Jack Lombardi's not the retiring type

John A. Lombardi says he's looking forward to a new career after 44 years as North Castle town supervisor.

John A. (Jack) Lombardi may be leaving the elected office he has occupied since Kennedy was president and gas prices were measured in cents. But the departing North Castle town supervisor isn't quite ready to fade into the sunset yet.

"A lot of people have already called me and asked me what I'm going to be doing, and I haven't made any commitments yet. I don't know for sure," Lombardi said.

He's leaning toward serving as a consultant to developers and others navigating the Byzantine local planning and zoning processes. If he chooses the consultancy route, Lombardi would follow in the footsteps of another onetime supervisor, Bedford's Larry Dwyer.

Lombardi was forced to find another way to make a living last month, when his 44-year reign as North Castleˆ‚s top elected official came to an end. Town Board member Reese Berman unseated Lombardi with 51 percent of the vote, in a three-way election widely seen as a rejection of the town's pro-development stance.

Berman complained that Lombardi's policies had overridden the town, especially Armonk, with McMansions and traffic. Lombardi strongly disagrees, saying the town and its school districts needed revenues from new development. To that end, Lombardi transformed Route 120 (King Street) into a corporate corridor by drawing MBIA Inc., Citigroup and Swiss Reinsurance America Corp. as well as IBM Corp.

"I've established an excellent base for the school district and for the town taxes. I feel that I've done exceptionally well in that area," Lombardi said.

ATTRACTING IBM

The supervisor attracted IBM to Armonk in 1962, six months after taking office, after executives met him to discuss what he thought would be plans for a data-processing center within 440 acres the company owned off Route 22.

"(IBM) came to me about six months into my term and said, how would you like to have the corporate headquarters in your town. And I said, ’ÄòI would love it. But I'd have to feel some people out and see how they feel. But I'm sure if it's something good for the community and the tax base, I'm sure that the people would accept it.'" Lombardi recalled.

"I worked with them a year, and then bingo, IBM decided to move here. It was the greatest thing that ever happened in our town."

NEW ROCHELLE RINGS IN

A HAPPY NEW MAYOR

Tim Idoni's taking the county clerk's seat next week, but his likely successor as New Rochelle mayor says city residents shouldn't notice much of a change.

Noam Bramson vows to continue the city's redevelopment of the past decade, which has brought downtown new stores and the promise of new affluent residents given the city's 1,800 luxury apartments under construction or planned.

"Our challenge will be to build on our substantial successes and to do even more to make our community a great place to live and work and raise a family," Bramson said. "There are a number of projects on the drawing board that we need to bring to a successful conclusion."

Like Trump Plaza, the 180-apartment condo building is being built by Louis R. Cappelli. And the $175 million project by hometown developer Joseph Simone for 438 condominium units and 44,000 square feet of retail space is on land bordered by Church and Division streets.

And bigger than any of those projects, the mixed-use community officials want to create at Echo Bay. The city will wrap up a study, then issue a formal request for proposals within months.

Bramson is all but sure to be appointed New Rochelle's 23rd mayor by his fellow Democrats on the Democratic-controlled City Council next month. When that happens, Bramson will cap a decade of representing the 5th district, which includes Iona College.

GAME CREATOR TAKES

EDUCATORS TO SCHOOL

More than a year after Fly chronicled his development of a card-based word game (Nov. 29, 2004), Dr. Ifay Chang has some good news: Schools, teachers and their students have begun warming up to his "Scrammble" and several offshoot games he has created.

Among interested schools is Public School 173 in Jamaica, Queens. Its principal, Dr. John Murphy, heard about the game by attending a seminar Chang held in Mahopac, where Murphy lives. Chang will work to turn teachers on to his games as a new policy board member of the Northern Westchester and Putnam Teacher Center.

"The toy and game industry doesn't want to invest money in developing new games unless there's mass production or a tie-in to a TV show. So for educational games, you've got to get the teachers to buy in to it. They are the key," Chang said.

Chang began his foray into gamesmanship two years ago by creating Scrammble, in which players try forming words using letters on their cards. Players who succeed gain points, only to lose them if the next player takes a card and forms a larger word using that letter and the others. Play continues until every card in the deck is flipped open. The one with the most points is the winner.

Since then Chang has created more than 20 variations on Scrammble, detailed in a new book "Passport to Scrammble Land." There's Scrammble Poker, where players create "hands" of words; the highest score wins. And Scrammble Bingo, where players match word sounds as they fill columns by forming progressively longer words.

The games are designed to combine fun and education, as well as teach students and teachers to create their own new games, a process Chang calls Make-A-Game or "MAG" Pedagogy. It's not yet much of a business, he's only making a few thousand bucks selling a few games at a time. That could change as more schools embrace MAG.

"Marketing and advertising are very expensive, so my strategy is to take the grassroots approach and focus on schools and libraries," said Chang, a retired IBM research scientist and Polytechnic University dean.

Even with his focus on games, Chang still runs the most-viewed medical search engine on the Internet, Medical World Search (www.mwsearch.com), and the Internet-based phone service IPO2U.com Inc.ÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªøÔªø