Nearing the end of his second term, Rick Drew has attended every trustee meeting since his swearing-in. “I’ve tried to make it a real priority,” he said this week. “I ran on a platform of real participation and fulfilled that pledge. There were people not showing up to meetings, and it was sad to see empty seats when there was such a backlog” of trustee business.
A service manager with SeaCoast Enterprises, which operates marinas and boatyards on Three Mile Harbor, Mr. Drew serves on the trustees’ ponds, roads, and harbor management committees. He said that a restructuring of the board to include a second deputy clerk has proven effective “and has enabled board members to work together in a team environment.”
The trustees’ efforts to restore the health of Georgica Pond, done in conjunction with Christopher Gobler of Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences and the Friends of Georgica Pond Foundation, a property owners’ group, is “one of the marquee accomplishments of my work,” he said. The trustees have closed the pond several times in recent summers due to dense blooms of toxic blue-green algae. Mr. Drew called those events “part of the basic inability of the former board to really work with other agencies and the community. . . . Autonomy was the main focus, and as a result things weren’t getting done.” The board’s swing to a Democratic majority in the 2015 election, he said, brought “a proactive approach to Georgica. We have developed a watershed management plan that’s now a model for watershed remediation in Suffolk County.”
While he believes that “wind energy is important” in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, he has been a strident critic of the proposed South Fork Wind Farm with respect to its potential impact on commercial fishermen and what he considers a grossly inadequate community benefits package offered by the developer. “I’m proud that I was an impact player, someone that brought leadership” on the issue, he said. “The trustees are in a good place to deliberate on this project. We’ve done our homework.”
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