Suffolk County Legislator Ann Welker, a Democrat who is seeking a second term, and her Republican challenger, Raheem Soto, spoke of their respective records and policy agendas in an uneventful debate hosted by the League of Women Voters of the Hamptons, Shelter Island, and the North Fork on Monday.
Climate change and other environmental issues, affordable housing, and federal officials’ pursuit of immigrants in Suffolk County were among the issues discussed, sometimes in imprecise terms, in the hourlong debate pitting the incumbent, a former Southampton Town trustee, against her challenger, who publishes the Messenger newspaper chain.
The only clear point of disagreement between the candidates for the Legislature’s Second District was on offshore wind. “I’m not in favor,” Mr. Soto said, “and I would love to display the data because for every study that says something good, there’s an opposing study. And I think sometimes the discussion about these things is politicized to the point where we get lost about what it’s doing to nature and what it’s doing to our environment.” He did add, however, that “we do need to explore all the green energy that’s available to us. . . . I’m not a fan of the turbines.”
“Anything that we can do to use renewable energy is so wise, as we are located in a tricky situation,” Ms. Welker said. “Wind farms are a vitally important part of our future. The ocean is a fabulous place for them. I do disagree with my opponent on that.”
As for degradation of drinking water, “one of the things that we can do is continue to promote, at a much grander scale, getting these [innovative-alternative septic] systems into the ground,” Mr. Soto said. “I would be a really aggressive advocate for getting our resources and creative ways to get our tax dollars back here. We need more investment into the East End. We’re subsidizing a lot of the western towns, and we need someone that’s going to step up and say enough is enough. We need clean drinking water out here. We need septics in the ground. We need runoff taken care of.”
Ms. Welker referred to the 2016 pilot program in which treated effluent from the Riverhead wastewater treatment plant was used to irrigate the adjacent Indian Island Golf Course, a county facility. “It was very successful,” she said. “That same project is now to be replicated at the Bergen Point wastewater treatment plant,” she said. “There is a county-owned golf course next door, so the piping would be very minimal. That’s the expensive part of this, but that’s going to allow for water reuse.”
Asked by Estelle Gellman, the debate’s moderator, if the county should develop a plan for garbage removal and how residents and businesses could be encouraged to reduce waste and increase recycling and composting, Mr. Soto said that “there needs to be a cultural awakening.” The county, he said, should not get involved in garbage removal. “What we need to do is talk about a partnership with private industry and how to best do that,” he added, before taking the opposite position. “I would be in favor of a great plan from the county that does it efficiently, that does it at little to no cost to the taxpayer, because we are so heavily invested and heavily taxed. I would be in favor to see a plan for countywide waste removal.”
“Closing of the Brookhaven landfill is something that’s long overdue,” Ms. Welker said, “but a regional plan for our waste is also something that’s long overdue. There is the opportunity here, with the closing of the landfill, to stop trucking our waste to regions to the west.” Food scraps are being collected in several municipal recycling facilities, she said. “Food waste is, unfortunately, the largest amount of waste that we produce. . . . Composting, and then the reusing of that compost on our properties, is a really good way to look at the future.”
On affordable housing, Ms. Welker pointed to the community housing funds in East Hampton and Southampton Towns. “That money now can be used to help us to do matching funds when there’s county money available, or there are grants that are available,” she said. “One thing that’s being investigated right now is manufactured housing. There’s an initiative by New York State to provide manufactured housing at very reasonable rates, and that is being passed through the county.”
Housing is prohibitively expensive for many “because regulation makes it that way,” Mr. Soto said. As for accessory dwelling units and work-force housing, “a lot of this stuff is tied up in building and zoning and a lot of overlapping and overarching bureaucratic steps,” he said. “At the county level, I would want to work with streamlining some of these processes for A.D.U.s, streamlining and looking at where we have duplicative process and zoning for builders, and sometimes it’s just too much.”
Asked for their position on allowing federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to pursue undocumented immigrants, Mr. Soto said that it was “unfair to frame the question that way. However, I’m not in law enforcement, and I would rely on the expertise of law enforcement, who know what they need and what they don’t need and whether that’s a good agreement or not.” ICE, he said, “is going after the worst-first type of scenario. Have there been some hiccups or things in operations with law enforcement? Absolutely. I think we all need to be treated with dignity and respect. Our immigrant population here, they deserve an opportunity at what we all have, the American dream. I don’t think it should be unfairly and illegally taken away from them at anybody’s whim.”
Ms. Welker said that Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman’s allowance of law enforcement to work with ICE agents, under which local officers are deputized to perform immigration enforcement duties, was “most unfortunate. County Executive Ed Romaine has not, and I thoroughly support County Executive Romaine’s decision in this. Our immigrant population is part of the fabric of not only the East End but of our region. We are so fortunate to live in safe communities. If there were situations where the safety was compromised at all, and ICE agents needed to be assisted by police, then I would support it. But otherwise, these are important, important people in our communities.”
In his closing statement, Mr. Soto said that he has “great relationships” in the Legislature. Should he be elected, “I’ll use those relationships that I’ve built over years of being involved to help fight for our resources to come back to the East End, because the bottom line is we contribute a heck of a lot more than we get back.”
“The opportunities abound for government to make critically important decisions that help all of us that are residents of Suffolk County,” Ms. Welker said in her closing statement, “and I’d like to continue to be part of that.”
Early voting starts on Oct. 25 and continues through Nov. 2. Election Day is Nov. 4.
