Registered Democrats in the First Congressional District will go to polling stations on Tuesday to choose a candidate to face Representative Lee Zeldin in the Nov. 6 general election. Polls open at 6 a.m. and close at 9 p.m. Absentee ballots must be postmarked by Monday. 

Kate Browning, Elaine DiMasi, Perry Gershon, David Pechefsky, and Vivian Viloria-Fisher are vying for the nomination to challenge Mr. Zeldin, a Republican who is seeking a third term. 

Reflecting national trends, three of the five Democratic candidates are women, and for two of them, this campaign is their first. Ms. Browning, a former school bus driver, and Ms. Viloria-Fisher, a former teacher, both served multiple terms on the Suffolk County Legislature. Ms. DiMasi spent 21 years as a physicist and project manager at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Mr. Gershon’s career includes 25 years in commercial real estate lending. 

Mr. Pechefsky made an unsuccessful bid for New York City Council in 2009, running on the Green Party ticket. He was a longtime staffer for the City Council, and has worked for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Mayor’s Office of Appointments. He is on leave from his position as a senior adviser to Generation Citizen, a nonprofit that trains college students to provide civic education to middle and high school students. 

While the campaigns have declined to share internal polling data, Mr. Gershon, who lives in East Hampton, told supporters at a private event on June 9 that the race is between himself and Ms. Browning, a former Suffolk County legislator. The others, he said, were far behind. 

“I’m proud of the positive campaign we’ve run on the important issues facing our community and why I believe I am the most qualified candidate to beat Lee Zeldin and stand up to Donald Trump’s divisive agenda,” Ms. Browning said in a statement sent by email on Tuesday. “I’ve run a grassroots campaign fueled by individuals, unions, and local elected officials like [Assemblyman] Fred Thiele and [Legislator] Bridget Fleming and we’re excited to move to the next stage of the campaign.”

“This is an exciting election,” Ms. DiMasi said in an email on Monday, “and we are ready for the outcome, thanks to over 500 supporters and volunteers who have reached out to thousands of voters. Every voter’s voice matters, and I am the only candidate, a woman and professional scientist, with a plan and the ability to propel Long Island’s economy into a sustainable and fruitful future.”

The Cook Political Report, an independent, nonpartisan newsletter that analyzes elections, campaigns, and political trends, puts the First Congressional District race in its “Likely Republican” column. But Democrats have scored wins in several special elections since Donald Trump was elected president, including in what were thought to be solid Republican districts and states. The 2016 election has galvanized the Democratic Party and its supporters.

Mr. Zeldin is a steadfast supporter of the president, who is under investigation by an independent counsel for alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. Most recently, the president is under fire for his administration’s practice of separating the children of undocumented immigrants from their parents when apprehended at the southern border. 

Last Thursday, groups including Progressive East End Reformers and People Power Patchogue sponsored a rally outside of Mr. Zeldin’s office in Patchogue. The “Keep Families Together” rally, according to organizers, was an effort to persuade Mr. Zeldin to speak out against the policy. PEER held another rally outside Mr. Zeldin’s office on Sunday. A “rally united for immigrant women and children” was to take place yesterday, again at Mr. Zeldin’s Patchogue office.

The East Hampton Town Democratic Committee has selected Councilman David Lys as its candidate for the town board seat he has occupied since he was appointed to it in January.

Mr. Lys prevailed over David Gruber, the other candidate in the running, at the committee’s meeting on Friday, by 63 percent to 37 percent. 

In nominating Mr. Lys, J.B. DosSantos called him “an extremely passionate, intelligent, hands-on type of person,” a leader and role model who, he said, has brought voters of all political affiliations together. Mr. Lys is the best candidate to ensure that Democrats retain all five seats on the town board, he said. 

Jim MacMillan put Mr. Gruber’s name into contention, recalling the longtime political activist’s unsuccessful bid for East Hampton Town Supervisor in 2001, his chairmanship of the Democratic Committee, and his membership on the party’s campaign committee, as well as his service as a trustee and treasurer of the Hampton Day School and co-founder of the East Hampton Conservators. Mr. Gruber’s knowledge of “the complex problems confronting our community” and concern for the citizens of East Hampton was clear, Mr. MacMillan said. 

