August 3, 2026
Episode 252 opens in late July, which in Rochester means it is technically summer but Corey is already mourning it. Mark is fine. Nate Salzman walks in and the three of them get into it immediately. Mark first met Nate in 2023, sitting on his couch, asking for a check. Nate was running for town board. Mark pulled out his checkbook. Three years later, Nate just won the Democratic primary for Brighton Town Supervisor and is set to be sworn in on January 1st.
He is 33. He has two young kids. He works full time in the Monroe County communications office. He knocked on doors, challenged an eight-term incumbent, and won. He is not a career politician. He is someone who got frustrated and decided to do something about it.
Mark asks about the wave of young elected officials challenging the establishment, from AOC to Max Frost to Nate himself. Nate makes a distinction he returns to throughout the episode: there is ambitious in the sense of chasing a title, and there is ambitious in the sense of trying to get something done. He is the second kind.
Someone came up to him at Wegmans frustrated about the town. He listened. He says he approaches politics from a place of frustration, and that if you are not impatient trying to move things forward, you are in the wrong business. He gives a concrete example: a friend trying to open a bakery on Monroe Avenue. That family does not have time for polite waiting. Their urgency is real. He thinks elected officials should feel that urgency too.
He is also direct about the advice he has gotten to slow down and stop creating opposition. He rejected it. If your goal as an elected official is to stay in the spotlight and not make waves, he says, you are failing the people you serve.
When Nate decided to run for town board in 2023, he did what any good campaign strategist would do: he went to the town website to find out what Brighton said it wanted. He found a plan called Envision Brighton 2020. Mark laughs because he has heard Nate say this before. Rochester, he notes, is famous for issuing reports, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on them, and then watching them collect dust.
Nate's campaign was simple: just do what the plan already said. Build a village-like atmosphere on Monroe Avenue. Make it easier for small businesses to open. Build more housing. People responded. He won. Then he went to the town board and spent three years watching it not happen.
He is honest about it. He did not deliver on those promises. Not for lack of trying, but because the process itself is broken. Brighton's zoning code is so strict that almost every development decision runs through the supervisor's office as a one-off negotiation. Small businesses that cannot afford a team of lobbyists or tens of thousands in extra taxes simply do not open. That process can only be fixed from the supervisor's chair. So he ran for it.
Mark asks where Nate's ideas come from. He mentions one book immediately: Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. The argument is simple. We should build more of what we need. Housing, infrastructure, services. If the code makes it harder to build, reform the code. Nate says he was on Evan Dawson's show talking about the abundance agenda with State Senator Jeremy Cooney. He is not making this up as he goes. He has been thinking about it for years.
He also just finished 48 Laws of Power. He has two kids under two. He listens to Positive America, Derek Thompson's podcast on The Athletic, and a lot of sports content. He is a Phillies, Eagles, Sixers, and Flyers fan. He apologizes for this. He moved to Rochester anyway.
Nate ran against a well-respected 70-year-old Democrat who had held the seat for eight terms. He says the key was simple: he listened to residents. When he knocked on doors, went to family dinners, and showed up at town hall, he heard the same frustrations over and over. He felt like a challenge could succeed. Everything else, the eight terms, the establishment weight, the political advice to wait his turn, he calls noise.
He also writes a Substack. When he posts new ideas, he gets pushback. His response is to call the most vocal critic before the next post goes out, hear them out, make edits where he thinks they are right, push back where he does not, and then publish. He says those negative comments often turn into agreement because he engaged. He thinks the people who take criticism personally and cannot separate ideas from identity are doing themselves a disservice.
The first thing Nate wants to do when he takes office is formalize constituent services. Right now, if you call town hall about a sidewalk issue, you get transferred, you leave a voicemail, and then you wait. There is no ticket. There is no notification. There is no follow-up. It just sits on someone's voicemail. He wants a dedicated team, a formalized ticketing process, and a clear system for tracking every resident request from open to resolved.
