Scheniderman First Supervisor of Two Towns
Jay Schneiderman, who previously served as East Hampton Town supervisor and has since reached the term limit in the Suffolk Legislature, will serve in Southampton Town come January.
Voters elected Mr. Schneiderman, who moved from Montauk to Southampton not long ago, the next Southampton Town supervisor on Tuesday night. Mr. Schneiderman received 56 percent of the vote, according to unofficial results from the Suffolk County Board of Elections. An Independence Party member, he also ran on the Democratic and Working Families tickets.
His opponent, Richard W. Yastrzemski, a longtime Southampton Village Board member and the deputy mayor there, received 44 percent of the vote in the Town of Southampton on the Republican and Conservative lines.
“I actually felt the race was going to be much closer than it was,” Mr. Schneiderman said yesterday morning before heading to a budget meeting at the Legislature in Hauppauge. “Everybody was confident except me.”
Mr. Schneiderman said he would be able to get right to work, with less of a learning curve than he has had in the past, because of his experience.
“East Hampton and Southampton are very similar,” he said. In Southampton, he will oversee a $90 million budget and 500 employees, but the issues are the same — housing, overcrowding, keeping taxes down, water quality, to name a few. “It’s not like I’m coming from an area in the Midwest. I know the town well. I’ve represented it for 12 years.”
When he first took office in East Hampton, he had served only on the zoning board. “I had to learn the job of supervisor real quick,” he said.
Mr. Schneiderman said he believes he may be unique in having been elected to serve as supervisor in two towns: “This may be a first in the state’s history.”
Come January, Mr. Schneiderman will succeed Supervisor Anna Throne-Holst, who chose not to seek re-election and instead is mounting a campaign in the First Congressional District against Representative Lee Zeldin in 2016.
The supervisor-elect will maintain a Democratic majority on the Southampton Town Board, though only one of his running mates was elected with him on Tuesday. John V. Bouvier of Westhampton received 4,808 votes, coming in second in a four-way race for two seats. Christine Scalera, the Republican incumbent and an attorney based in Water Mill, received the most votes, with 5,235.
The other Democratic candidate, Julie R. Lofstad of Hampton Bays, came in third with 4,698 votes. Damon A. Hagan, an attorney from East Quogue who ran on the Republican line with Ms. Scalera, finished last with 4,365 votes.
Bridget Fleming did not seek to keep her seat on the town board, instead running a successful campaign for a seat in the Suffolk Legislature. She defeated Amos Goodman on Tuesday.
Mr. Schneiderman said he is looking forward to reaching across party lines to Ms. Scalera and her fellow Republican on the board, Stan Glinka, and getting to work. “I don’t think they’ll be partisan for the sake of partisanship,” he said.
He also thinks there are new opportunities to work with the Town of East Hampton to tackle regional issues such as traffic and water quality.