NAUMOFF RESIGNS FROM PETERS COUNCIL

NAUMOFF RESIGNS FROM PETERS COUNCIL

By Peter Glasser
The Weekly Recorder
April 14, 2008

Bill Naumoff submitted his resignation from Peters Township Council effective with the April 14th meeting. He recently started a new job that requires him to travel to Ohio frequently, and attending meetings regularly would have been impossible. Never being one to promise the people something he couldn’t deliver, he packed it in.

Prior to becoming a councilman, Bill was active in the McMurray Rotary, serving as its president for one year. His primary support when he first emerged on the local political scene came from the youth sports crowd, in which he had also been very active. While Bill was one of the driving forces behind numerous improvements to the township’s sports fields over his eight years on the council, and pushed for the building of a community recreation center, he grew beyond simply being an advocate for sports in the township. His greatest moments as a councilman came in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 2001.

Like most of us, Bill Naumoff yearned for something productive to do for his country at that moment. He first put together a Rally For America. Instead of hogging the limelight to himself, as many politicians would have done, Bill assembled a number of prominent local leaders to do most of the speaking on a chilly November evening in 2001, even reaching across the political aisle to US Army Major Lew Irwin, a prominent local Democrat. Peters schools provided choruses of children to sing patriotic songs. To my knowledge, it was the largest gathering in town ever assembled by a Peters official.

It became next to impossible to purchase U.S. flags locally in the weeks after the terrorists struck. It bothered Bill that our town’s main streets were virtually devoid of American flags, and he wanted help local residents obtain flags for their homes. Working with a few others, he found a manufacturer that would take a direct order for a large quantity. An order was placed and individual flags were offered to the public at the township’s wholesale cost. The plan was to fly them initially on main roads in Peters, and then at the end of one year to distribute the flags to the families that had paid for them, to be flown over their own homes.

Bill ran against me in 1999 and lost, then was appointed to Council in early 2000 to fill the position vacated by the resignation of Sandee Umbach, then won re election in 2001 by a crushing 2 to 1 margin against challenger Frank LoCastro, despite the challenger heavily outspending him, and then was unopposed in 2005. His term expires at the beginning of 2010.

But Bill Naumoff’s greatest strength was his ability to turn former opponents into friends, allies and supporters. I’m not sure how it happened, but after having him run a tough campaign against me, I wound up seconding his nomination for appointment to council and joining with him on numerous political campaigns. More than that, though, he became a personal friend. That’s not to say we didn’t disagree on political issues from time to time, sometimes vigorously. But with Bill, it was never personal. The people have lost a good public servant, one that I hope someday returns to public life.