East Hampton Town Supervisor Kathee Burke-Gonzalez was endorsed by Gov. Kathy Hochul, Assemblyman Tommy John Schiavoni, County Legislator Ann Welker, by the New York League of Conservation Voters, the Working Families Party, and by three of four town board members, and on Tuesday night, she won the endorsement of Democratic voters.
With over 62 percent of the vote, she defeated East Hampton Village Mayor Jerry Larsen to claim her role as Democratic candidate for town supervisor this November, and in all likelihood re-election, as there is no Republican candidate for the seat.
As the incumbent supported wholeheartedly by the Democratic establishment, her victory perhaps comes as no surprise, though the magnitude of it was a shock, as many close observers expected a tighter race.
Mr. Larsen ran a tenacious campaign. He focused on the struggles at the Building Department and problems with a number of town projects, including the stalled senior citizens center, a pet project of Ms. Burke-Gonzalez. He also backed a full slate of challengers for the 38 seats on the East Hampton Town Democratic Committee (two for each of 19 Election Districts), nine of whom appeared to have won on Election Night, although in several districts fewer than 10 votes separated the successful and unsuccessful candidates, with absentee ballots and affidavit votes still to be counted.
“This was a grueling campaign,” Ms. Burke-Gonzalez acknowledged in her victory speech at Rowdy Hall in Amagansett Tuesday night.
Despite Mr. Larsen’s constant needling, especially on social media, where his campaign had a prolific Instagram account, the supervisor stayed above the fray, refusing to go negative and attack her challenger. “We made a decision as a team to keep this positive, and the voters responded to that,” she said. “We have enough of that misinformation and nonsense and spin in Washington. We don’t want that here,” she said to whoops and hollers.
“The tally came in; we lost,” Mr. Larsen said at Serafina in East Hampton, where he had gathered with his supporters and committee candidates. “It was a hard-fought campaign. I have to congratulate them for doing the job they did. But I’m proud of our committee. We picked up, it looks like maybe eight seats, so that was a win on that side of things. And we’ll see what happens in the future.”
Mr. Larsen has two more years in his term as village mayor.
“Obviously, our town has, I still feel there’s a lot of mismanagement going on. But I think that the Democratic Committee has such a strong hold on the second-home owners and people who live here that, when they come out as the official Democratic Committee and they endorse somebody, it carries a lot of weight. It’s very clear. So, I think nothing’s going to change with that.”
In her short victory speech, made apparently while Mr. Larsen was calling to congratulate her, Ms. Burke-Gonzalez used the word “misinformation” three times, but also said she hoped to work with the mayor moving forward, specifically to help residents whose water has been impacted by the contamination of at least two wells near Cove Hollow Road.
She noted that Mr. Larsen’s campaign taught her some lessons and exposed areas where she, along with town government, needs to improve.
“There were things that came out in this campaign that our administration needs to work on,” she said, without elaborating, “and I’m committed to doing that.”
“We’re going to help you!” Alyson Follenius yelled from the crowd of mostly Democratic Committee members assembled around Rowdy Hall’s bar. Ms. Follenius was locked in a tight race for a committee seat in Election District 5 in East Hampton. Unofficial results from the Suffolk County Board of Elections showed her in third place, only four votes behind Lisa Larsen, the mayor’s wife, who is a member of the East Hampton Village Design Review Board.
“We ran on our accomplishments,” the supervisor said. “We ran on our vision for the community and keeping our folks here and on affordable housing and protecting water quality and coastal resiliency and providing for our seniors and our kids and recreation.”
Tom Flight, the only member of the town board to endorse Mr. Larsen, said yesterday that “this election underscored the importance of listening to and addressing the needs of our local working residents in a way that reflects our Democratic Party’s core values. While issues such as environmental protection remain important, we must also recognize when our policies inadvertently make it harder for working families to live and thrive here. Rebuilding a strong local workforce and ensuring that municipal employees, tradespeople, teachers, first responders, and other working residents can afford to remain part of our community should be central to our efforts moving forward.”
