I took a brief journey over to the Westchester County Office Building in  White Plains today to see if anybody on the defeated ninth floor was standing at an open window, threatening to jump and end it all. Nothing dramatic was going on.

In fact, it was very quiet.

I ran into Board Chairman Bill Ryan in the lobby. For a guy who was 44 votes behind in the unofficial count, he seemed rather buoyant. The election in the 5th District is far from over—there will be a recount. Maybe Ryan thinks he’s got in the bag. After all, they haven’t yet counted the absentee ballots from the local graveyards.

I also ran into Legislator Vito Pinto, D-Eastchester. Pinto was standing at a table selling raffle tickets and baked goods to raise money for U.S. troops overseas. He was doing a brisk business. By the time I got there, he figured he was going to collect $500 for the cause.

Not bad.

A few words about Pinto are in order. He is a modest and dedicated public servant, who has held his seat for 12 years despite being in a mostly Republican district. His popularity with people from all political persuasions was evidenced by the fact that no one opposed him in last Tuesday’s election.

We talked for a little bit about the terrible shooting spree at Fort Hood, Texas. I said something about how  the most noble job in the world must be that of an Army medic or Navy corpsman—the noncombatant soldiers and sailors who risk their lives in battle to save fallen comrades.

Pinto knows more than a little about combat. A Vietnam veteran, he flew in 250 missions and was wounded in action. It was moving to see him doing his bit for the troops.

I’m not going soft on the Board of Legislators, but Pinto deserves a thank you and so do all the veterans. Nov. 12 is Veterans Day.

They must be singing “Roll Out The Dumpster” up on the ninth floor at the Westchester County Office Building where the Andy Spano team is coming to terms with Tuesday’s stunning results in the county executive’s race.

One of my spies tells me  they’re busy emptying desks and file cabinets and shredding documents like mad.

My informant tells me that when he came to work today on the eighth floor, where the county legislators roam, there was a “huge rolling garbage bin” filled to the brim with papers. The janitor told him the garbage was from the floor above—Spano’s domain—and that there was more to come.

Gee, I wonder if they brought in the county shredmobile for this major operation. (at left)

But here’s a more serious question: How much of that stuff was sensitive material not meant for scrutiny by the prying, public eye?  If you want to see it, you’ll probably have to go down to the Canyon of Heroes today and sift through the confetti.

We’re going to break down Tuesday’s election in a special edition of  “High Noon” today. What did it all mean?

We’ll try to answer that.

For the first half hour, our phone guest will be Rob Astorino, who won in a stunning landslide over three-time incumbent Andy Spano in the Westchester county executive’s race. On election night, Astorino said the results “blew his mind,” a remark which prompted memories of the movie “The Candidate,” when in the end, the victor turned around and asked, “Now what do we do?”

In addition to our usual cast of crazy pundits and political analysts, we’ll also be talking to Journal News reporter Gerald McKinstry and Andrew Whitman, a correspondent with RNN-TV, which conducted the only poll on the county executive’s race.

Tune in today at 1460 AM or log onto wvox.com.

The truth is nobody thought Bob Hyland had much of a chance to unseat Bill “Boss” Ryan. That doesn’t mean Hyland wasn’t a good candidate.

He was.

A standout at Stepinac High and a star football lineman for the Super Bowl winning Greenbay Packers, Hyland, has long been  a familar face on the local scene. For manyy years, he has owned and operated the Sports Page pub in White Plains. Hyland is tall, soft-spoken and modest in the mold of a Garry Cooper-type. His business acumen and biography made him an appealing candidate.

However, he faced some big problems. He’s a political novice for one thing. And he was up against a powerful, entrenched incumbent in Ryan, who sits as the chairman of the county Board of Legislators. Ryan raised more money than Hyland and he had the advantage of serving in the Fifth legislative district which overwhelmingly favors Democrats.

