For those who remember David Gruber’s early involvement in East Hampton politics, his alliance this election year with the local Republican Party might seem an unlikely pairing. First spurred to action by frustration over airport noise, in 2001 he ran for town supervisor on the Democratic ticket, and though he lost, he went on to become the party’s chairman and later a committee member who helped to set the tone for Democratic campaigns.
“All of the things that the Democratic Party talks about, we’ve been talking about forever, and I feel like we’re out of excuses,” he said at his house in East Hampton this week. This year he is running for supervisor on the Independence and Libertarian lines, with support from the local Republican Party.
He formed the East Hampton Reform Democrats last year and then forced a Democratic primary for town board, but lost to David Lys, the party’s choice, who had been appointed in January 2018. This year, the Reform Democrats joined with members of the Republican and Independence Parties to form the East Hampton Fusion Party, which will have a line on the ballot but few official candidates there. A failure to file a timely acceptance letter for his Fusion Party nomination resulted in his name being left off that party’s line on the November ballot.
Democrats in East Hampton not only have total control of the town board, they also have an overwhelming party registration advantage over Republicans, making it harder and harder for candidates from other parties to win elections.
“Competition breeds alternative ideas,” Mr. Gruber said. “That’s the whole motivation for the Fusion Party. . . . And the happy news for me is that we came together and it’s not about gritting our teeth and making painful compromises.”
Mr. Gruber screened with the Republicans for town supervisor, and they wanted him, but the county party would not sign off on his nomination, which is required for candidates not affiliated with the nominating party.
“If I listen to the things that both parties say, it seems to me the Republican Party is much more concerned about the working people in this community,” Mr. Gruber said. “On local issues, I find myself overwhelmingly in agreement with them.”
And how does that square with his long fight for noise controls at the town airport, a fight that often put him at odds with key players in the Republican Party?
“It has never been my objective to close the airport,” Mr. Gruber said. “It’s always been to have a livable solution, an airport that serves chiefly local pilots who use it for recreation or business and that doesn’t drive everybody else nuts. . . . We can do it here if we can get local control over the airport.” The noise issue “has only gotten worse,” since he ran for supervisor in 2001. What’s changed, he said, is that “at least a part of the aviation community has evolved in my direction of thinking.” There’s an understanding among more people that “if we cannot solve the problem in a way that’s equitable, the airport may end up being closed,” he said. “That would be a great loss to the community.”
Looming large in his mind this election year is how the town should tackle affordable housing, water quality, renewable energy, and the business of governing, and how little he thinks the current town board is doing to address those issues.
On affordable housing, “The only thing that stands in our way is the political will to do it,” Mr. Gruber said. While the comprehensive plan says East Hampton needs 1,300 units, of the approximately 22,000 housing units in the town “about 500 of them are affordable,” he pointed out. If the town insists on low-density development everywhere, “we can never solve this problem.”
“Affordable housing has to be built with very high density,” he said, with the appropriate water treatment on site “so that wastewater is cleaner than when it comes out of an individual house.” Building low-rise apartment buildings in half a dozen locations in town would allow the town to provide the affordable housing called for in the comprehensive plan on just 80 acres, Mr. Gruber said, adding that if the town can manage to preserve 15,000 acres of land, surely it can manage to find 80 acres for affordable housing.
The town has two water quality issues, the candidate said. One is how to deal with septic waste and nitrogen; the other, how to address contaminants in drinking water, such as the chemicals found in private Wainscott wells. He believes private wells need to be tested proactively in different areas of town. “Once you know what’s in the drinking water, you can make decisions about what can be done, how it can be treated, is an area dense enough where it’s practical to install public water?”
Regarding the septic waste issue, he said, the town may need to do more than simply encourage people through rebates to switch to innovative alternative systems designed to reduce nitrogen. Even if everyone were to take advantage of these rebates and change over their systems, “Is that actually sufficient to give us clean groundwater?” There may be areas where sewage systems are the better option, he said. And if the town really believes the nitrogen-reducing private systems are the best alternative, then “we’ve got to make it one-stop shopping for people. . . . We probably need somebody specifically dedicated to this” to “make it as simple and easy to get the whole thing done as fast as humanly possible.”
“We seem to get stuck in a pattern of incremental so-called solutions that make people feel better because something is being done,” Mr. Gruber said. “But at the rate we do these things we’re never really going to fix it.” The town needs to ask, “What does it take to get to the end in time, money, and effort, and then commit to do it.”
In describing the current status quo at Town Hall in his weekly letters to the editor of The Star and in mailings to voters, Mr. Gruber uses words like “cronyism,” “incompetence” and “lawlessness.”
“I see a lot of hostility on the town board to dissent and criticism,” he said. “Your critics are the most valuable people to listen to.”
Referring to the controversial plan to move the town shellfish hatchery to Three Mile Harbor, which he opposes; an effort to revamp the town’s music and entertainment permits, and the Montauk hamlet study, among other things, Mr. Gruber said that “over and over, we’re not inviting the active participation of the community in devising these plans.”
“The job of government is not to rule over people; the job of government is to help the community realize its goals for itself.”
Mr. Gruber and his Fusion ticket running mates have been highly critical of the proposed South Fork Wind Farm, an offshore installation whose transmission cable is to come ashore in East Hampton Town.
While the town’s renewable energy goals — to use 100 percent renewable electricity by 2020 and 100 percent equivalent renewable energy in electricity, transportation, and heating fuels by 2030 — are “noble aspirations,” he says, the town needs to “make a concrete plan with executable steps to get to this goal.”
“A lot of the appeal of the South Fork Wind Farm is that it came to seem to some people as a magic solution” for meeting those goals, he said, and “that has driven a lot of people who feel very passionately about achieving that goal to overlook [the wind farm’s] many problems.”
“Simply permitting a cable to pass through a corner of East Hampton where it will connect to the LIPA grid . . . the notion that it means we will have achieved our renewable energy goal is a fiction,” he said, asserting that only a fraction of the wind farm’s output would power East Hampton Town. The power, he predicted, will be “grossly overpriced” and “will not solve peak demand problems.” Add to that its disruption of commercial fishing, and the need for transformer upgrades, and he sees “enormous technical and financial problems with this project.”
The town should instead look to solar fields, he said. He contends that the town would need “no more than 300 acres, and those acres can include rooftops and parking lots,” to build the solar fields that could provide clean, green energy.
“Is preservation of every square inch of land in East Hampton actually more important than affordable housing and renewable energy?” he asked.
“The only way we’re going to understand the limit of what we can achieve is by sitting down and determining what we can actually achieve,” Mr. Gruber said. East Hampton’s problems “are solvable, and I just feel compelled to try to do something about them because I know that I know how to do something about them.”