Anthony Costanza: Integrity Under Fire in Irondequoit

He sat down, straightened the papers he brought with him, and spoke with the calm precision you expect from someone who has carried serious weight. Lt. Col. (Ret.) Anthony Costanza did not ask for applause. He asked for accuracy, offering receipts instead of rhetoric. What followed was not a campaign speech. It was a story about restoring trust when the temperature rises and rumors run ahead of truth.

The first tangle to cut was linguistic, not legal. In New York, an “indictment” is a charging instrument returned by a grand jury. A “prosecutor’s information” is something else: a written accusation filed by a district attorney in a local criminal court, and by definition, it does not charge felonies. They are not interchangeable. As he said, “Words matter,” and confusion here is not harmless. Anyone can verify the distinction in New York’s Criminal Procedure Law, definitions that should not bend to headlines.

Once the vocabulary was anchored, Costanza turned it on himself. When he served as town assessor, he stated he removed personal discretion in assessing his own home by using independent third-party appraisals, then laid bare the system’s flaws. Six weeks in, he delivered a thirty-page internal report exposing widespread errors, lower and middle-value homes overassessed, higher-value ones underassessed. He reported that later appraisal work showed his own home had been overvalued by roughly $30,000. The message: “Check the math,” not “trust me.”

That is not a wild claim. Across the country, scholars warn of assessment regressivity, where lower-priced homes are assessed at a higher percentage of market value than upscale homes. Christopher Berry’s national study uncovered that pattern across millions of sales, and professional bodies demand that governments test for price-related bias. New York’s Office of Real Property Tax Services (ORPTS) directs assessors to use metrics like the Price-Related Differential (PRD), ideally near 1.00, and the Coefficient of Dispersion (COD) to maintain uniformity. If a town wants fairness, it should publish those numbers for every homeowner to see before bills drop.

The stakes are real in Monroe County, where property taxes already bite. New York’s statewide effective property tax rate outside the city hovers around 1.23 percent, higher than the national average. The conservative answer is not to starve services, but to demand that every dollar earn its keep. Costanza claims he cut the assessor’s departmental budget by 11 percent year-over-year and now pledges a 10 percent pay cut if elected supervisor. Instead of empty symbolism, a disciplined town publishes unit costs: cost per parcel, days per permit, days per document request, and lets residents monitor the math.

He spoke of law not as cudgel but as guardrail. “As a father, I made the decision to prioritize my son over another promotion,” he shared, and that choice is part of why he accepts patient, lawful processes even when they take time. He is now navigating the K-1 fiancé visa process for his future wife. “If you preach order, live it where it costs you time,” not where it wins applause.

Public safety matters here. Nationally, violent crime fell 4.5 percent in 2024, according to the FBI. Murder and non-negligent manslaughter dropped nearly 14.9 percent. Those are not abstractions; they are lives saved. In Irondequoit’s 2023 year-end report, the town recorded 0 murders, 34 robberies, 6 rapes, 43 assaults, and a startling 308 stolen vehicles. That last number demands response, not rhetoric. “Let experts lead, enforce the law equally, and rely on data, not drama,” Costanza said.

Transparency came up again and again, not as a slogan but a stopwatch. New York’s Freedom of Information Law demands action within five business days, or a written acknowledgment and a date for response. Beyond twenty business days post-acknowledgment, the agency must explain why and offer a date. That is the legal baseline. “A town with nothing to hide should do better,” he insisted. “Acknowledge in two days, respond within twenty, publish a public FOIL log with timestamps and links.” Because delay kills faith, and trust is the hardest thing to rebuild.

Then there’s the potential. Irondequoit sits astride a lake, a river, and a bay. These are not backdrops; they are engines. The Irondequoit Bay Harbor Management Plan identifies more than 230 acres of public parkland, already fortified by state-funded resiliency upgrades. “If permitting is predictable and timelines are firm,” he noted, “low-impact businesses can thrive around those assets without losing what makes the shoreline feel like home.”

When you pull back, a pattern emerges. “Dashboards, not diatribes. Receipts, not rhetoric.” He will cut his own pay before touching others’ pockets. He wants to fix the roll, enforce with data, and plan around natural assets. He wants open books, open procedures, and a clock people can see. That is not ideological theater. It is the conservative center line: “Keep what works, fix what doesn’t, and do it in the open.”

Challenges remain. The reassessments, audits, and enforcement are work, not wishes. But the data show what honest management can do. When national crime rates drop and towns with accurate rolls earn trust, you learn that undoing dysfunction is mostly undoing secrecy and sloppiness.

If you want the town measured by character, follow the trail he laid: “Facts over slogans, receipts over rumors, and sunlight over insinuation.” Check the definitions. Read the dashboard. Demand the clock. Then hold everyone, especially the people you support, to the same standard.

That is how self-government grows up. That is how Irondequoit reclaims its reputation for being tough, fair, and open.

And that, in the end, was the story he brought into the room, not an argument about who to fear, but a blueprint for what to fix. The names will come and go. The habits remain. “Start with service before self,” he said. “The rest follows naturally when you tell the truth precisely and do the work in daylight.”