The race between incumbent Jeffrey Klein and challenger Daniel Fasolino for the 34th District state Senate seat is a rematch of sorts: The two first met in a contest for Democratic district leader in the northeast Bronx in 1990.

Klein won that race. Four years later, he won an Assembly seat from the Bronx and in 2004 his Senate seat, which stretches across portions of Westchester and the Bronx. Fasolino went back to work as a real estate broker in the Bronx and a small-time home builder, and changed his enrollment to Republican.

In an interview with The Journal-News Editorial Board this week, Klein listed a series of priorities: HMO reform allowing physicians to overrule decisions by health maintenance organizations; property tax relief that combines ideas from the state Senate and Assembly; and measures to curb state spending due to the nation’s deepening economic crisis.

With the Assembly already dominated by Democrats, Klein said his party could be poised to take over the state Senate from the GOP for the first time in 40 years. Republicans now outnumber Democrats 31-29.

“It will be an important opportunity to deal with issues that I have been dealing with very hard over the last two years,” said Klein, a 48-year-old attorney.

Klein wants to see a property tax cap that limits school tax increases to no more than 4 percent, a measure favored by Senate Republicans, combined with a circuit-breaker backed by the Assembly Democrats. A circuit breaker substitutes state payments for a portion of a household’s property taxes if those taxes exceed a certain percentage of the household’s income.

He also calls for relief from so-called unfunded mandates – state and federal requirements that drive up school district costs because the requirements are not accompanied by funding. Unfunded mandates persist despite decades of complaints by school officials.

Klein says he opposes uniform budget cuts to state programs, preferring to leave public safety and education untouched while focusing reductions on other, less critical areas.

In addition to the failed district leader election 18 years ago, Fasolino said he lost a bid for the New York City Council in the mid-1980s. Fasolino, a 71-year-old retired New York City police officer who also has Conservative Party support, describes himself as “not a polished candidate.”

Asked why he was running, Fasolino immediately responded: “the tax situation.”

“We should be reducing spending, cutting taxes and capping the property tax,” said Fasolino, whose campaign materials say he supports the death penalty as a way to reduce murders. Although New York City saw a drop in homicides to 496 in 2007 from 2,245 in 1990 despite the lack of executions in the state in decades, Fasolino cited his experience as a police officer in saying he believed the severe penalty worked.

The district encompasses an irregularly drawn district that includes the eastern half of the Bronx and slices of the northwest and central Bronx as well as Pelham Manor, Bronxville, Tuckahoe, Eastchester, northern Mount Vernon and southeastern Yonkers.

Source: LoHud