For your consideration as the write-in candidate for Village of Saranac Lake trustee by or on Tuesday, March 19, 2024.
Remember: Fred can win if we write him in!
Fred Balzac is running to represent and give voice to year-round homeowners and tenants of the Village of Saranac Lake, along with part-time residents who care so much about our community that they’ve registered to vote here—all people whose needs and interests have for too long been given secondary consideration by our village board and government. Rather than cater to the demands of special interests and elites in Saranac Lake and elsewhere in our region, Fred’s number-one goal if elected is to prioritize the needs of ALL our neighbors—putting people before profits.
Biographical Summary
With more than 40 years of professional experience, Fred Balzac has worked as a promotional copywriter; medical writer, editor and project specialist; freelance journalist, crisis counselor, grant writer, operations manager, and community organizer—in such fields as book publishing in New York City, medical communications, regional newspaper/magazine publishing, and nonprofit arts.
Since becoming a full-time resident of the Adirondacks in 1993, he has worked remotely for Connecticut-based Chase Medical Communications, served as a contributing writer and arts & culture reporter for the Lake Champlain Weekly (LCW), edited Northern Home Garden & Leisure (HGL) and other magazines for the LCW’s Plattsburgh-based publisher, taught Freshman Composition at North Country Community College in Saranac Lake, co-produced/programmed several film festivals and curated film series for the Adirondack Film Society of Lake Placid, and offered crisis counseling to survivors of Tropical Storm Irene in Clinton and Essex Counties as part of Project Hope, which was funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), overseen by the NYS Office of Mental Health, and facilitated by the Mental Health Association in Essex County, Inc.
Citizen Fred
Deeply involved in the cultural, socioeconomic, and political life of the region—typically as a volunteer—Balzac has made contributions in such diverse roles as a citizen-monitor of local & country government, bed & breakfast innkeeper, journalist, theater artist, workshop leader, community organizer, and political activist. He led a successful 15-year effort to preserve the historic 1857 Jay Covered Bridge—the last publicly owned such structure in the Adirondack Park and the Town of Jay’s most treasured cultural artifact—and protect the famed Jay swimming hole, rapids and upstream scenic-recreational river corridor from being blighted by the construction of a new concrete-and-steel bridge.
Volunteer efforts in the Adirondacks include serving on the boards of the Jay Entertainment & Music Society (JEMS)—where, as acting treasurer Fred played an important role in advancing the theater-building project the group found itself enmeshed in at the time; the Whiteface Mountain Regional Visitors Bureau; and the Adirondack Film Society, following the elimination of his part-time job owing to a lack of funding—thus, demonstrating his dedication to the organization and the arts it presented. He served as an in-school playwriting workshop leader and script judge for Pendragon Theatre’s Young Playwrights Festival, on the Jay Flood Relief Committee following Tropical Storm Irene, the steering committee of the Tahawus (arts) Center in Au Sable Forks, and on the Shared Decision-Making committee of, and as the Forensics (speech and drama) team assistant coach for, Keene Central School in Keene Valley.
As co-chair of The Adirondack Democracy and/or in association with other groups, Balzac directed, produced/co-produced, and publicized a series of theatrical productions, panel discussions, and public presentations, including as fundraisers for such nonprofit causes as the Arts Council of the Adirondacks, the Elizabethtown Community Hospital, and the Central Asia Institute (toward building schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan).
Working closely with the then-Town Supervisor, the late Tom Douglas—one of Balzac’s political heroes—Fred initiated, wrote, oversaw the design of, and helped launch the Town of Jay government’s first-ever website—which grew out of an influential report Balzac wrote for a group he co-founded, the Jay Council on Tourism, on strengthening the town’s economy by growing its tourism trade. A few years later, Fred was named by then-Jay Town Supervisor Thomas O’Neill to the Essex County Occupancy Tax Oversight Committee, on which Balzac served briefly as chair.
Notable Achievements
Among the successful grant applications he has written or coauthored was one for a state-funded Essex County “Creating Healthy Places” grant to establish the Town of Jay’s first community garden. As a medical writer-editor, Balzac worked closely with some of the country’s top neurologists on a redefinition of TIA (transient ischemic attack) published in articles in the New England Journal of Medicine and the journal Neurology that’s been adopted in clinical trials and medical practice guidelines. His work has won or shared awards in journalism, essay writing, playwriting, academic scholarship, and community service. Honors and awards include:
• The 2022 bell hooks Writing Prize in Gender & Women’s Studies, SUNY Plattsburgh, for his essay “Pontifications on Power”
• The 2020 Feinberg Library Prize for Research, SUNY Plattsburgh, for his paper “Polarization Deconstructed: Elites vs. the People in Post-WWII America and Debt-Crisis-Ridden Greece”
• Co-recipient, as an LCW contributor, Best Arts Coverage in NY State (Circulation Division 2), 2013 and 2008, from the NY Press Association
• Second prize, North Country Public Radio/Adirondack Center for Writing One-Play competition, 2004, for the absurdist comedy Who’s Buried with Lou Gehrig’s Disease?, which, as a result of the prize, was given its first staged reading at Pendragon Theatre
• Co-recipient, as co-founder and president of the grassroots advocacy group Bridge & Beyond, the Adirondack Council Community Service Award, 1995
• Winner, Critical Choices statewide essay contest commemorating New York State’s Bicentennial for his essay championing voting rights for homeless people, 1988
Politics and Education
A registered Democrat for most of his adult life (beginning from the moment he turned 18), Balzac joined the Essex County Democratic Committee (ECDC) in 2008, excited by the election of Barack Obama as our nation’s first African-American president, and was an active member until 2011. That year, over philosophical differences with the Democratic Party at the national, state, and county levels, Fred switched his voter registration to Green—finding that the state Green Party’s 60-page platform reminded him of what Democrats stood for when he came of age in the 1970s. Over the next decade, Balzac engaged in volunteer organizing work for the Greens. In 2019, he was the principal organizer of a visit to Plattsburgh by Green Party presidential candidate Howie Hawkins (another of Fred’s political heroes), which included a campus forum at SUNY Plattsburgh and an off-campus press conference at City Hall that generated extensive media coverage in the region. Mr. Hawkins later called his Plattsburgh visit the “best-organized” event of his 2019-20 campaign.