When the result of the committee’s open vote was announced, the room broke into applause. Mr. Lys thanked the group for the nomination. “I am extremely honored,” he said. Calling himself “a workhorse,” he promised to work tirelessly for the committee and for the town. “I appreciate all your efforts,” he told the committee. “Please give me a chance to earn your respect, if I have not already.” 

Mr. Lys, who changed his party registration from Republican to Democratic, is serving what would have been the remaining year of now-Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc’s term as a councilman. Should he win in November, he will have to stand for election again in November 2019 if he wants to continue on the board.

Of the 28 committee members who voted on Friday, Mr. Lys won 18 and Mr. Gruber 10. One member abstained. The votes were weighted, based on the number of votes cast in the last gubernatorial election in the election district represented by the member (which is not necessarily the district in which he or she lives).

Amos Goodman, chairman of the East Hampton Town Republican Committee, said yesterday that his party has screened town board candidates but has yet to make a decision. “It’s a challenge,” he said, “because you have people who don’t make the cut, and you have people who are great candidates, but it’s almost a shame, it’s almost political malpractice to run them for a single-year term in a year that’s likely to be an unfavorable one for the party at the macro level. And you have people you really like, like David,” he said of Mr. Lys, whom he called “a very likable guy.” 

A decision and an announcement will be made soon, Mr. Goodman said. “We want to do this thoughtfully and smartly. . . .We don’t want to squander resources unnecessarily, but at the same time, this year is important in terms of setting momentum as we go into next year.”

With just a few weeks until the June 26 primary election, candidates for the Democratic Party’s nomination to challenge Representative Lee Zeldin are crisscrossing New York’s First Congressional District, appealing to voters and potential volunteers with a message they hope will resonate. 

On Monday, that effort brought Elaine DiMasi to East Hampton, where she spoke with and answered questions from a few dozen residents at the Elizabeth Dow store on Gingerbread Lane. 

Ms. DiMasi, a physicist who spent 21 years at Brookhaven National Laboratory, laid out a vision for a district powered by a clean-energy economy.

“We need to find the right way to bottle the sun and wind that’s coming into the district for free,” she said. “We have research on batteries, on solar materials, and on smart-grid technology. . . . At the universities and the laboratory we have a technology incubator, but there aren’t enough occupants and companies in it. We do not have a technology corridor for small-scale manufacturing, for prototyping, but we should, because we could be building almost everything that’s needed for the offshore wind within our district. . . . We can be programming the electrical grid to manage all these distributed sources of power from the different wind farm areas and the different solar areas. And we have to expand our trade schools.” 

Fresh from graduate school, the Pennsylvania native came to Long Island in 1996 to work at the laboratory. “I was incredibly excited, and I just kept my nose to that grindstone for the first 10 years or so,” she told the gathering. “Then, the Tea Party got into Congress and started throwing sand in the gears.” 

Congressional dysfunction, she said, has manifested in difficulty passing budgets, and even led to a government shutdown. Brookhaven National Laboratory is the largest source of federal funding for the district, she said, bringing in a half-billion dollars annually. 

“If the government shuts down for 10 days, you have to spend $10 million out of carryover funds that were saved from last year,” she said. “If that’s all you have and it shuts down for the 11th day, you fire four people. So if Congress can’t do what it needs to do, the leadership of laboratories, agencies, and all other kind of institutions like that all across the country have to drop what they’re doing and figure out who they’re going to furlough. It’s no wonder that morale starts to go down . . . and then it starts being harder to ask for more funding for more discoveries. You could see that happening when the Tea Party was in power.” 

When Donald Trump was elected president, “I said to myself, I could stay here and keep my job and watch the bottom fall out of it. Or, I could do what I saw the environmental scientists do: In their spare time, before the presidential election, they logged on to government servers and downloaded climate data from federal sites, and they safeguarded it on private servers,” anticipating an administration potentially hostile to science. 

“I know what’s possible,” Ms. DiMasi said. “As a scientist, that’s always what my job has been about. We do something that seemed impossible five years ago. It wasn’t impossible, it was just really hard, and we had to figure it out. We need that in Congress.”

A group calling itself the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance has formed with a mission to coordinate the fishing industry’s effort to ensure that the nascent offshore wind industry does not hinder its work. 

