The four candidates vying for two seats on the East Hampton Town Board faced off for the last time on Oct. 16 at the East Hampton Library, the two incumbents defending their tenure and setting goals for the next term, the two challengers criticizing the same while offering their own vision for town government.
Sponsored by the League of Women Voters of the Hamptons, the event also saw Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc debate his challenger, David Gruber. That debate was covered in these pages last week.
Councilwoman Sylvia Overby, who is seeking a third term, spoke of her philosophy of collaboration, which she said was illustrated by the hamlet studies that have been in progress for more than three years. The studies have spanned that time, she said, because “we needed to get a lot of input and buy-in from the community.” That is the only way to pass legislation, she said.
Betsy Bambrick and Bonnie Brady, who are united under the EH Fusion Party banner, disputed that. In the past six to eight years, said Ms. Bambrick, a longtime town employee and its former director of code enforcement, those with an opposing viewpoint have been “silenced.” This, she said, is “what happens when you have one-party rule: Opposing voices are simply not heard.” The town, she added, “runs the risk of stagnation when we just study things to death.”
Ms. Brady, a Montauk resident and the executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, pointed to the Army Corps of Engineers’ controversial effort to stabilize that hamlet’s downtown beach, the Montauk hamlet study, and the proposed offshore wind farm to portray a town board that is not responsive to constituents, particularly those living in the easternmost hamlet. “The entire beach area is, frankly, destroyed,” she said of the Army Corps’s stabilization effort.
But Ms. Overby defended the Army Corps’s work in Montauk. “We know what it looked like after Sandy,” she said of the oceanfront motels after the storm of October 2012. “Everything was exposed, all the foundations.” The Army Corps-installed sandbags “have been helping us maintain the beach and the tourist industry,” she said. “We want to make sure it stays a viable economy.”
She also hit back on a proposal the Fusion Party’s Mr. Gruber advanced: densely built housing to alleviate a shortage of affordable housing.
“Some things I’ve heard tonight” amounted to “almost a wrecking ball to our zoning code. . . . We’re not other places,” she said. “I’m glad we’re not.” The town board’s accomplishments have come through collaboration, she said, citing the hamlet studies, affordable housing, renewable energy, and historic preservation.
Ms. Overby also spoke of her work as liaison to the Anti-Bias Task Force and the upcoming seminar on undocumented immigrants’ ability to obtain driver’s licenses, set for Wednesday. The Police Department has Spanish-speaking per sonnel, she said, as do many town departments. “We want to make sure the immigrant community is safe, secure, and that they know we care about them.”
Councilman David Lys, who was appointed to the board in 2018 and is seeking what would be his first full term, spoke of his father, who immigrated from Indonesia and “made a wonderful life” in East Hampton. The town’s immigrant community is not just Latino, he said, but Caribbean, Asian, and European. Outreach, he said, is how government can understand disparate groups and their needs.
“We are building a community here,” he said. “We need to be able to have future generations trust government and participate. Understand who they are, keep listening.”
Ms. Bambrick said that she was surprised to learn, when she became director of code enforcement, that no town-issued literature was printed in Spanish. “It was important to communicate with the Latino population,” she said, as “a lot of them were complaining to my office about substandard housing. . . . I made sure one of the first things I did was get everything translated to Spanish.”
Ms. Overby referred to the coastal resilience workshop, which was held on Monday, as an example of the town government proactively addressing erosion and sea level rise. The workshop, she said, had been organized “so we can understand how to address climate change, what to expect, solutions we can have through professionals we’ve hired” by way of the Coastal Assessment and Resiliency Plan.
Ms. Brady suggested buying a dredge, possibly shared with other East End towns. But a dredge and associated costs, including mobilization, piping, and staffing, were prohibitively expensive, Mr. Lys said, adding that, absent the Army Corps’s stabilization effort, “we would have had no economic driver” in Montauk’s tourist industry.
Ms. Bambrick said that the former Child Development Center of the Hamptons building in East Hampton should have been converted to “a centrally located senior facility,” and proposed a housing complex akin to that at St. Michael’s Lutheran Church in Amagansett, where she works, in every hamlet “so our older residents can stay local.”
Mr. Lys said the town board had worked with Stony Brook Southampton Hospital on the creation of a freestanding emergency room facility in East Hampton. A next move, he said, should be to work with the hospital toward establishing “some type of assisted living” facility in the town.
Ms. Overby pointed to recent legislation allowing residents to rent their house and live in an apartment within it, giving senior citizens a chance to “age in place” by downsizing while also gaining rental income. She also touted the services offered at both the senior citizens center in East Hampton and the Montauk Playhouse Community Center, and a wellness program set up at Ashawagh Hall in Springs.
Election Day is Tuesday. Through Sunday, residents can vote early at Windmill Village, at 219 Accabonac Road in East Hampton.