Camille O’Brien, a staffer for New York state Sen. Peter Oberacker, says she is running for Assembly to tilt Big Apple-driven state policies toward needs in the upstate region.
Ms. O’Brien faces Lou Ingrassia in the June 25 Republican primary for the 100th Assembly District, which covers Sullivan County, the city of Middletown, and the town of Wallkill.
Longtime Democrat incumbent Aileen Gunther decided not to seek reelection.
“[The state] policies that were passed were not working for our community,” Ms. O’Brien, who grew up in Orange County and recently moved to Sullivan, told The Epoch Times. “It is very city-based; it almost seems that the state has forgotten rural New York.”
Ms. O’Brien was endorsed by the Sullivan County Republican Party, County Conservative Party, and Teamsters Local 445, a union that represents most Sullivan County public employees.
Born in Brooklyn, Ms. O’Brien moved to the town of Greenville at age 6 and attended Minisink Valley School District before pursuing an accounting associate degree at the State University of New York–Orange.
She went on to study for a bachelor’s degree in entrepreneurship and small business management at the City University of New York–Baruch, where she also served as the student senate’s legislative affairs vice chair at both the college and city university system levels.
Following her graduation in June 2014, she worked on the reelection campaign of longtime state Democratic Assemblyman Félix Ortiz in Brooklyn. After that, she chose to work at an upstate holistic wellness conference center for a few summers.
“It was a very healing time ... I delved into a lot of the grief that I hadn’t dealt with,” Ms. O’Brien said. She lost her mother at 16 and gave up college scholarships to stay close home to help take care of younger siblings with her retired New York City firefighter father, now deceased.
In 2017, she came back to work for Mr. Ortiz and later served as his chief of staff around the time when the Democratic Party flipped the state Senate and gained control over both houses.
“That was the year that bail reform passed, and that was when so many things started passing that I wasn’t comfortable with,” Ms. O’Brien said, adding that she decided to leave her job at the State Assembly because of the one-party control and the lack of meaningful legislative debates.
The 2019 bail law eliminated cash bail for most misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies, allowing defendants to be released without paying any money while they await a court appearance. Several provisions have since been rolled back.
Following several months of visiting and studying statehouses around the country, Ms. O’Brien came back home and started working as a community outreach director for then-state Sen. Mike Martucci, a Republican whose district included parts of Orange and Sullivan counties at the time. She answered constituent calls, ran a mobile office, and set up inquiry desks at town halls.
Currently, she does community outreach work in Sullivan County for Republican state Sen. Peter Oberacker and is a coordinator on the Sullivan County Drug Task Force.
She also volunteers in community activities that help children cope with the loss of parents and encourage people suffering from addictions to seek treatment.
Campaign Platform
Ms. O’Brien said that one of her top priorities is to curb the drug epidemic—Sullivan County has one of the highest overdose rates in the state—through enforcement, prevention, and rehabilitation.She said her personal journey and professional experience in the state capital and on the drug task force would contribute to effective rehabilitation initiatives at the state level.
Ms. O’Brien also said she supports policies to alleviate financial burdens on middle- and working-class families as the cost of living shoots up statewide.
“I have almost always had two jobs my whole life,” she said, adding that when she worked for Mr. Ortiz, she picked up catering jobs to cover the extra bills she took on for her sick father.
“A lot of the challenges the middle class has right now with families struggling to afford things—that is something I understand on a very deep level.”
When it comes to immigration, Ms. O’Brien said she hopes the state can do more to reverse some of the negative effects of the sanctuary policy in New York City.
“So much state money is going towards the migrant crisis in the city because so many people came,” she said. “Sullivan County, particularly, as a place that needs resources, is hurting.”
In addition, Ms. O’Brien said she wants to repeal or roll back bail reform, put more educational control in the hands of parents, and look at sensible cuts to state spending.
As of May 29, Ms. O’Brien had raised about $11,600 for her Assembly campaign, according to publicly available data from the New York State Board of Elections.
She has received a little more than $76,000 in state public financing matching funds over the past two months, according to data published by the New York Public Campaign Finance Board.
