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Margaret Friedlander
Margaret Friedlander was born in Brooklyn, raised in New Jersey and has been a full-time Hampton Bays resident since just before the COVID pandemic in 2020 after buying a house here back in 1992. She’s a first-time candidate for Southampton Town Trustee who has been civically engaged here for decades and considers herself a resident, if not a local.
Friedlander is touting her experience as a businesswoman with more than two decades in global advertising and marketing as some of her selling points to become a Trustee. Her business career emphasized strategic collaborations and her various roles, including project manager, have put her in charge of budgets of up to $5 million. “The board,” she said, “should be a diverse board in terms of experience and skill sets.”
Friedlander was approached by the local Democratic Party to run for a Trustee seat this year, and after thinking about it for a minute, she decided to take her first political plunge into elected-official waters.
“I think I can make a meaningful difference and go beyond my hamlet of Hampton Bays as well as take my professional skill sets and amplify that,” said Friedlander. “I care. I think it’s important to do what I can as a resident of my community.”
Friedlander boasts of being among the first — if not the first — local to do some research on BESS facilities and raise a communitywide alarm that would eventually lead the Town Board to enact a six-month moratorium on the approval of controversial battery storage facilities, after paving the way for their introduction in the town via a change in zoning to accommodate the fright-inducing facilities.
She has done her homework on Trustee issues too, she said, and is fully aware of the local intrigue surrounding the Trustee push for a new tax-line status with the state that would provide a direct budget to the Trustees instead of having one approved by the Town Board every year. She’s stressing “intelligent management and reporting on the tax line” as it lurches toward implementation next year and suggested greater coordination between the Trustees and the Town Board that currently exists — encouraging the pursuit of “sound policy” over the posturing that currently dominates Town Board-Trustee public interactions.
“I’m not a silver-spooner,” said Friedlander, who is running on the Democratic line. She emphasized a tenacious work ethic and zeal for research as key motivators and selling points behind her push to become a Trustee and pierce what she called a “super-secret all-boys system” that she has a “big issue with” (departing Trustee Ann Welker notwithstanding).
