Editor's note: This story has been updated to reflect a statement by the Greece public works commissioner denying a claim about snow plowing in the town.

Retired Greece police Officer Jim Leary is challenging incumbent Bill Reilich in this year's race for Greece town supervisor.

Leary is the second enrolled Republican in Monroe County races to switch to the Democratic Party in a bid to unseat a GOP incumbent.

Reilch, elected to Greece's top spot in 2013, is head of the Monroe County Republican Committee and a former small-business owner and Monroe County legislator and served as a state assemblyman from 2002 until becoming supervisor.

Leary, 62, retired from the Greece Police Department in 2015 and has been an active volunteer with Mother of Sorrows Church in Greece for much of his adult life.

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In his bid for office four years ago, Reilich promised to "take a good town and make it great again," an apparent reference to the scandal-pocked administration of former Town Supervisor John Auberger, also a Republican. During Auberger's tenure, which began in 1998, the town was racked by controversy, first with revelations that the town's assessor had conspired with a local appraiser and a former Eastman Kodak Co. tax official to defraud Kodak and the town of Greece, and then by rampant corruption revealed within the Greece Police Department.

By Reilch's assessment, he's been successful in making a turnaround.

As major accomplishments, he cites reducing the town budget, keeping the tax rate in line, bringing a free Fourth of July celebration to the town hall campus. Additionally, he points out major investments his administration has made in recreational amenities: a concert pavilion, pickleball courts, an ice rink, a state-of the art ADA-compliant playground and a spraypark on the town hall campus. In addition, he notes a new rental lodge in Braddock Bay Park, a refreshed town marina on Braddock Bay that's in the midst of major renovations and a reworked lodge at Adeline Park.

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Funding for many of those projects came from a combination of state grants and a unspent recreation trust fund that had built up to more than $1 million under Auberger, but had gone unspent.

"We tried to bring the community together and have reason for people to be proud to say they live in Greece," he said. "We tried to look at all qualities of life, tried to hit benefits for all age groups, our senior citizens, our younger people and families. At the same time, be prepared to be responsive when a situation may arise such as what we experienced with the flooding, the windstorm and a 22-inch snowstorm."

Other major achievements, he said, were the construction of the Gerald D. Phelan Police Headquarters on Vince Tofany Boulevard as well as cost-cutting measures that did away with a longstanding practice of balancing the town budget with reserve funds. He eliminated nearly 10 percent of town jobs, purchased the town's streetlights from Rochester Gas and Electric, opened a solar power farm for town use, renegotiated the town's telephone contract and sold four of the town's nine cell towers.

"Our budget every year has been lower than the budget I inherited," said Reilich. "To go four years and still be under what a previous budget had been tells you how cost-effective we've been in looking at how you can save money."

For Leary, who worked for seven years for the town as a part-time dispatcher before joining the police force, making his first run for office was an easy decision.

"I worked for all different supervisors during my 34 total years with the town, and I know what this town is capable of and what its workforce is capable of," he said. "I've seen the peaks and valleys of different management styles, but I keep running into current employees and when I'm asking them how they're doing it's all negative, negative, negative."

Leary said Reilich has micromanaged town departments to the breaking point.

"It's one-person rule, it's just this way, and he doesn't care about employees or listening to them," he said. An example, he said, is that highway crews now need approvals from the top before they can initiate plow runs during winter weather.

"In the past, Greece had the best roads and now I've even noticed driving around that you see the roads are pretty crappy compared to how they used to be," he said.

Greece's commissioner of public works, Kirk Morris, issued a statement Thursday rebutting Leary's assertion about snow plows that said, in part: "I can confirm that this is absolutely not true. Snow plowing and salting of roads are conducted based on winter conditions ..."

Additionally, Leary said many of the items that Reilich points to as accomplishments are hidden examples of wasteful spending.

"Look at all the money they put into that one playground," he said, referring to the one that opened earlier this year at Town Hall. "That was $675,000 on just one playground when we have 16 of them in the town. Why not put $100,000 into this park, and then $100,000 into that park?"

Leary also questioned the town's practice of issuing take-home cars to the supervisor, the deputy supervisor and some department heads.

"To me, that's an awful lot of wasteful spending of taxpayer dollars," he said. "Why does the highway commissioner need a take-home car?"

If elected, Leary said, he'd undertake a study to see how often those take-home cars are used for town business during off hours and revisit the policy determining who does and doesn't get a car.

Also, he said, he'd strive to expand the town's contingent of crossing guards to better ensure that students make it safely across the roads. He said Greece pays its guards $3 less than some other towns and that he would revisit that pay scale.

But overall, he said, the biggest issue in the town is morale.

"If the employees are happy, they come in with a good attitude and that reflects on the customers, the taxpayers," he said. "You end up with the plow guys doing a better job, etc. It's a domino effect."

The town supervisor presides over Town Board meetings and votes on all matters before the board, as well as serving as the chief financial officer for the town. In Greece, supervisors serve a four-year term. The 2018 salary is $124,099.

MCDERMOT@Gannett.com

About the candidates

Bill Reilich

Age: 60

Residence: Melwood Drive

Occupation: Greece town supervisor, chairman of the Monroe County Republican Committee

Party: Republican, Conservative, Independence, Reform

Top priority: Keeping town spending in line and "making a good town great again."

Jim Leary

Age: 62

Residence: Clearwater Circle

Occupation: Retired Greece police officer

Party: Democratic, Working Families

Top priority: Improving the delivery of town services by improving morale within Town Hall.