Ann Glennon, First Female Building Inspector, Takes Over In East Hampton

After 22 years in the East Hampton Town Building Department offices, Ann Glennon took over as head of the department last month—the town’s first female principal building inspector.

As the principal building inspector and department head, Ms. Glennon takes over a department wrestling with an almost constant deluge of building permit applications and an antiquated, but organized, system of record-keeping.

Ms. Glennon started in the town’s Building Department as a messenger in 1993, under then chief building inspector Fred Sellers. Over two-plus decades, she held every administrative position in the department. When Mr. Sellers retired, she had considered getting certified to be a building inspector but instead took over as Building Inspector Don Sharkey’s administrative secretary.

When Tom Prieato, who succeeded Mr. Sharkey after his death in 2009, left last fall, Ms. Glennon’s deep experience with keeping the department running made her the obvious choice to take over the department—which meant she finally needed to go through the six-month state certification to be a building inspector.

The new duty does not particularly seem to overwhelm her.

“The volume of applications has gone up a lot since I first started, and the code has gotten stricter over the years,” Ms. Glennon said in her offices last week. “With clearing limits and patios and pools all being considered structures, we’re looking into the properties more than we did in the past. But I’ve been here for all the changes through the years … so I know them like the back of my hand.”

With no town records digitized, information about every property in the town, and its history of construction, permits and certificates of occupancy, is kept on paper in bound, handwritten ledgers stacked atop rows of filing cabinets stuffed with surveys and blueprints that fill much of the Building Department’s offices, two storage rooms and parts of other offices in Town Hall’s satellite complex at 300 Pantigo. The system holds every property record, back to the first building permit ever issued by the town in 1959.

“It’s an old way of doing things, but our system works,” Ms. Glennon said. “We have a great staff, we’re all on the same page and everyone is very good at keeping track of things. I think the department runs very well.”