BCW Member Tim Foley Appointed to Head Builders Institute

Tim Foley of Scarsdale has been appointed the new Executive Director of The Builders Institute (BI)/Building and Realty Institute (BRI) of Westchester and The Mid-Hudson Region.

BI/BRI President Vincent Mutarelli made the announcement on December 4^th. Mutarelli said that Foley will start in his new position on January 2, 2020.

Foley has spent the past two years as the Communications Director for New York State Assembly Member Amy Paulin, who represents the 88th Assembly District (Eastchester/New Rochelle/Pelham/Scarsdale/White Plains). In addition to serving as Paulin’s General Liaison with the press and media, he was an important aide for many of her special projects and initiatives focused on Westchester County.

Those projects and initiatives included coordinating the work of 33 local governments and school districts in Westchester, Suffolk, and Nassau Counties to challenge the IRS regulations disallowing the use of charitable funds to offer relief for taxpayers straining with the new cap on the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction at the federal level; supporting local community efforts to respond to both the problematic response by Con Edison to the March 2018 nor’easters; advocating for adequate funding for the Metro-North Railroad in the next MTA Capital Plan; and spreading public information on options to adapt to Con Edison’s moratorium on new natural gas services.

Prior to his work with Assembly Member Paulin, Foley was the Director of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Connecticut State Council, which includes six affiliated locals representing over 65,000 active and retired members, making it the state’s largest union. In that capacity, he also served on the Coordinating Committee for Protect Our Care CT, a campaign that supports comprehensive, high quality, affordable and accessible health care for all Connecticut residents.

For nearly a decade, Foley was first the Communications Director and then the Political Director for the Committee of Interns and Residents/SEIU Healthcare, a labor union for resident physicians training in safety-net hospitals in California, Florida, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, and the District of Columbia, including the resident physicians at Westchester Medical Center. Foley sat on the Steering Committee for the Metro New York Health Care for All Campaign, a New York City-based multi-constituency health care justice coalition, as well as for the Save Our Safety-Net Campaign, a community-labor coalition that focuses on the issue of hospital closures that disproportionately affect lower-income families and communities of color.

In 2014, Foley served on the Public Health Committee for the Transition Team for Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, and was also a member of the Paid Sick Days Advisory Committee for the Department of Consumer Affairs for the City of New York. He was also a delegate to the Westchester-Putnam Central Labor Body. Foley currently serves on the Village Planning Board of Scarsdale and previously served on the Advisory Council on Human Relations. He is also the President of the Scarsdale Forum, a not-for-profit volunteer organization in existence since 1904, which seeks to provide a platform for meaningful community dialogue about municipal, school and related civic affairs.

The Builders Institute (BI)/Building and Realty Institute (BRI) is a building, realty and construction industry membership organization. The association, based in Armonk, has more than 1,800 members in 14 counties of New York State.