Republican candidate Zachary Winn aims to defeat Democratic candidate Jorge DeFendini ’22 for the First Ward seat of the Ithaca Common Council on Nov. 4. If elected into office, Winn seeks to address Ithaca’s homelessness and drug problems and to get Cornell University to increase its contribution to the city.
Winn said he wants to run for Common Council after watching downtown conditions “degrade” over the last few years. He said that both the current and past Common Councils have not properly handled Ithaca’s drug and homeless problems.
“I've seen more and more people clearly in distress, homeless living on the street,” Winn said. “The attempts to address these problems have been either unsuccessful or even disastrous, from the Alcohol and Drug Council going under to the detox center failing to actually open.”
A resident of downtown Ithaca, Winn said he works in the food service industry. He is also behind the news blog Ithaca Crime, which was created because he felt the public “wasn’t being informed” about instances of crime.
Another reason Winn seeks a Common Council seat is because he would “like to see a lot more cooperation between the city and the county,” which he said is lacking. Winn said that he feels that the city and the county are “often working at cross purposes.”
“It's really not constructive and a waste to public resources from both the city and the county to not work together to solve our problems,” Winn said.
If elected to office, Winn said that his first action item would be to dissolve the Memorandum of Understanding between Ithaca and Cornell University, in which Cornell pledged an annual contribution of $4 million to the city in lieu of paying taxes in 2023.
“That was a very bad deal that was negotiated,” Winn said. “It was signed under the duress of an ongoing budget where they needed that money to fill out the budget, but then they robbed subsequent years of what Cornell's actual contribution should be.”
The current Common Council race is not the first time that Winn has run for office in Ithaca. In 2022, he ran for mayor of Ithaca and was defeated by Laura Lewis after he received 8.6 percent of the vote. He also ran against Phoebe Brown for the First Ward seat in 2023, losing after receiving 15.25 percent of the vote.
According to the Tompkins County Board of Elections, only 5.89 percent of Ithaca residents are registered Republicans. The First Ward has the highest percentage of Republicans in Ithaca at 7.63 percent.
Some of Winn’s views have sparked criticism in Ithaca. In 2021, he burned a Black Lives Matter flag during a Back the Blue rally.
However, he maintains that he is transparent about his views, which he believes are consistent with much of the country as a whole.
“I have been fairly open about what my beliefs are,” Winn said. “What I consider a rational, normal opinion on certain issues and what might even be considered the most widely held consensus opinion nationally is here a very fringe view.”
Winn said that by being a candidate of a party with a small voter base, he feels that he can speak freely without a large voter base to lose.
“It's almost freeing to be in such a minority position because I can say wherever I want without having that much of a constituency to alienate,” Winn.
Despite the small Republican voter base in Ithaca, Winn stressed the importance of having a choice in every election.
“If every single race is determined in the Democratic primary, then the election in November is almost irrelevant,” Winn said. “By putting myself on the ballot, I have introduced choice into an election where there would not otherwise be one.”
Correction, Oct. 24, 2025: A quote by Winn has been corrected to say "at cross purposes" as opposed to its previous mis-quote of "across purposes."
Dalton Mullins is a member of the Class of 2027 in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. He is a senior writer for the News department and can be reached at dmullins@cornellsun.com.
