After his third election, Rep. Timothy Bishop is finally feeling safer and is about to retire the long-standing debt from his first win in 2002.
Aides say that in the next several weeks, Bishop will pay off the last $30,600 he owes to Doug Dodson, who managed that first campaign. That’s down from an original debt of $96,000, which Bishop has been slowly paying off.
Bishop, who first beat incumbent Felix Grucci by a scant 2,000 votes, increased his margin to 35,000 this year, winning every town in his district, including conservative Smithtown, where he got 54 percent of the vote. He also ended the election with $400,000 in his campaign account, cutting back on his last-minute spending against Republican Italo Zanzi because he was comfortably ahead.
Rick Brand