Taken in the context of the national political dialogue, last week’s League of Women Voters of the Hamptons, Shelter Island, and the North Fork debate featuring East Hampton Town Board candidates was efficient and polite. Livestreamed, it gave viewers a chance to hear where the three candidates for two town board seats stand on the airport, the gun club, the senior center, affordable housing, and other issues.
There was no yelling or personal attacks. The few times the time limit was exceeded, there were apologies. Still, contrasts were drawn between Councilwoman Cate Rogers and Councilman Ian Calder-Piedmonte, the incumbent Democrats, and J.P. Foster, their Republican challenger.
“How do you account for turnover at Town Hall and what do you feel should be done about it?” asked Terese Wildrick, co-president of the league.
“It’s a major problem,” Mr. Foster answered. “Pay is an issue. I think it’s come up a little bit, but we still need to go further with the pay structure. The environment just has to change. I think the leadership needs to either change or get with the program.”
He highlighted difficulties at the Building Department and attempted to draw a contrast between the town government’s struggles and the East Hampton School District, where he has been president of the school board for the last 12 years.
“We have 375 employees,” he said of the district. “We have several unions. We have the Civil Service that we must deal with. If you look at some of the people that left the town, a fair amount lived here. They had houses here. Why are people leaving?” He added that his leadership on the town board could help.
Ms. Rogers was quick to point out, however, that it’s not just the town that’s having employment issues. “This is happening across business sectors,” she said, a point corroborated later by Mr. Calder-Piedmonte, who is co-owner of Balsam Farms. “I know, looking at the school district, they had 27 resignations and retirements this year, which pretty much matched what we had,” she said.
She pointed out that the town had recently hired a new principal building inspector and added new positions to that department. She said there were multiple generations of the same family working in the town. “I think it’s just a part of a political narrative to say the town is falling apart.”
“It’s not a political narrative when a whole department walks out,” Mr. Foster said, referring to departures in the tax receiver’s office over the summer.
That was about as heated as things got.
On the senior center, Ms. Rogers and Mr. Calder-Piedmonte sought to take the negative of the fighting architects and turn it into a positive by discussing how the town could now broaden the use of the facility.
“I thought in the original discussion there was way too much focus on the structure and not the services that were provided,” Ms. Rogers said.
“The facility might accommodate children, young adults, and a broader community,” Mr. Calder-Piedmonte added.
Mr. Foster also supported an expanded use and suggested coupling the senior center with the Y.M.C.A., which he said was “desperately looking for a new location.”
“We just spent $1.3 million and we don’t have anything for it,” he said.
Each candidate supported restrictions for East Hampton Town Airport. Ms. Rogers, as the town board liaison to Wainscott, where the airport is located, said residents supported curfews and studying the impacts of “Uber-style helicopter flights.”
Much of the debate was spent talking about affordable housing, which Mr. Calder-Piedmonte said was “the biggest problem we face.” He spoke of legislation he proposed to create affordable residences that would allow for four housing units on a single acre of land, and his advocacy to use a portion of the new community housing fund to provide loans to construct accessory dwelling units, or A.D.U.s, and assist first-time home buyers with down payments.
Mr. Foster said he supported A.D.U.s but thought there should be an exception in the zoning code to allow for houses to be larger if they incorporated an A.D.U.
He also argued that transportation problems were restricting development. “Riverhead gets further and further away every year. It doesn’t move physically, but the traffic increases,” he joked. He thought commuter trains needed to be expanded, and each candidate agreed.
Ms. Rogers said reducing the maximum house size in the town was one way the board was able to increase density for more affordable housing. “I looked at taking that use and transferring it to increase density for affordable housing as a response to the luxury home market taking over our neighborhoods, and the price of homes,” she said.
To a question about what the town could do to support food pantries, “I hear some people sort of scoff at it and think there’s not a need out there,” Mr. Calder-Piedmonte said. “But I can tell you that I know firsthand that there is.” He said his farm donated to the pantries every week, and he assisted in moving the East Hampton Food Pantry to the Town Hall campus so it could serve more people.
“I know our food pantries will be impacted by losing partners that have grants from the federal government,” Ms. Rogers said. “We support all of our food pantries and give them grants from a town board level. That’s why you really can’t separate national politics from local politics,” she said, drawing a contrast with Mr. Foster. “So many people are being impacted by those national politics.”
“Taking the national politics out of it,” Mr. Foster said, “we’re East Hampton, and we do what we need to to protect our neighbors. We take care of our neighbors. If we tackle it as a community and keep it that way, I think we can get through this.”
Toward the end of the debate, Ms. Wildrick asked what issues the board needed to address beyond what had already been discussed.
Ms. Rogers said coastal resilience and ensuring that the town would have a speedy recovery after a disaster, adding that expanding child care was another goal. She also said the town needed to address the impacts of the climate crisis, shown, for example, in the devastation of woodlands here by the southern pine beetle.
Mr. Calder-Piedmonte said it was important for the town board to fight for “working people and small businesses and our traditional industries to make sure that East Hampton retains its soul.” Water quality, whether the sole source aquifer or the beaches and ponds, was another priority, he said, as was addressing traffic “where we can.”
Mr. Foster said the town had a lot of infrastructure that needed updating, calling out the transfer station in particular. “If we don’t maintain our infrastructure, we’re not helping our environment either.” He called for the town’s solar program to be “beefed up.”
Election Day is Nov. 4. Early voting takes place from Saturday through Nov. 2, locally at Windmill Village on Accabonac Road.