The group is made up of commercial fishermen from the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic States who have concerns about offshore wind farms. RODA will seek to coordinate efforts of the fishing industry, the offshore wind industry, and federal, state, and local governments to promote effective offshore development policies and to support more scientific research on the impacts of wind farms. 

Current regulatory efforts to assess the impact of offshore development on fisheries have been disconnected, according to the group, and past offshore projects have not adequately engaged with the fishing industry and the regional fishery management councils. As a result, the group says, offshore leases have been awarded to projects located in prime fishing grounds. On the South Fork, commercial fishermen are critical of the proposed siting of Deepwater Wind’s South Fork Wind Farm, approximately 35 miles off Montauk at the area known as Cox’s Ledge.  

“The current, splintered approaches to engaging fishing communities in the offshore wind leasing process are ineffective and inefficient, and the result is that critical fishing industry expertise is not being considered,” Anne Hawkins, the group’s legal and scientific counsel, said in a statement on Friday. “Fisheries need a unified effort to ensure they get the best possible offshore outcomes.”

One of the group’s priorities is to explore partnerships with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Atlantic states to develop collaborative scientific research. This would address a lack of peer-reviewed information on the effects of offshore development upon fisheries and fish. It would also be used to inform offshore developers and regulators in planning sites, awarding leases, designing operations plans, and developing mitigation strategies.

RODA is also working with its members to provide a unified voice on industry-wide issues, such as consideration of new offshore developments.

“The industry needs to speak as one,” said Robert Vanasse, RODA’s communications and media adviser. “The offshore wind energy industry, and regulators at the federal, state, and local levels need to hear clearly the concerns of participants in our domestic fisheries. We will work to foster the productive dialogue among those parties that is urgently needed and sorely lacking.”

Even with approximately 60 comments at the East Hampton Town Trustees’ joint hearing with the town board on May 17 on the proposed South Fork Wind Farm, the trustees have agreed to accept comment through next Thursday from others who wish to be heard. At their meeting on Friday, a few of those who spoke on May 17 were among those who had more to say.

 The trustees assert jurisdiction over the ocean beach in Wainscott, where Deepwater Wind, the Rhode Island developer seeking to build 15 turbines offshore, said is its preferred landing site for a transmission cable. 

The trustees are debating whether to grant a lease to Deepwater Wind to bury the cable under the beach, from which it would be routed underground to a Long Island Power Authority substation in East Hampton. 

Michael Northrup of Springs, who serves on the town’s waterfront advisory board, told the trustees at the meeting that climate change is “a battle we are all losing, a catastrophe coming our way like a freight train.” In arguing for the wind farm, Mr. Northrup, who is program director of a sustainable development grant-making program at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, said that, left unchecked, climate change will have a catastrophic impact on shorelines and oceans. Though there is no silver bullet, there is plenty of “silver buckshot,” he said, and “one of the bigger pieces of buckshot is offshore wind.” 

Taking a larger view, Mr. Northrup referred to plans for development of more and bigger offshore wind farms off the Mid-Atlantic and New England coasts. “There’s a lot of supply-chain jobs and all kinds of other economic opportunities that’s going to come with that,” he said, adding that New York risked losing it to neighboring states if it does not embrace the emerging energy resource. “It’s pragmatic to think we should try to capture as much of that as we can,” he said. 

Last week, Gov. Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island and Jeff Grybowski, Deepwater Wind’s chief executive officer, announced that Revolution Wind, a proposed wind farm in the same federal lease area as the South Fork Wind Farm, is expected to create more than 800 immediate construction jobs along with 50 permanent jobs and hundreds more in indirect fields. Deepwater Wind also announced a $250 million local investment. 

“The upsides seem enormous, and the downsides of climate change are so horrible,” Mr. Northrup said. “The costs of climate change are so huge that I hope that we can live with offshore wind, hopefully not giant costs from moving ahead.” 

Alice Tepper Marlin, also of Springs, warned that “the adverse effects on marine life of burning fossil fuels are far more deleterious than any possible adverse effects of siting and operating the wind turbines. . . . Every year that we delay, we are further acidifying our oceans, we are allowing climate change to accelerate and continue.”