Ryan mailed out a last-minute flier that came close to libeling Hyland. Even if Ryan pulls this out in a recount, it’s an upset and a repudiation of the Boss.

But look what happened. With all 51 election districts reporting, the race is a virtual dead heat. Hyland leads Ryan by 44 votes—5,456 to 5,412, according to unofficial numbers from the Board of Elections.

The funniest political commercial in the race for county executive was Rob Astorino’s take-off on “Lifestyles Of The Rich and Famous.” in which the incumbent Andy Spano is shown living the “life of a rock star”  with all the trappings—champagne,  premium seats at ball games, body-guard drivers and trips to “exotic lands.”  The cheesey imitation of the cheesey Robin Leach is particularly humorous.

For the commercial click on Andy and scroll to the icon.

In the spot, Spano is depicted as tourist in China, a place he frequently visited during his tenure, which ended last night in a landslide victory for Astorino.

Word has it that Spano has hit the road again.  Not China,  though. This morning, he took off for Florida.

Hmm…for three days the Westchester County Department of Health advised homeowners in my section of Yonkers to boil the drinking water because of “groundwater infiltration” that happened when the pipeline was shut down for repairs.

Of course I ignored the advisory because I rarely drink water from the tap—even if it is Yonkers water which every once in awhile wins one of those water-tasting contents. What the hell is water supposed to taste like anyway?

The idea that some foreign substance had infiltrated the east side of Yonkers made me think for one second that it was a big county government plot, but to what purpose I knew not. Perhaps it was cherry-flavored Kool-Aid to make us obediently follow Andy Spano and his veggie wagon.

It reminded me of Jack D. Ripper, the crazy officer in Dr. Strangelove played by Sterling Hayden. He does a great riff on water in a scene with Peter Sellers who played the unctuous Capt. Mandrake. Click on  “vodka” for the scene.

RIPPER: Mandrake, have you never wondered why I drink only distilled water, or rain water, and only pure grain alcohol?

MANDRAKE: Well it did occur to me, Jack, yes.

RIPPER: Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation? Fluoridation of water?

MANDRAKE: Ah, yes, I have heard of that, Jack. Yes.

RIPPER: Well do you now what it is?

MANDRAKE: No. No, I don’t know what it is. No.

RIPPER: Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?

Ten years ago, when Westchester County Board Chairman Bill “Boss” Ryan ran for re-election in the  fifth legislative district, his opponent released a last-minute mailer that was so below the belt that it cried out for rebuke.

I slammed Ryan’s Republican opponent, Denise D’Ambrosio, in a Oct. 31, 1999 column that carried the headline, “Campaign flier defies facts, fairness, common sense and good taste.”  Yes, I defended Ryan.

The flier in question basically said that Ryan stalled on a proposed gun control law and set Westchester up for a Columbine-type disaster. What made the ridiculous charge even more outrageous was that the flier included a photograph of two boys—one white and the other black. The white boy had a very real-looking gun pointed at the black boy’s head.

D’Ambrosio lost the election.

But now, what do you know? Ryan has essentially done a similar jobbing on his 2009 opponent, Bob Hyland. A flier “paid for” by the Westchester County Democratic Committee went out late last week that smears Hyland and his business, the Sports Page Pub in White Plains.

The flier, reads “Not paying his taxes, violence at his bar…that’s Robert Hyland.”

This is a sign of desperation and it’s the subject of my column which will appear in tomorrow’s edition of The Journal News and posted on lohud.com. You would think Ryan would know better.

The robo-calls are starting.

I just got one from Chappaqua resident Bill Clinton—or maybe it was just a guy disguising his voice. It is Halloween, isn’t it.

Besides, there’s more than few car dealerships around here that hire bad impressionists to appear in radio and cable-TV commercials masquerading as the former first president.  And it’s not all that hard to effect Clinton’s twangy voice.

I mean, there’s no possible way I could tell if  that was a phone recording from the real Bubba. It could have been anybody.

