Oct. 28, 2026

To the Editor:

I came to Bronxville on purpose. I am a dual Swiss-American citizen and a founder. I have started companies and raised the capital to build them, and my family could have settled almost anywhere. We chose this one square mile, and we chose it for what it already is: a community that has drawn ambitious, public-spirited people for generations and has stayed a real village the whole time. I came here to join that, not to upend it.

People sometimes expect someone whose work is innovation to favor change for its own sake. I have learned the opposite. The best new ideas are never built on cleared ground. They are built on a foundation solid enough to take the risk. The founders and investors I respect most are careful about what they preserve, because they understand that protecting the right things is what makes bold moves possible. Innovation and tradition are not rivals. The best of one depends on the other.

A perspective from where I come from may help. In Switzerland, people vote often, several times a year, much of it on small and local matters. No one treats it as a burden. It is simply what belonging to a place means. And it works for a reason that usually goes unspoken: local questions are kept local. They are decided on their own merits, not folded into whatever national contest happens to be loudest that season. That separation is not an inefficiency to be solved. It is the point.

Proposal 1 asks us to do the opposite. I understand the appeal, and I do not dismiss it. More neighbors do vote in November. But turnout and good judgment are not the same thing. My concern is that our Trustees would start being chosen by the party label at the top of a crowded ballot rather than by who they are and what they will do for Bronxville. That would import the very thing this village has worked so hard to keep off its own streets.

This village did not happen by accident either. It was planned, deliberately, more than a century ago, and it has endured because each generation understood which parts to protect and which to build on. That is the same discipline I try to bring to everything I create. Keep innovating inside Bronxville. Do not dismantle the foundation that makes it worth innovating in. How we choose our local leaders is part of that foundation.

Reasonable people can disagree about this, and I respect the neighbors who see it differently. But I keep arriving at the same place. I am not willing to trade a community that governs itself on its own terms for a number that looks better on paper.

I chose Bronxville for what it is. I am voting No on Proposal 1 on November 3rd.

Sincerely,

Sebastian Alyn Gyr
Bronxville Resident