She and Mr. Northrup urged the trustees to allow the transmission cable to land at Wainscott, which they said would allow them to maintain some influence on the planning and construction and that would result in the town’s receiving the community benefits package Deepwater Wind has proposed. 

But Thomas Bjurlof, who lives in Port Jefferson and said he had been a consultant to governments including Germany, which has deployed more than 1,100 wind turbines since 2009, said that “offshore wind, if not implemented properly, will create many, many new fossil power plants.” This has happened in Germany, he said, “following massive investment in offshore wind.”

Germany’s energy consumption increased by an estimated 0.8 percent in 2017 over the previous year, according to a report by AG Energiebilanzen, a group focused on energy accounting. The increase is attributed to a positive economic trend. The report notes that coal consumption decreased by 10.4 percent in 2017, and electricity generated by nuclear power fell by 10.3 percent, while single-digit increases were recorded for oil and natural gas. Electricity generated by renewable sources, including wind, rose by 6.1 percent and now accounts for 13.1 percent of total energy consumption. “For energy-related [carbon dioxide] emissions, the AG Energiebilanzen anticipates a stagnating development,” the report says. 

“A country’s carbon emissions are subject to many factors,” Gordian Raacke, of the advocacy group Renewable Energy Long Island, said in an email on Tuesday. Germany closed many nuclear power plants, he said, following the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, “which resulted in coal plants to continue to operate beyond their planned retirement, operate more hours of the year, or burn more polluting types of coal.” 

Mr. Bjurlof urged the trustees to disregard any perceived pressure to grant a lease to Deepwater Wind before the developer submits applications to federal and state permitting agencies. The trustees, he said, should go through Article VII, a public review process under state law, “and get all of the facts and be under the guidance of some expert or judge who is used to these kind of proceedings. . . . If you sign a lease or an easement at this point, you take yourself out of the proceeding. You essentially become a spectator.” The trustees have previously stated their intention to apply for intervener status under Article VII. 

Simon Kinsella of Wainscott, an opponent of the South Fork Wind Farm, said the conduit through which the transmission cable is to be routed would be 24 inches in diameter, large enough to fit three 138-kilovolt cables. “Why are they putting in this huge conduit for just one cable?” he asked, suggesting a potential carrying capacity of 1,200 megawatts, although the wind farm is to be a 90-megawatt installation. 

Clint Plummer, Deepwater Wind’s vice president of development, said in an email on Tuesday that his company “has publicly committed that the easements we have requested will only be used for a single export cable to serve the 15 turbines planned for the South Fork Wind Farm.” The grid in East Hampton is weak, Mr. Plummer said, and could not support a larger project such as that suggested by Mr. Kinsella. LIPA’s request for proposals for meeting the South Fork’s energy needs, he said, “was because there was a need for a specific quantity of energy to be generated in East Hampton to support the grid and serve a growing need.” 

But opponents of the wind farm echoed Mr. Bjurlof’s exhortation not to rush into a lease agreement. “It’s going to happen,” Rachel Gruzen of Amagansett said of offshore wind, “but you want to do it right. We need an architecture and a framework for evaluation.” Citing an information vacuum, she said “every experienced professional environmental planner, conservationist, renewable energy expert I spoke to is either straightforward opposed to this project or asking to hit the pause button so we can do further review.” She called the $8.45-million community benefits package “a drop in the bucket,” and said it was “manipulation tactics.” 

Bonnie Brady of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association repeated a call made at the May 17 joint hearing to deny access to Deepwater Wind until it has completed a comprehensive fisheries monitoring and mitigation plan, with compensation if needed. Steve Gauger, a fisherman, said the town should look to onshore wind and solar power if it wants to maintain control over energy.  “There’s just too many questions, it’s going to be too expensive,” he said of the South Fork Wind Farm. He and Manny Vilar, a candidate for town supervisor last year, pointed to the project as a component of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s political ambitions. “If you don’t feel like a political pawn, you should,” Mr. Vilar told the trustees. “There clearly is a much bigger political picture here.” 