Many committee races remain to be decided and likely won’t be for at least a week as the board of elections counts the absentee and affidavit votes. However, Mr. Larsen at least dented the standing committee.
If election night results hold, one of the bigger and more consequential upsets occurred in District 16, in the Northwest area of East Hampton.
There, Marilyn Van Scoyoc picked up the most votes of any committee member townwide, with 165. However, her running mate, a longtime committee member, Tim Garneau, who is also a town trustee, may have lost to Sarah Minardi, vice president of the East Hampton School Board and wife of Christopher Minardi, the village’s deputy mayor. Ms. Minardi had 132 votes, Mr. Garneau 125, and Jonathan Tarbet had 107.
Election districts with higher populations, like 16, matter more during Democratic Committee conventions, at which candidates are chosen. Each committee member is allotted a number of votes equal to half of the Democratic votes cast in their election district for the Democratic candidate in the last gubernatorial election.
District 2, which runs into Sag Harbor, is also heavily populated. It was won convincingly by Peter Ginna (151) and Michael Koegler (148), both the party’s choices.
“This election was about defending Democratic values and principles,” said Mr. Koegler. “We faced a challenge from people that were willing to sacrifice Democratic values just so they could gain power -by any means necessary. They made it about themselves instead of making it about how they could best serve Democrats in East Hampton.”
Mayor Larsen’s candidates, his wife, Ms. Larsen, and his deputy mayor, Mr. Minardi, were both ahead in District 5. Mr. Minardi had 61 votes, Ms. Larsen 58. Ms. Follenius had 54 and her running mate, Joe Gonzalez, the supervisor’s husband, had 52.
Mr. Larsen’s candidates in District 8 in East Hampton, also appear to have prevailed. Kelly Anderson was the high vote-getter with 136, David Gruber, a former committee chairman and unsuccessful candidate for supervisor, had 132, followed by Jerry Mulligan with 127 and Juan Roldan with 118.
The standing Democratic Committee also took one-seat losses in District 11, where the mayor’s candidate Jaqueline Dunphy picked up 127 votes to win second place behind David Goldstein. Mr. Larsen’s pick of Carroll Logie was third with 122 votes and the party’s choice, Rob Cardonsky, had 118 votes. In District 15 in Springs, Thomas Crouch, the committee’s treasurer, was five votes behind Jennifer Lilja, the wife of the East Hampton Village administrator, Marcos Baladron. Ms. Lilja had 115 votes, Mr. Crouch 110. The top vote-getter in that district was Annemarie McCoy with 132; last was Trisha Notel Erickson with 104.
Another closely-watched race was District 12 in Amagansett. The Democratic Committee chairwoman Anna Skrenta won it handily, with 115 votes. "Jerry Larsen called to congratulate Kathee," she said to cheers. "He said, 'You really are a machine,' and I said, if you mean by a machine that we are a team of people that love each other and work together, then, yes, we are a machine." Her running mate, David Hillman, was a single vote behind Mr. Larsen’s candidate, Vicki Littman, who had 100 votes. Rona Klopman finished a distant fourth, with 70 votes.
Two other Democratic Committee members, Barbara Ann Layton and Joan McGivern, who switched sides to endorse the mayor, lost their races: Ms. Layton in District 1 in East Hampton where she trailed Anthony Martone by three votes (he had 30), and Ms. McGivern in District 2.
In District 9 in Springs, Francis Bock, a town trustee who was cross-endorsed but since came out for Mr. Larsen, was the top vote-getter with 127, while the party’s choice Adam Hornbuckle, with 99 votes, was just two ahead of the challenger, Mary Waserstein.
“I love you all,” said the town supervisor at the end of her speech in the dimly lit bar, but it was barely audible over the crowd. Minutes later, it was last call, and then the Democrats spread into the night, some with plans to pick up roadside election signs, despite the driving rain.
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Note: This article has been updated since it first appeared online. A quote from Anna Skrenta's speech was also corrected.
