.”

By January the city’s own press channel — troyny.gov, the Office of the Mayor, the city seal — was running a release headed “Sue Steele and the Democratic Majority.”

These are not misunderstandings - they are blatant lies… I am done playing political games with the Democratic Council.

In May, the same channel called the council’s proposed limits on camera data “Pro-Criminal,” the legislation “dangerous, misguided, and a gift to criminals,” and the council members servants of a “national agenda to score political points.”

In July, when the council said the camera data it had been given was incomplete, the city’s own Facebook page carried her statement that its members “were too lazy to review it in its entirety.”

In August, under oath, the council had “spinelessly refused” and “irresponsibly refused” to act, was “behaving recklessly,” and was dithering.

The volunteers

The pattern predates the cameras. In July 2024 the city’s Facebook page announced she had introduced legislation “to replace the dysfunctional Planning Commission” — unpaid volunteers, described that way in the city’s own voice rather than inside a quotation.

Unfortunately, the Planning Commission has inexplicably delayed projects of all kinds… The commission should operate within the bounds of its duty, personal preferences have no role in decision making.

In December 2025 the Times Union reported that a city release accused representatives of the Knickerbacker Memorial Playgrounds board — another volunteer body — of “outright recklessness.” Of their proposal she said: “which we are not going to allow you to do, period.”

The auditor

Jeff Nessich is the City Auditor. When the council voted to stop paying Flock, he was the officer who declined the payment. Her filings describe him as an instrument of the people who appointed him — “merely a creature of the Council,” someone Council President Steele “apparently controls,” an official who “takes his marching orders from the City Council” and has “no genuine autonomy and no role whatsoever in emergencies.”

What the pattern is for

Every one of those characterisations was aimed at someone who had disagreed with her about the same thing: cameras that photograph every vehicle in Troy.

The residents who objected were paranoid. The council that voted to pause the contract was lying, spineless, reckless and lazy. The auditor who followed the council’s direction had no independent judgment. The council’s legislation was pro-criminal. The lawsuit was a political power play wasting taxpayer money.

This local law is yet another example of the City Council’s misdirected priorities and nothing more than a political power play… While the Council wastes time and taxpayer dollars pursuing this in a courtroom, the people we serve lose.

What the record shows

The 2024 promise was that the city’s channels would be open to everyone regardless of their opinions, and that people would not be punished for holding them.

What followed used those channels to name the opposing party, call its members liars, and label its bills pro-criminal. It described the residents who turned up to speak as paranoid souls and their accounts of being followed as wild claims. It told a court the city’s own auditor has no mind of his own.

Not one resident has stood up at a council meeting and asked Troy to keep the cameras. The people who want them are the administration and the police department. The people who came to object are paranoid souls.