Tom Gardella, Sag Harbor's New Mayor, Says Cooperation and Mutual Respect Are Keys To Solving Village's Problems

Sag Harbor Village Mayor Tom Gardella spoke at length last week about his plans, in an interview lightly edited for length and clarity.

Q: Congratulations on your election as mayor. You’ve been involved in the Sag Harbor community going on 40 years, beginning as a fire department and ambulance volunteer. What motivated you to get involved — and stay involved?

Thank you. Yeah, it’s close to 40 years. I finished as fire department chief and lost by five votes to Aidan Corish in the trustee election in 2017. The interesting thing is, at first with the trustee position, it wasn’t something I was looking to do. I had just finished being fire chief. It was that Mayor Sandra Schroeder asked me. So I thought about it and said, “Okay, let me run” because I thought I had something, a voice, that I could offer something to the village.

Basically, I was somebody who came out here with very little, I was somebody who’s gone from renting in almost an affordable housing situation — my parents and I rented a house in North Haven, and we split the bills. Then I bought my house in the village and went through some of the boards. I had some experience of what it’s like here.

But all these positions, I was asked. I was asked to run for trustee, asked to be the deputy major, and I said, “Yeah, I’ll do it.”

Q: So, I imagine you’ve heard the expression, “If you want to get something done, ask a busy person?”

Yeah. Well, there you go.

Q: One of the things you said on Election Night is you wanted to bring the village together. How do you do that?

I’ve always tried to bring people together and try to focus on what we have in common, like what’s our common interests, our common goals.

I’m not naïve, though. I’ve tried this before. And sometimes, as much as you want to try to bring people together, it doesn’t work. I did it in the firehouse, I did it with issues in the village that I had to deal with. And so in those cases, what you want to do is just have some mutual respect. Let’s realize that, for whatever reason, I don’t want to work with you, I don’t like you, whatever it is, but let’s try to have some respect to get things accomplished or to coexist peacefully. Otherwise, it’s too much. So often in politics, everything’s focused on the negative.

You have to understand that you have a certain responsibility as a public servant. Now, if you’re going to bring up an issue that’s controversial, you need to see both sides of the issue and see where you can find some commonality.

I mean, just something as simple as we had just this past board meeting. We had some issues with The Church, some complaints, but the neighbors who stood up and spoke, the first words out of their mouth was, “I support The Church. I want to see The Church succeed.” So there you go. Now we have a common interest. April Gornik wants to succeed; they want to see The Church succeed. So let’s try to solve this issue. Let’s try to come together and see how we can make it work.

Q: After serving as deputy mayor under Mayor Kathleen Mulcahy, you jumped ship and endorsed Jim Larocca when he ran against her in 2021. Given the way things turned out, with four board members sometimes aligned against him, do you regret your decision?

I didn’t really jump ship. And I had an honest conversation with Kathleen, and I have nothing but total respect for Kathleen. And I’ve said it publicly, I thought that she worked as hard as she could as the mayor, and I think she’s a great person.

But Jim, I thought at the time, Jim had asked me to run as trustee with him. So there was a certain amount of loyalty there. And for me personally, I had to make a decision, “Do I support Kathleen or do I support Jim?” And I made the decision to support Jim only because I thought that if you look at Jim’s resume on paper, he’s filled many positions and he’s worked for the state, he’s worked for Long Island, he’s worked in housing.

So my assessment was that he could open up some doors for Sag Harbor that maybe other people couldn’t.

Q: Any regrets that you made that decision?

I don’t have any regrets. I have to live with the decision I made and there’s no looking back on that.

Q: After being elected mayor, you said affordable housing was a top priority. That is not surprising, given you were the first member of the board to say it needed to be a priority for the last administration. What do you think went wrong with the initial effort and how do you expect to attack the problem now?

You have to take it in context. And that’s what I think was part of the problem with the original approach. We are a small village. We oversee 2.2 square miles. So what could we do as a local government, as far as the codes go, that can help create some affordable housing? It’s a delicate balance, because we want to preserve the life that we have.

What I had seen, and I’ve said this over and over again, was that we were making things more difficult for people that wanted to, say, convert an accessory dwelling to an apartment.

People who were trying to make affordable housing — it was difficult for them. So I felt that we should be looking at the codes, we should be looking at what we can do, basically to incentivize or make it easier for people to create that extra housing. And if it creates some extra income from them, it’s a win-win. So that’s how I saw it because I saw people were being thrown out of their apartments because they were considered nonconforming. Instead of us trying to help, “How do we make this safe? How do we make it workable?” It is the code and we have to enforce it, but is that really the best thing?

Q: You pitched the idea of building near the firehouse.

Well, it’s more than an idea. We are having a meeting with the architects, H2M, who are coming up with another set of drawings for the Emergency Services building. We’ve already cordoned off where the Department of Public Works and the ambulance headquarters are now. It’s a half an acre to be used for affordable housing.

