Burke-Gonzalez Vs. Leon for Supervisor Pits Experience Against Frustration

For the first time in its history, two women are in the running for the top elected office in East Hampton Town government.

The candidates for town supervisor, veteran Councilwoman Kathee Burke-Gonzalez, a Democrat, and political newcomer Dr. Gretta Leon, a Republican, come from vastly different personal and professional backgrounds, but both say they want to shift the mode of local government in the coming years with an eye toward making it more supportive of the changing local population.

The winner of the race will earn a two-year term in the supervisor’s suite at Town Hall, replacing Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc, a Democrat, who is retiring this year after three terms as supervisor and 12 years on the Town Board.

Burke-Gonzalez has been on board since 2015 — she has two years remaining on her third four-year term on the council — and has been deputy supervisor for the last three years under Van Scoyoc. She was on the Springs School Board for nine years and worked as an advertising executive before being elected to town government.

As supervisor, Burke-Gonzalez, 61, has said she wants to “modernize” town government — improving child care and adolescent services for youth and transportation and wellness programs for the town’s growing senior population — she has spearheaded the planning for a new Senior Center on Abrahams Path to be built next year — and continuing the work the current administration and councils has begun with several affordable housing projects in the pipeline, expanding renewable energy resources and continuing the town’s robust funding of water quality improvement projects.

“My years of public service have been firmly rooted in my core values: family, hard work, compassion for one another and respect for our natural environment,” she said during a candidates forum with the Village Improvement Society of East Hampton last month. “However, these last few years have been challenging, to say the least, as the global pandemic has changed so much about our lives. These profound shifts require a change in the way local government operates. We need to modernize how we do business.”

Though constrained on what she can say about the town’s efforts to rein in aircraft traffic at East Hampton Airport by the lawsuits brought by charter aircraft operators and airplane owners, she did say during a candidates debate with the Village Preservation Society of East Hampton that her view of the matter was based in part on a broad survey of local residents in which 80 percent of respondents were in favor of new limits on aircraft traffic at the airport.

She said she is not in favor of a town proposal to put a wastewater treatment plant to service a sewer system in downtown Montauk in county parklands in Hither Hills.

“I spoke to the opposition … in fact, I asked Rick Whalen to take me on a hike, and I was really taken aback by how well used those trails are,” she said during a candidates forum in Montauk on October 1. “When I walked that property, I knew for myself that was not the place to site a treatment system.”

She hit back at criticisms from her opponent claiming the town has not done enough to spur improvements in cellular service, pointing out that the Town Board partnered with cellular providers to get new towers erected in Northwest and Springs and has amended codes on new towers that will allow the Springs Fire District to erect a tower at its firehouse. She said that the town has taken a responsible “methodical approach” that will lead to improvements in service soon.

She has spotlighted the town’s response to the pandemic during her tenure, organizing a vaccination clinic in Wainscott when vaccines were unavailable elsewhere on the East End and delivering more than 88,000 meals to homebound senior citizens — which has now morphed into a grab-and-go service that provides five meals a week for seniors on fixed incomes or living alone.

She said the kind of leadership the Town Board provided through that crisis needs to be continued by her and her running mates, David Lys and Tom Flight.

“Our community needs experienced, compassionate leadership,” she said.

Leon, 36, acknowledges her lack of the sort of deep experience in the professional and public realm of her opponent, but she has framed her campaign around a desire to make it easier for those from the town she grew up in to remain here and the frustrations of skyrocketing housing costs, working class salaries that have not kept pace with the cost of living and what she sees as a disconnect between government and young residents.

“It’s been a burden to stay out here, I still live with my family. It takes a toll on you, physically, mentally and [financially],” she said during the Montauk candidates forum. “We need to find solutions to local issues, such as quality of living, affordable housing, economic issues, infrastructure and development.”

Like her Republican running mates, Scott Smith and Michael Wootton, Her criticisms of the current Town Board mainly focus on sweeping endemic issues of housing, overdevelopment, cellular service and lagging salaries and the town having not yet solved them.

At the Montauk forum, she said she was in favor of a proposed project to remove invasive plants from the Benson Reserve along Old Montauk Highway, including by using goats to graze away some of the plants along some of the property’s steeper slopes.

She also said she was in favor of expanding town staffing in the Ordinance Enforcement Department to better tackle housing code violations.

She said the town website is not very “user friendly” and said that she thinks the town does a poor job of communicating with residents, especially younger ones, about town programs. She said the septic replacement program is especially labyrinthine and complicated and may deter some from participating.

Leon was noncommittal on the matter of the town allowing cannabis sales since Southampton Town does — Burke-Gonzalez said she did not see it being something town residents seem to care much about since she has never heard from a constituent who supported a change in the policy — but said she’d be willing to study the matter.

East Hampton Airport should remain open, she said, and thought that fighting the lawsuits brought against the town by aviation interests and Montauk residents was a “waste.”

Asked during the VPS forum about how she thought the Community Housing Fund and tackling development density should be used, she admitted not knowing much about the issue but worried that opportunities to build affordable housing are dwindling.

“We have nowhere to put affordable housing anymore — there’s nowhere to build,” she said. “I grew up here, there was so much land, so many ways to build, so much opportunity.”

But she also said she is in favor of reducing the size of houses, and sees it as something the town should have done earlier.

“For the last 10 years, nothing has been done regarding house size — it just goes slowly,” she said. “It’s been 10 years of getting worse. House sizes getting worse. It’s time to fully address this.”