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Joseph McLoughlin
Joseph McLoughlin is a born-and-raised local who attended Southampton High School before getting a degree in communications at Iona College. He fell into the political life a few years ago when he was on the Southampton Village Planning Commission and a one-term Village Trustee.
He’s running for Southampton Town Trustee on the Democratic Party line at the encouragement of Ann Welker, who moved on from her role there to take a run at a Suffolk County Legislature seat this year. “She had asked me to run,” said McLoughlin, “and I happily obliged.”
His No. 1 issue is beach access, but water quality is, of course, not far behind.
“We have a lot of polluted water bodies,“ he said, owing to decades of poor wastewater management. “Our charge is the bottomlands,” said McLoughlin, “and if we get a tax line we can prioritize those issues and work with the community to get them more mitigated than had previously been done.
His “pet peeve,” said McLoughlin, is excessive development, and while the “Trustees have no jurisdiction over development, but is an interested party when it comes to the waterfront, where the Trustees should have some level of being consulted on those matters.”
And while most of the Town Board’s charge is those bottomlands, McLoughlin noted that the Trustees do have some upland responsibilities and that “the Trustees have to go outside their comfort zone and work with the town, work with town departments on these issues of shared jurisdiction.”
It may seem idealistic, McLoughlin admitted, but it’s time for the Board of Trustees and the Town Board to start working together. “We have a broken system,” he said, and one he’d like to do his part to fix.