Even I could have done Clinton’s voice.

Of course, if it had been me I would have added heavy breathing to give it the perfect Clintonian edge. Then I would’ve said: “Hey baby, this is your old president, Bill. Your husband isn’t home, is he? I hope not. Hah, I’m just kiddin’ ya!”

In any case, the  10-second call was on behalf of County Executive Andy Spano, who is seeking his fourth term on Tuesday. I expect Hillary, or the Bam will call next…or maybe Jack Nicholson. How about the Guvenator of Cal—ee-forn-i-a?

“Hallo, dis is Ahnald. Dohn be a gurlee mahn…vote for Ahn-dee Spah-no!”

I’ve just checked Andy Spano’s campaign contributions. It amounts to 126 pages, the length of a short novel. The total take for this election cycle? More than $3 million.

But what the records don’t show is the shadow contributions paid for by taxpayers. That’s the money that goes into bogus press conferences, press releases, mailings and vote-getting gimmicks that ostensibly have to do with important county issues but are transparently timed in the weeks, days and hours leading up to election day. Spano’s staff, whose salaries are paid for by the citizens, are not supposed to be engaged in electioneering.

So one might question a letter dated Oct. 19 that was written by Spano’s deputy, Sue Tolchin,  and mailed to South Salem residents. Accompanied by a brochure, the letter purports to explain Spano’s controversial affordable housing settlement which calls for the county to spend at least $52 million to build, buy or lease 750 units of housing in 31 mostly white communities.

Because this issue has bitten Spano in the backside, one might conclude that the purpose of the correspondence was more about politics than policy—and that it was done on the taxpayers’ dime.

It begins this way:

“Dear South Salem Resident:

“It has come to our attention that there is a great deal of misinformation about the fair and affordable housing settlement that was recently passed by the Board of Legislators. Because of this, we have put together the enclosed brochure that will give you the facts about what the settlement means and what it does not mean.”

Note that Tolchin puts the settlement at the feet of the Board of Legislators. Spano negotiated the deal and then put a gun to the board’s head to pass it quickly, even pulling out the race card to shame them into action.

Spano should reimburse the taxpayers for the cost that went into this. Come to think of it, he should also make good on the Columbus Day Weekend discounts he gave to Bee-Line bus riders.

He can afford it. He’s got more than $3 million.

An RNN-TV and Siena Institute Research poll released tonight shows Andy Spano leading Rob Astorino 48 percent to 41 percent in the county executives’s race. That’s a sevne percentage point spread.

But the good news for Astorinos is that leave 11 percent of the voters up for grabs. The poll has 4.5 percent margin of error, plus or minus.

Here’s the whole press release from Andrew Whitman of RNN:

RNN Television (Regional News Network) and the Siena Research Institute have released the results of the only public poll in the race for Westchester County Executive, and Westchester County District Attorney.

The results were first made public on the network’s news/talk/opinion program Richard French Live Thursday night at 7pm.

The results in the County Executive race are particularly revealing, in that the lead is just 7 points in a county where Democrats hold a huge registration advantage (D:  46.6%; R: 25.5%), and where Spano defeated Astorino by more than 16 points in 2005.

Other areas of note within the poll:  Spano, a 3-term incumbent, leads despite a high unfavorable rating (46%); Spano’s favorable/unfavorable split is even more pronounced among unaffiliated voters (34% favorable/60% unfavorable; unaffiliated voters make up 22.2% of the electorate in Westchester County); Astorino is within striking distance, even though nearly half of those polled (1/3 of all Republicans, as well) say they still don’t know enough about him to form an opinion.

In the DA’s race, incumbent Janet DFiore (D) remains in solid shape for re-election, polling at 52% against® Dan Schorr’s 21% and (WF/I) Tony Castro’s 14%.

Complete results (including polling on some specific issues) as well as demographic breakdowns are attached.

For any additional information or comment, please feel free to contact RNN as listed below.