He talks about government efficiency without using it as a cover for cutting services. He is specific: if it takes three months to approve a tree removal, that is a broken process. If a small business wants to move across the street and it takes three and a half years to get approved, that is a broken process. If a battery storage project is still in review after three years and has not even been voted on, that is a broken process. He is not blaming the staff. He is blaming the policymakers, including himself, for not fixing the systems the staff has to work inside.
He also points out something specific about Brighton's zoning boards. The Architectural Review Board, the Zoning Board, and the Planning Board all meet on different days and, by rule, must be visited in separate months. So if a business owner has everything ready in May, they cannot meet with all three boards in May. They have to stretch it out across the calendar. He wants to change that.
Mark asks the direct question: ten years from now, if Nate gets everything he wants, what does Monroe Avenue look like? Nate describes it clearly. People living right on the avenue, walking downstairs to a locally owned bakery or coffee shop. Green space. Slower traffic. Fewer potholes. Bikes. A place where you can park your car and spend the entire day, get lunch, go to the library, swim with your kids, grab dinner before you drive home.
He says it is a problem that his wife suggests dinner in the city or Pittsford but never Brighton. He drives through Pittsford and sees brick buildings, lawns, a corridor that feels intentional. Brighton has a plan on the website. But it does zoning by one-offs. COMIDA, the county's nonpartisan economic development arm, put out a report saying exactly that: Brighton's problem is that every zoning decision is a separate negotiation. There is no overlay, no consistent framework, no predictable path for a business that wants to open.
The state is already planning to redesign the road itself, moving to one direction in each lane with a middle turn lane. That will happen in the next couple of years regardless. Nate wants to use that moment to also begin the Monroe Avenue overlay zoning district conversation. He wants to start it on day one, get the public involved, and move fast once the direction is set. He is also actively recruiting businesses and developers to think about Monroe Avenue now, before the zoning changes, so they are ready to move when the rules change.
Brighton declared itself a pro-housing community. Since then, Nate says, the town has consistently permitted single digits of new homes per year. He wants to change that. He is not willing to put a specific number on it yet, but he is thinking about it.
He points to a few specific sites. There is a project being discussed behind the JCC, along the canal. Part of the land is in Henrietta, part is in Brighton. The Brighton portion is already zoned for housing. He is excited about it. He also mentions the parking lot at Wheaton Place Plaza where Fox's Deli is. He quotes a Republican listener: you could shoot a rifle through that parking lot and not hit anything. He thinks it could be housing.
His pitch to every developer and builder who comes to him is the same: we want to build more housing, all kinds of housing. Not just single-family. Not just working-class. All of it. His theory is that more housing brings more residents, more residents support more businesses, more businesses grow the tax base, and a growing tax base funds the community center and services that Brighton has been chasing through state grants and incentive zoning for decades. Build the thing. The rest follows.
Favorite restaurant: Red. Every anniversary, every birthday, every election win. He does not hesitate. Hidden gem: Fox's Deli, where he and his wife had their first date. They met the first day of high school, were friends for years, and he wore her down. He is proud of this.
One lie Rochester tells itself: the weather is not that bad. He says it was fine for about a decade and then this past year was brutal. His wife's family is from Puerto Rico. He visits, looks at the sun, and reconsiders everything.
Most underrated thing Rochester has: the Red Wings. He says the stadium, the food, the customer service, and the quality of the baseball all punch well above what a city this size should have. He watched Grayson Rodriguez pitch there two years ago. He thinks the Silver family does not get enough credit.
One Rochester figure, now deceased, to have dinner with: Frederick Douglass. He knows it is not a surprising answer. But he says in the current political moment, what strikes him most about Douglass is not the resume but the pragmatism. The stakes were as high as they could possibly be, and Douglass still found a way to be strategic, to sit in rooms with people he disagreed with, and to keep moving the ball forward. Nate thinks about that a lot right now. He means it.
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