Thursday evening at the Riley Avenue School was the hottest ticket in Riverhead, as residents from Jamesport to downtown to Wading River packed into the auditorium to hear from all six candidates running for Town Supervisor and Town Board this November.
Pictured Above: (l-r) Riverhead Town Board Candidates (l-r) Ken Rothwell (R), Mark Woolley (D), Bob Kern (R) and Kevin Shea (D)
The forum, sponsored by the Greater Calverton Civic Association and the Wading River Civic Association, was the only one of three civic association-sponsored forums the Republican incumbents agreed to attend this election season.
Nearly 100 residents braved the cold and wind to hear what the candidates had to say.
Incumbent one-term Republican Town Supervisor Tim Hubbard, a former Town councilman and Riverhead Town Police Detective, had said he didn’t believe forums held by the Greater Jamesport and Heart of Riverhead civic associations would be fair, because their leadership included people active in town Democratic politics, prompting his slate to skip the forums.
His running mates are Councilman Bob Kern, a former president of the Riverhead Chamber of Commerce and the longtime operations manager at Martha Clara Vineyards, and Councilman Ken Rothwell, director of several local funeral homes and a volunteer firefighter with the Wading River Fire Department.
Pastor Jerry Halpin of the North Shore Christian Church is running for Supervisor on the Democratic line. His running mates for Town Board are retired New York City firefighter Kevin Shea and Mark Woolley, a Riverhead native and longtime congressional staffer, mostly for Republican congressmen.
Town Board Talk
Wading River Civic Association President Sid Bail grilled the Town Board candidates for the first hour of the forum. The incumbents and challengers had sharply contrasting views on issues ranging from downtown redevelopment to taxes to code enforcement and cannabis shops.
Mr. Woolley, whose bombastic style and social media presence criticizing the current board’s decisions has made waves this election season, was first out the gate to slam the town’s plan to redevelop downtown with a new town square and an adjacent five-story hotel.
“Goodbye Craft’D,” he said of a popular bar in a town-owned building whose lease was condemned in order to tear down the building for the hotel construction. “There will be nothing else for us, just for tourists. You’re not going to be able to see the river. That’s going to be blocked out, and probably part of the sun.”
He added that, even though much of the project will be paid for with grant money, “that’s still tax dollars, not monopoly money.”
He also said the town was not working with the Army Corps of Engineers to mitigate the flooding there, after he had worked as former Congressman Lee Zeldin’s District Director to bring the agency in to study the flooding.
The Republican candidates countered that assertion.
“Look at the plan. It’s predicated on flood mitigation. That’s the first thing that was taken into consideration,” said Mr. Kern. “A lot of people I talk to don’t want a hotel. Why would they? The only time you want a hotel is when you travel somewhere. If you talk to the hotels, they’re packed.”
He added that J. Petrocelli Contracting, chosen to be the town’s Master Developer for the Town Square project, should “absolutely” be the developer of the project. Joe Petrocelli’s construction companies have been involved with the redevelopment of much of East Main Street, including the Hyatt Place hotel and the Long Island Aquarium.
“Should we be taking a risk on someone we don’t know?” asked Mr. Kern. “That would be reckless.”
Mr. Rothwell agreed.
“It is a flood mitigation project. It is a revitalization, and it becomes an activation point” for downtown, he said, adding that the town has gotten $58 million in grant funding for the project.
Mr. Shea said that, as a firefighter, he’s glad the downtown plan is focusing on “mitigating possible disaster,” but “when we were talking about the vision people had about how the city was going to appear, I don’t recall the idea of having more apartments was part of it,” and that he doesn’t think “a bland, anywhere hotel that’s five stories high” really has the “heritage look to it that people want to come for.”
On increasing the town’s tax base, Mr. Woolley criticized the town’s handling of the sale of property at EPCAL, which is mired in litigation after the town nullified a deal with its latest suitor in 2023.
“It’s tied up in litigation, which this board has mishandled miserably, but it’s still this thing we got from the Navy for a buck back in 1988,” he said, adding that he had been working, while serving as Mr. Zeldin’s District Director, on setting up an air traffic controller station, known as Tracon there, which would provide support for other nearby airports and could have employed 900 people.
Mr. Rothwell said he and Mr. Kern had inherited the EPCAL contract from former Town Supervisor Laura Jens-Smith, a Democrat.