Alarmed by the spread of extreme right-wing militancy and the threats to American democracy coming from the Republican Party, Balzac changed his registration back to Democratic in February of 2023. He rejoined the ECDC and was appointed to represent election district #2 in the Town of North Elba. In May, at a caucus of the North Elba Democratic Committee (of which he is also now an active member), Fred was nominated for one of the two town councilperson seats being contested in the November 7, 2023 election.
Although he was not elected, Balzac ran a strong third out of four candidates, winning 42% of the vote (based on 1,385 people voting, each of whom could cast two votes for councilperson). He actually received more votes on the Democratic line (582) than the second-place finisher, an incumbent, received on the Republican line (576); but the latter had a second, independent line, which Fred did not have, and garnered an additional 100 votes.
Balzac has previously run for office several times—in all but one race against incumbents and always as an “outsider”/non-establishment candidate. In 2009, for example, in a race in which he ran as a Democrat for one of two councilperson seats in the Town of Jay, along with an incumbent Democrat and an incumbent Republican (a tough combination to beat, especially when both candidates are “locals”), a switch of a mere 31 votes from the second-place finisher to Balzac would have resulted in victory. In 2020, running for one of two village trustee seats in Saranac Lake on the Green Party line and as an avowed Democratic Socialist, on a ticket with a write-in candidate, Trevor Sussey, against two incumbent Democrats in a very pro-Democrat community, Fred received 40% of the vote. The Balzac-Sussey ticket was endorsed and actively supported by the High Peaks chapter of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and Fred’s candidacy was also endorsed by the local chapter of the national environmental group, the Sunrise Movement.
Inspired by the example of Rocky Balboa in the movie Rocky, Balzac has a philosophy on running for office that can be summed up by Rocky’s original goal of “going the distance”—in other words, never quit, never stop getting up form the canvass no matter what kind of beating you’re taking! More important than winning, in Fred’s view, is raising tough issues that no other candidates will dare speak about while challenging the established “powers that be” and other entrenched special interests.
Currently, Balzac is a proud card-carrying member of DSA and active in the High Peaks chapter, believing that socialism—at its most basic level—means prioritizing people over profits and that, simply put, socialism = democracy. With HPDSA, he has served on the Anti-Pregnancy Center and Housing Rights working groups and focused on fighting corruption in the Village of Saranac Lake government under then-Mayor Clyde Rabideau. Fred is a member of Adirondack Voters for Change, including its Abortion Access and Affordable Housing committees, and co-founder of Neighbors for Good Government – Tri-Lakes (NfGG), which sought to expose the abusive behavior of Mr. Rabideau toward village residents, among other malfeasance by the village government. In the winter of 2022, Balzac co-organized a highly regarded public forum, co-sponsored by NfGG and High Peaks DSA, with the three new candidates for village mayor and, in April of that year, Rabideau left office under a cloud.
Born and raised in northern New Jersey to and by working-class parents—his Dad was an iron worker, his Mom a department-store clerk at Gimbels and then Macy’s—Fred is a product of the Fair Lawn K-12 school system (in Bergen County), where he was elected student council president in high school and chosen by his fellow class scholars (top 5% of the class) to be the class speaker at graduation. The first in his immediate family to attend college, Fred earned a B.A. in English from Columbia College, the main liberal arts division of Columbia University and, 30 years later, went back to school to earn a Multimedia Journalism Certificate from SUNY Plattsburgh, where he continues to take courses in such subjects as political science and film studies.
As further evidence of the strong belief in the critical importance of education in the Balzac household, Fred & Kathy’s son, Samuel, was valedictorian of his class at Keene Central School and graduated from Columbia magna cum laude.
Fred dedicates this present candidacy to his son and to Sam’s generation, in the belief that—in a world threatened by climate catastrophe, environmental degradation, nuclear annihilation, and rising authoritarianism & fascism—by acting locally we can have some positive effect globally, for the future benefit of our current young people and the generations to come.
Your Struggle Is OUR Fight 