East Hampton Village Voters To Decide On Board Candidates On June 21

East Hampton Village voters will be asked to go to the polls this coming Tuesday, June 21, to elect two trustees to the East Hampton Village Board.

Polls will be open at the village Emergency Services Building off North Main Street from noon to 9 p.m. on Tuesday. The election is open only to village residents who are registered to vote at a village address.

Three candidates are contesting for the two seats: incumbent Trustee Arthur “Tiger” Graham and challengers Sarah Amaden and Carrie Doyle.

Amaden and Doyle, both political newcomers, are running on the NewTown Party ticket, the party founded by Mayor Jerry Larsen to support his own candidacy in 2020 and holds three of the five seats on the board. Graham is running for a second term on the board on the Fish Hooks Party ticket, which he founded in 2018 with fellow Trustee Rose Brown, who declined to seek a second term on the board this year.

Amaden is a former school teacher who has lived in East Hampton Village for 20 years and put three children through the East Hampton School District. She has been an active volunteer for a number of local organizations, like the East Hampton Food Pantry, the Ladies Village Improvement Society, Fighting Chance, the East Hampton Library and the East Hampton Garden Club.

Over the next four years, she says she sees the most daunting issue facing the village as the design and installation of a new sewer system to serve the downtown business district and surrounding neighborhoods, and how to pay for it. She has said she is not in favor of village-wide or user-based taxes to fund the estimated $15 million cost.

“This project is essential for a vibrant village,” she said, “and we all need to come together to get this accomplished.”

She says that if elected, she would like to spearhead the creation of a village welcome center to help visitors and part-time residents connect to the community.

“As of now, 85 percent of the village is second-home owners,” she said. “People want to be part of the East Hampton community, but need a way to plug in. Providing lists of volunteer opportunities, summer jobs, and introductions to people will strengthen our community and ultimately our village.”

Her running mate, Doyle, is one of those part-time residents. An author, she splits her time between East Hampton and New York City, where she lives with her husband and two teenage sons.

Doyle was appointed by Larsen to the Zoning Board of Appeals in 2021, and to the board of directors of the East Hampton Village Foundation, the nonprofit founded by the village last year to accept private donations for village improvement projects.

Doyle has written several books, three in 2021 alone, and co-founded an independent publishing company, Dunemere Books, in 2016. She previously worked in magazine publishing, serving as editor of Harper’s Bazaar in Moscow and then as the founding editor of Marie Claire magazine in Russia. She has said that her time overseeing the magazines overseas taught her a lot about management that will serve her well on the Village Board if elected.

Throughout the campaign, she has said her top priority, if elected, would be to focus on combating the annual plague of empty storefronts in the village business district.

“I would like to have a vibrant village, without empty storefronts and with stores that are of interest to actual village residents and not just tourists,” Doyle said. “This is a broad initiative because it would entail many pieces: building a sewer system; determining how we incentivize — or require — local landlords to keep their storefronts open; and creating a master design plan that includes updating our park and infrastructure.”

She has said that as a trustee she would call for holding a town hall-style meeting for all village residents to air opinions on a wide range of subjects, from zoning to public events to the general tenor of village government. She said she worries that too many village residents do not think government is interested in their assessments.

“I believe it is a terrible feeling to think that your government representatives do not care what you think,” she said. “I may not agree with everyone, and they may not agree with me, but I really want to be someone that constituents can reach out to who will do my best to help them address their concerns.”

Graham is a retired Wall Street salesman and trader who was a part-time village resident for 20 years before moving to the village full-time in 2003. Prior to joining the Village Board, he served on the Planning Board and the East Hampton Historical Society’s board of directors, of which he was the president in 2008, and has been the chairman of the Thomas Moran Trust since 2013.

He was elected to the board in a special election in 2017 to fill the unexpired term of Trustee Elbert Edwards, who died the year prior. In 2018, he won election again to a full four-year term.

Graham’s campaign this year has focused largely on his role — typically in conjunction with Trustee Brown — as a foil to Larsen’s administration dictating village policy with little to no discussion or public contemplation of alternatives. He has said that if reelected, he would continue to push for more of the village government’s business to be done in the open during public meetings rather than behind the closed doors of the mayor’s wing at Village Hall.

“My first priority would be to restart the work sessions so that the public can see/be part of the sausage making process,” he said in reference to the monthly meetings where policy initiatives were typically discussed conceptually before being introduced as legislation — a step that Larsen has largely eliminated in favor of crafting legislation within his administration and then introducing it with only the legal minimum of introduction before being put up for a public hearing and vote, sometimes on the same day.

“Having everything done behind closed doors serves no one but the mayor,” Graham said. “My top priority will be governmental transparency and accountability. The village as a whole needs more access to village government and the governing process.”