Also at the meeting, John Aldred, a trustee, told his colleagues that the environmental studies chief of the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s Office of Renewable Energy Programs had responded to the request for a study of the effects of the electromagnetic field emanating from a transmission cable on near-shore migratory fish behavior, a concern expressed by many fishermen. Such a study is proposed for part of the planning process, Mr.  Aldred said. Mary Boatman, the environmental studies chief, said  she hoped a final report would be ready by the end of 2019, Mr. Aldred said. Should the study’s results identify potential concerns, recommendations for further fieldwork would follow.

Adapting to climate change, enhancing fisheries,  and preserving cultural and ecological resources were the focus of a report on implementing the Local Waterfront Revitalization Program that the town’s waterfront advisory committee delivered to the East Hampton Town Board on Tuesday. 

The recommendations are those considered most time sensitive, Rameshwar Das and Rachel Gruzen, members of the committee, told the board, and would provide an important update to the L.W.R.P. in light of the developments since the document was completed in 1999. The developments cited were beach erosion, plans for a wastewater treatment system in downtown Montauk, and a plan for an energy storage facility between Fort Pond and Fort Pond Bay in Montauk. 

“With the town’s initiatives,” such as the hamlet studies and the Coastal Assessment and Resiliency Plan, “I see all of those things need to converge in what will be a policy update of the L.W.R.P.,” Mr. Das said. “If those can all be brought to bear on an update . . . I think we’ll have much more of a utilitarian coastal management plan for the coming decades.” 

Climate change, sea level rise, and increased storm activity represent the greatest threats to East Hampton and its residents, the report states. Storms and increased erosion are short-term threats, and climate change is “a slow-motion emergency that over coming decades may submerge significant portions of the town’s coast, endanger life and property, infiltrate freshwater aquifers with saltwater intrusion, and threaten the town’s economic growth as both a year-round and summer resort community,” the report states. 

Hazards and hurricane damage mitigation plans are urgent, it says, “given the projected increased incidence and severity of hurricanes and other weather events.” The town should pursue grants to address breach closure contingencies, detailed poststorm recovery and reconstruction, and targeted buyouts. 

Integrating sea level rise estimates is critical to planning, according to the committee, and sea level rise projections should be mapped in detail to show what areas will be inundated and in what time frame, where infrastructure will be at risk, and where water tables will be affected by saltwater intrusion. These projections should be reassessed biennially. 

Planning and zoning board decisions should be based on the legal ramifications of flooding, the report says, citing approval of the substation and proposed battery storage facility in Montauk as an error. “The developments were approved despite being located in a flood zone . . . which defies responsible planning,” according to the report.

Erosion-control districts, such as those created by the Town of Southampton for beach replenishment in Sagaponack, can help manage long-term erosion and should be explored for locations including bayside subdivisions and downtown Montauk, once beach stabilization is completed there, the report states.

The encroachment or displacement of fishery infrastructure by retail, restaurant, and tourism-oriented businesses is cited, and the town should continue supporting the sustainable seafood movement, including new models for marketing and distribution of local and sustainably harvested fish, the report says. 

The committee recommends that planning be continued to improve the property around Montauk Harbor. “This is a complex region given waterfront development density, commercial activity, and compromised water quality,” the report says. Maintaining docks, landing sites, and packing facilities is critical to preserving the area as a vital port with a waterfront-dependent economy and the town’s traditional cultural identity.

 “It is important to maintain Montauk Harbor as an economic generator that feeds jobs . . . and provides a local fresh-fish supply to Montauk and the region’s restaurants with minimal carbon footprint from transport,” the report says. The town also should come up with best management suggestions for what it calls sustainable “aquatecture,” for commercial and residential waterfront property owners to mitigate storm damage. 

The former fish factory on Cranberry Hole Road in Amagansett should be revitalized and the State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation should be engaged to ensure that future plans for Napeague State Park are congruent with the L.W.R.P., the committee says, while recreational activities there should be limited to passive uses such as walking and recreational fishing but the launching of motorized vessels should be discouraged. 

The committee recommends an update to identify “habitats at risk and those that are already disturbed or degraded.” Nonnative plants and animals have become threats since drafting and approval of the original L.W.R.P., the report states, and native habitat acreage has diminished due to competition from invasive species and development. The report also says deer foraging has had a “significant and deleterious” effect because it eliminates understory vegetation and may be causing permanent change. 

