The lighter side of The News: Seeking votes, not stolen cars; The ides of March; How ’bout them Cowboys?

The recently approved 2024 Amherst town budget includes money to hire 17 police officers.

Public safety remains a priority for residents, said Michael Szukala, a Town Board member, as he learned at one house he visited while campaigning door to door one evening in October.

“They thought I was a car thief. They didn’t know who I was,” Szukala recalled the other day. “I was a stranger in the neighborhood.”

He said he hit them with the “unassailable logic” that he wore a tag with his name on it.

“How am I a car thief with a name tag?” he said, laughing.

That didn’t satisfy the resident at the door, at least not at first.

“The person said this: ‘How do I know it’s not fake?’ ” Szukala said.

Szukala then showed the resident one of the campaign flyers he carried that featured his picture.

“Look, I’m running for council,” he recalled saying.

This “one-two punch,” as Szukala put it, finally convinced the resident that Szukala wasn’t trying to steal a car.

“So, fortunately, they didn’t call the police,” he said. “Because if they had you’d have been doing another story where a councilman gets arrested.”

Tonawanda Supervisor Joe Emminger doesn’t believe he’s entirely at fault but it’s sure an odd coincidence.

A recent interview brought up the fact that bad things have happened in the months of March that followed each of his first two successful campaigns for town supervisor.

Emminger was elected to the post initially in 2015 and four months later the town’s largest taxpayer, the Huntley generating station, closed down.

Four years later, in 2019, Emminger won a second term and, four months after that the Covid-19…