Meet the New Southampton Town Trustees, Not the Same as the Old Trustees

In an election cycle in which none of Southampton Town’s top offices had competitive races, the most stunning and dramatic result of the vote last week landed on the race farthest down the ballot.

The Democratic Party’s sweep of all five seats on the Board of Trustees of the Freeholders and Commonality of the Town of Southampton — better known as the Southampton Town Trustees — was almost universally shocking, even to the victors, and concerning to many as the board steeped in the maritime history of the town stands to lose decades of institutional and experiential knowledge come January.

When Trustee Edward Warner Jr. — who has been a Town Trustee for 19 years and succeeded his father, who was a Trustee for 27 years prior — and Trustee Chip Maran depart the board in January, it will be the first time perhaps in centuries, if not ever, that the 340-year-old board will not a have a working bayman in one of its seats.

Also leaving in January will be Scott Horowitz, who has been a Trustee for 12 years and is the board’s current president. Horowitz shepherded the Trustees through the process of establishing their own tax line, and financial independence, but also the legal and accounting complications that comes with it.

The Democratic candidates who swept to resounding victories last week included just two incumbents, Joe McLoughlin and Matt Parsons, mounting their first reelection campaigns since joining the board at the start of last year.

They will be joined by three first-time public officer holders: Jimmy Mack, Hannah Pell-O’Farrell and Sara Topping.

Though newcomers to elected office, all three have direct familial connections to the Town Trustees’ orbit.

Pell-O’Farrell’s father is Councilman Bill Pell, who was a member of the Town Trustees for 14 years before being elected to the Town Board two years ago. Topping’s husband, Peter, is executive director of Peconic Baykeeper, the maritime water quality and environmental advocacy nonprofit. And Mack’s brother, Billy, is co-owner of First Coastal Corporation, the Westhampton-based consulting company that works extensively with the Town Trustees on erosion control applications for waterfront homeowners and also represents Southampton Town to the federal Fire Island to Montauk Point Reformulation project.

For the newcomers and the now elder-statesmen sophomore Town Trustees, the realization that they are the proverbial “dog who has caught the car” took almost no time to sink in.

“It’s a lot of institutional knowledge that Scott and Ed have, I’m well aware of that,” Hannah Pell-O’Farrell said this week of the veterans displaced by the Democrats’ upset victories last week. “I’ve spoken to Scott Horowitz already about the projects he’s been working on, and I hope that we can keep that line of communication open. Scott and Ed worked so hard for so many years, I don’t want their knowledge to just be lost, and Scott said he would be happy to continue to be a resource.”

Topping said that she visited the Town Trustees office in Hampton Bays on Monday morning and met with the staff, who she said will be even more integral than they already are while the new Trustees and the board’s leadership get up to speed.

“Like all new jobs, it’s going to be a lot of new information in a short amount of time,” Topping said. “Obviously it feels like a lot of knowledge is being lost. But they have a lot of that staff has been there for a significant amount of time and we’ll be relying on them a lot at first.

“It’s going to be a lot and it’s going to be hard work, but I’m ready for it,” she added. “Thankfully, the current Trustees have done a lot to set a lot of things up for the next generation.”

Parsons, who said he expects to take over as the Town Trustees’ president when the new board is sworn in, said that the learning curve for the new board members and for himself and McLoughlin taking over as the board’s leadership, will have to be very steep — and even more so because all five members of the board will have to run for reelection again next fall as the town shifts its elections from odd- to even-numbered years.

“We will have three people who are brand new to the Trustees and, I can tell you from experience that campaigning to be on the Trustees and being on the Trustees are very different worlds — so there will be some challenges,” he said.

“But we’ve already had some great meetings, explaining some of the roles, personalities, legal cases and the day-to-day issues and we have an amazing office staff that will still be there on January 3. Joe Lombardo will be initiating the three of them into the legal basis that the Trustees stand on, and we’ll all do our best to teach them the Trustees’ culture, just like was done with me and Joe two years ago.”

“We are cautiously excited,” he said.

Parsons said that longtime legislative secretary Jessica Feldman and the Trustees environmental analyst, James Duryea, will be relied on heavily and that as he takes over the helm of the Trustees he expects to move things forward “much more slowly and deliberately” with day-to-day business like permitting applications for docks and bulkheads, as the new board gets its feet under it.

Several major projects are already in the works and will proceed apace, Parsons said, a testament to the work of the current Trustees, especially Horowitz and Warner.

He also hinted at some new projects to improve water quality in the town’s freshwater bodies that he hopes to unveil early in the new term.

The departing veterans said that while the election loss stings, they are proud to be able to say that they will be handing the new Trustees an organization that is functioning more productively and smoothly than it ever has.

“Scott and Chip and I set that board up pretty well, it will be able to run for at least three to four months on autopilot and you won’t even have to touch the wheel,” Warner said with a chuckle at the maritime metaphor.

“That being said, Matt and Joe are going to have a rude awakening coming. They are going to have to be there pretty much every day,” he added. “The Trustees budget has to be kept an eye on all the time. There’s a lot of things that need to be managed. There’s a lot of projects happening — Speonk Shores canal bulkhead is coming up, the Mill Creek boat ramp, Peconic Road is getting a new ramp, that is a major one, the dredging projects, and all the day-to-day stuff that comes up all the time.”

Horowitz and Warner lauded the strides they’ve made in recent years modernizing the Trustees as a board and as a municipality, settling a number of long-running legal fights over beach access and a property dispute in West Hampton Dunes, cementing permits with the state for the regular opening of the Mecox Cut.

“We have worked for over a decade to get that board on stable ground financially and organizationally. I definitely feel good about that,” Horowitz said. “From the Ponquogue fishing pier, to the Lake Agawam shoreline project and the other facilities, we took a lot of things that were liabilities and turned them into assets.”

Neither Warner nor Horowitz would say whether they would run again in the snap election turnaround next year, but both said it was something they will weigh come the new year.

But the outgoing board president also lamented that party politics had seemed to finally overwhelm the Town Trustees, a panel that he said had always worked hard to keep political parties and ideologies out of its election campaigns, in favor of the sort of experience and understanding of the town’s waterways necessary to navigate the permitting and duties of the Town Trustees role responsibly.

“This is national politics overriding our local community issues,” Horowitz said. “It’s disappointing that people don’t recognize, or ignore, the efforts people put in for the community and come out and make decisions on a partisan basis.

“I feel like we had a board that was functioning phenomenally — and to just wreck it for the sake of politics is upsetting to me.”