The committee recommends that the town provide additional resources for enforcement of the Peconic Estuary’s no-discharge regulation and increase the number of pump-out boats at docks and marinas to reduce pollution in bays and harbors. A boating education project would also help protect and improve water quality, the report states. Finally, the committee recommends that our coastal oral history be updated.  

“A lot of this work has been implemented for decades,” Ms. Gruzen, an environmental planner and educator, said at the conclusion of the presentation. “It’s not that there’s new material here that we’re all of a sudden presenting. It’s constantly being worked on by your departments and by all of you. So thank you, and we very much enjoy serving as advisers.”

The East Hampton Town Shellfish Hatchery building, on Fort Pond Bay in Montauk, is in need of repair and renovation. 

The hatchery, which distributed some 40 million oysters, clams, and scallops into town waters last year, was established in the 1980s after a brown tide reduced the local shellfish harvest by some 80 percent. 

Last month, Barley Dunne, the hatchery’s director, told the town board that all the doors and windows of its building, which was erected in the 1940s by the Navy as part of a torpedo-testing facility in the bay, must be replaced because water is leaking in. He also seeks to extend a roof on the building’s north side to protect a landing area against inclement weather. A glass block on the building’s exterior, through which most of the water is entering the building, also needs replacing, he said. 

The roof was replaced and a mold remediation effort begun in 2016, Mr. Dunne told the board. “That’s where this work stems from: There was a lot of black mold in the east end of the building, so the Sheetrock and insulation was ripped out.” That part of the project remains at a standstill, he said, pending renovations to make the structure watertight. “We need to button up the exterior to keep water out.” New windows and doors would also make the building more energy efficient, he noted. 

Once the work is completed, the hatchery is likely to seek tenants to rent part of the building, as has been done in past years. The town’s lifeguards have also expressed an interest in storing vehicles and Jet Skis under the extended shed roof, he said. That equipment is presently stored at present at the Montauk playhouse. 

Mr. Dunne estimated the project’s cost at $255,000. The town has allocated $165,000 toward the expense.

“Clearly the most important part of maintaining a building asset is to prevent water intrusion,” Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said at the board’s May 8 meeting. “The roof solved that issue, but the block in the upper skylight is a source of constant leaking. Before proceeding with mold remediation and re-Sheetrocking, we clearly have to take care of this.” 

The building is a valuable asset to the town, Mr. Van Scoyoc said. Storing lifeguards’ equipment at the hatchery, he said, is “a much less expensive alternative to building a new, separate, free-standing building on some other parcel.” The hatchery is also a candidate for solar panels, given the roof’s southern exposure alignment, he said. 

In its lifetime, the structure once housed a portion of the New York State Ocean Science Laboratory. It was later renovated to house the hatchery. The late Tony D’Agostino leased the east end of the building for 25 years for the Montauk Marine Science Institute, where he grew and propagated blue lobsters and conducted experiments on brine shrimp, Mr. Dunne said.

In an expansion of its survey of private wells in the vicinity of East Hampton Airport, the Suffolk County Health Department is testing 88 wells in Sagaponack Village and adjacent areas for the presence of toxic perfluorinated compounds, said Janice Wilson, a chief legislative aide for Southampton Town Supervisor Jay Schneiderman.

The compounds, known as PFOS (perfluorooctane sulfonate) and PFOA (perfluorooctanoic acid), have been identified by the federal Environmental Protection Agency as contaminants that pose an emerging concern as a health risk. PFOS is a key ingredient in fabric protectors and stain repellents, and is found in products such as paints, varnishes, and cleaning products. PFOA is used in creating a coating on cookware and in other consumer products. Both substances have been used to make firefighting foams.

In October, County Health Department officials announced that they had detected the chemicals in wells in Wainscott, which ultimately led the East Hampton Town Board to declare a state of emergency in order to provide affected residents with financial help to install water-filtration devices. The town is also planning, in the longer term, to extend public water mains to residential and commercial properties within the hamlet.

The new round of tests are taking place in areas within Southampton Town, and although there is not yet any indication that the PFOS or PFOA levels are above acceptable limits, the town has begun delivering supplies of bottled water to Sagaponack Village Hall for affected residents to pick up, said Ms. Wilson. The town will also be sending a letter to the homeowners, alerting them to the testing, and providing them with an order form to have the bottled water delivered directly to their houses.