Now you have to say, “What’s going to fit in the village?” We’re not going to cram 50 units in there. It’s got to be something that works. Is it going to be owner-occupied? Is it going to be rental? We haven’t even started down that path yet, but we’re in the process of having a lot-line modification up at the property that’s on the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike, where the impound lot is. What we want to do is take a piece of that parcel that’s undisturbed and sell it to the CPF if we can and get that preserved for the Long Pond Greenbelt, and then move the DPW where they’re staging for PSEG. That would open the half-acre at the Emergency Services building. Otherwise, it’s going to be difficult to fit everything at that site. It’s going get a little tricky, but it would be good for the residents, too, because we’d be moving the DPW out of a residential area and putting it up where it belongs.

Q: Won’t there be a whole bunch of people who are going to come out and say, “It doesn’t belong here. This should just be a greenbelt”?

I haven’t talked to Dai Dayton of the Friends of the Long Pond Greenbelt recently, but we discussed this, what I just told you, and she was okay with it. I said to her, “Look at what’s going on there now. Wouldn’t it be better if we had a more manageable situation?” And she agreed.

The idea is to keep everybody together. Like I said, we have a common goal. I want it to be able to show that we can preserve open space, we can create affordable housing, we can support emergency services, we can all work together and achieve what we want. Of course, she wants to see what’s going on, and I want to keep her in the loop. Anything that we build up there, I want her input on it.

Q: And to go back to the current DPW site, you only have a half acre there. You can’t stuff people in there in shoe boxes. They have to have a little room to breathe, don’t they?

Yes, but right now there’s no affordable housing here. There’s nothing. So anything we do is going to create something. And like I said, we have to be realistic. We’re a small village. We have to be able to do our part, do what we can that’s going to fit in the village.

Q: Water quality is another thing you raised right after the election. Do you have specific plans for tackling that?

I just spent two hours going over plans to reestablish some of these projects that have community support for things like rain gardens. We have drainage that comes from the village that goes directly into the bay as runoff.

We have an area that we’ve metered to see how much rainwater goes through. We’ve tested it to see what bacteria and nitrates there are. And the rain gardens put in those areas will slow it down or get it to a more manageable point. And that’s the idea. A lot of these projects have already been funded by the CPF, and they were put on hold once we had an incident on Amherst Road.

There was a petition. People complained that it was dangerous or they thought the project was dangerous. They made it 18 inches instead of a foot because of the amount of water that it would handle from runoff that was coming down the street.

So we’re in the process of redoing plans and once we do that, we’ll show it to the community and see how they feel about it. But we have projects that are already supported around the village. There’s at least I think five or six of them that were ready to go that were stopped.

It’s a start. You’ve got to start somewhere. We have the data that shows how much the flow was and what the contaminants are and we’ll compare that after the gardens are put in.

Q: There’s been talk for I don’t know how many years about a comprehensive plan. What do you think? Do you see that as being something you’d like to tackle?

I think it has to be considered. And one of the parts of that is building a capital reserve so that once we identify problem areas or projects that we want to do, we have funds to leverage in order to do them. Right now it’s like whack-a-mole. A problem comes up and you say, “Okay, let’s allocate this money and let’s do this.” And then another one pops up.

Q: What about a comprehensive plan in terms of zoning?

But we’re in the process of trying to get a grant. We’ve talked about that. If you don’t come up with a plan or if you don’t try to tackle this, the longer you just push it down the road, the worse it’s going to get. So you’ve got to try to address it, get out in front of a lot of these issues.

Yeah. I mean, we also have the sewage treatment plant. What’s the future of that? That can get costly if you’ve got to change equipment or upgrade the system.

Aiden [Corish] has done a great job, but Aiden’s not going to be here forever. None of us are. So what are we leaving for the future? And then my big thing is, it’s a personal thing with me, are the roads, the sidewalks, the curbing, the basic infrastructure of the village.

All of us are stretched thin. We’re doing everything we can to maintain what we have and we’re being overrun. I mean, look at the DPW. It’s an effort just to pick up the garbage, take care of the custodial work, all these things. It’s just a never-ending process. And then you have 26,000 cars coming through the village, on a day. And how does that impact our infrastructure, our roads? So it’s a lot.

Q: Sag Harbor is well-known for having opinionated residents, some of whom don’t even live here. You know there is going to be criticism and people are going to have opinions. Are you prepared for this kind of onslaught?

Look, if you’re in a public office or any public position, you’re going to be open to criticism. And that’s fine. If somebody wants to present me with a case, or if they’re showing me the facts, and it changes my opinion, I mean, I’m not somebody who’s dug in, that’s going to say I’m 100-percent right all the time, because nobody is.

Q: Where do you see Sag Harbor in, say, 10 years, 20 years?

That’s a good question. I would like to see it not overdeveloped. I’d like to see it maintain its character. I mean, that’s what I would love to see. I think we have managed pretty well so far, but housing and traffic are problems that aren’t going to be easy to solve.