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.

She called the residents who objected paranoid

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 admits it: “most speakers from the general public opposed authorizing the contract with Flock.” It says the speakers in favor 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. She did it in a court filing she signed under oath.

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. It describes them 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.” On March 31 she described them as “a small but highly vocal group” using “intimidation tactics and misinformation.”

On April 1 she held a news conference at police headquarters to announce the emergency. There she told the residents 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.

City channels called the council liars and its bills pro-criminal

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

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

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.” It called the proposal “dangerous, misguided, and a gift to criminals.” It called the council members servants of a “national agenda to score political points.”

In July, the council said the camera data it had been given was incomplete. The city’s own Facebook page then carried her statement that council members “were too lazy to review it in its entirety.” She sent it from her city email account that afternoon to her communications director.

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

The city’s page called its volunteer planners dysfunctional

The pattern started before the cameras. In July 2024 the city’s Facebook page announced she had proposed a law “to replace the dysfunctional Planning Commission.” The commission’s members were unpaid volunteers. The page used the word “dysfunctional” in the city’s own voice, not 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 on another city release. It accused people from the Knickerbacker Memorial Playgrounds board, another volunteer group, of “outright recklessness.” Of their proposal she said: “which we are not going to allow you to do, period.”

She told a court the auditor takes orders from the council

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. They call him “merely a creature of the Council” and someone Council President Steele “apparently controls.” They say he “takes his marching orders from the City Council” and has “no genuine autonomy and no role whatsoever in emergencies.”

Every label went to someone who disagreed with her about the cameras

Every one of those labels 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 did what the council asked had no judgment of his own. The council’s bills were 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, whatever their opinions. The city also promised 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.