America New York and New Jersey State Conference, as well as TWU AFL-CIO Local 252, has endorsed Representative Lee Zeldin’s re-election effort. The groups represent almost 140,000 members in the airline, railroad, transit, university, utilities, services, and gaming sectors. 

Debra Hagan, Local 252’s president, said in a statement that Mr. Zeldin has made “improvements to the quality of life for all working men and women throughout Suffolk County and New York State.” She added that Mr. Zeldin’s voting record demonstrates his support for improving local infrastructure and for veterans’ programs and benefits. 

“Local 252 is proud to endorse your candidacy for re-election,” she said, “and will actively support you in the months and years to come.”

The Transport Workers Union told the congressman that it would “actively engage our respective membership, retirees, and supporters who reside in your Long Island district to head to the polls and cast their vote to see your successful return to our great nation’s House of Representatives.”

In his own statement, Mr. Zeldin expressed his gratitude to the unions. “These hard workers are vital to our community and way of life and it will be a privilege to continue to fight for them, their families, and our region in the months and years ahead,” he said.

Perry Gershon, a Democratic candidate hoping to challenge First District Representative Lee Zeldin in the midterm election, told supporters on Saturday that his campaign’s polling indicates he and Kate Browning are neck and neck for the Democratic nomination, and that the other three candidates trail them by a wide margin. 

Mr. Gershon spoke with supporters at the East Hampton Village residence of Loida Lewis on Saturday, appealing to guests to vote for him in the June 26 primary and to encourage others to do so as well. A first-time candidate from East Hampton, he will face off against Ms. Browning, Vivian Viloria-Fisher, David Pechefsky, and Elaine DiMasi in the primary election. 

Mr. Gershon is establishing a temporary campaign headquarters at Keyes Art at 53 the Circle in East Hampton and will have a meet-and-greet event there tomorrow from 6 to 8 p.m. The campaign has invited the public to stop by to learn about the candidate, and has asked volunteers to call voters on his behalf ahead of the primary. 

The First District’s voter registration statistics are “really really rough numbers” for a Democratic candidate, Mr. Gershon said at the Saturday event. Key to victory, he said, is reaching Independence and Conservative Party voters as well as those unaffiliated with a political party. “Of those groups, I think I can appeal to many of them,” he said. He has been knocking on doors and has driven 24,500 miles since July 1, 2017, when he first declared his candidacy. 

“I’m going around this district, shaking hands, and listening to stories from as many people as I can, not just Democrats. There are a lot of people who are unhappy with what Trump is doing to the country,” he told the gathering, noting that Mr. Zeldin, a Republican, is an ardent supporter of the president. 

The candidate spoke of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents separating families as they are processed at stations along the southwestern border. (The New York Times reported in April that more than 700 children have been taken from adults claiming to be their parents since October, including more than 100 children under the age of 4.) The practice is “one of the most vile and disgusting things I’ve seen in America,” Mr. Gershon said. “I can’t believe that that’s happening in America, and Zeldin is not speaking up against it. He’s talking about how this is the way you fight MS-13,” the international gang with ties to El Salvador, members of which have been accused in multiple murders on Long Island. “Well, these 4-year-olds are not exactly MS-13 people,” Mr. Gershon said. 

If Democrats are going to prevail in the midterm and 2020 presidential elections, they must bear “a message of hope and optimism,” Mr. Gershon said, something he believes Hillary Clinton failed to do in her campaign for president. “I’m not going to miss that. And that’s how we get independent voters.” 

The national economy may be strong, “but it’s not so great in Suffolk County,” he said. “You have people whose wages are not going up. We don’t have any industry to speak of.” 

“Donald Trump is a con man,” declared Mr. Gershon, who said that he has known the president for 25 years. But Robert Mueller, the independent counsel appointed by the deputy attorney general to investigate ties between the president’s campaign and Russian officials, “is doing an independent, fair-minded inquiry. . . . We’re not supposed to draw a conclusion ahead of time, just like Lee Zeldin is not supposed to try to shut down the investigation before it happens.” Mr. Zeldin has been critical of the investigation, accusing the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation of misconduct in launching it.