Empire State Today

After shutting down ice rinks, Democratic Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz was filmed ice skating and shooting hockey pucks with at least 10 other individuals.

Poloncarz had forced one ice rink to shut down less than two weeks previously after it had hosted a hockey scrimmage, the Daily Caller reported.

“You see him giving everybody fist bumps and then he hops off the ice. That’s the county executive,” Erie County Comptroller Stefan Mychajliw said, the Daily Caller reported, regarding footage of Poloncarz.

Poloncarz claimed that he mostly skated alone, but the footage that Mychajliw saw and published showed Poloncarz with at least 10 other people. He was also seen fist-bumping other people while skating around the rink.

After the incident, Poloncarz’s spokesperson, Peter Anderson, did not return requests for comment from The Daily Caller. Mychajliw also published footage from someone else showing Poloncarz leaving the Northtown Center at Amherst wearing all black and carrying a honey bag and a hockey stick from that morning.

Poloncarz tweeted about the footage, saying that someone was stalking him to take it. He did not deny that it was him in the footage, the Daily Caller reported.

Less than two weeks previously Poloncarz had his health department shut down a skating rink due to children playing in a hockey scrimmage that went against the state’s guidelines.

Poloncarz had tweeted that the health department was monitoring several COVID-19 cases that occurred due to the players and coaches at the facility.

“God bless him,” Mychajliw said, Daily Caller reported. “It’s the height of hypocrisy to shut down rinks for having scrimmages and blocking children and youth sports from doing the same exact thing that he is doing.”

Mychajliw slammed Poloncarz for the hypocrisy of shutting down the rink and then doing basically the same thing, the Daily Caller reported.