Ms. Jens-Smith had actually been swept into office in 2018 criticizing the original deal, which had been inked by her predecessor, Sean Walter, a Republican.
Mr. Rothwell said that, when the courts make a decision on the case, “you’re going to need business people at the helm” of town government.
He added that the town’s Industrial Development Agency had brought more than $2.2 million into town coffers in 2023 by giving businesses “incentives to come and settle in Riverhead.”
On Riverhead’s stance on local zoning rules that strictly regulate where cannabis dispensaries can be located, over which Riverhead and Southampton towns plan to sue New York State, the incumbents also said they had inherited Riverhead’s decision to opt in to allowing cannabis dispensaries.
Mr. Rothwell said he had voted to opt out of allowing cannabis shops, but he was overruled in a 3-2 vote.
“New York is a home rule state. If we allow the state to make rules in our town, we are no longer a home rule state,” said Mr. Kern, adding that he thinks market factors will also dictate how many cannabis businesses can make it here.
“I hear that if we do not sue the state, there will be a proliferation of cannabis shops. Do I think 100 could make it in Riverhead? No,” he said. “I don’t think 100 pizza places could make it. I’ve looked at the Shinnecock Nation. They have several of them. Are there long lines? The answer is no.”
Mr. Woolley said the town hadn’t read the fine print in the New York State law.
“You never should have opted into this thing,” he said. “They heard that Babylon made $8 million bucks (in tax revenue from cannabis). That’s not happening. We’re not getting that result.”
“We’re gonna file another lawsuit with this,” he said. “Everything is lawsuits. Get it together. These guys are spending money that we don’t have.”
Mr. Shea said he would want to hear how the people of Riverhead feel about the dispensaries, and added that there is someone in every dispensary checking IDs to make sure people who enter the store are of age, and the town should consider the tax revenue.
“Is that a good thing? Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t,” he said. “I would rather just listen to my town say if this is what they want.”
On how to stop businesses from violating the town code, the incumbents defended their record, and the challengers said more needs to be done.
“We don’t overpay the employees in our town,” said Mr. Kern. “We have lost people we trained in code enforcement to towns that pay more. The people that stuck around, kudos to them.”
Mr. Rothwell added that money from rental permits is being used to hire code enforcement officers.
“We need more code enforcement officers,” said Mr. Woolley. “We need to set aside funding. We lost, in a fire, five individuals. That should never have happened. In order to find that money, we need a forensic audit of the budget.”
On how to support farms and farmers, Mr. Woolley said he’d been working with farmers since his time as a congressional district director, meeting regularly with the Long Island Farm Bureau and helping to get work visas. He said farmers are telling him now that the town’s transfer of development rights program is broken and needs to be fixed.
“They need to tell us what needs to be done, because they’re the ones farming the land,” he said, adding that, in 2024, the town tried to “ram through” an ‘agritourism resort’ code that he characterized as “developers running amok in town hall.”
Mr. Kern said he had been on the board of the Farm Bureau and on the town’s agricultural advisory committee, which he said has been the engine driving code that protects farmers. He added that farmers should be given more leeway to process their crops on their farms, as vineyards can do when making wine.
Mr. Rothwell ticked off several hundreds of acres of farmland preserved while he was on the board, but said that “every acre we preserve comes off the tax rolls,” adding that the revenue lost should be made up with businesses that provide “high tech jobs.”
On the town providing opportunities for first-time homebuyers, Mr. Woolley said he lives in Glenwood, a 55+ mobile home park, and he would like the town to make it easier to build manufactured or modular homes for younger people.
Mr. Rothwell said Riverhead is doing its share to provide affordable housing, with around 40 percent of housing downtown considered affordable.
Mr. Shea said much of the housing he’s seen that’s deemed “affordable” is actually not affordable to people living in Riverhead.
Mr. Kern said he would like to see the town reduce the minimum square footage for a house, which is currently 1,200 square feet.
On Leadership at the Top
Greater Calverton Civic Association President Toqui Terchun lobbed question after question at the Town Supervisor candidates.
On the town piercing the state-mandated 2 percent tax cap, with a tax levy increase of 7.9 percent this year— the largest increase since the cap was put in place in 2012, Ms. Terchun asked what could be done to stop piercing the cap in the future.
Mr. Hubbard said pension increases, health insurance and salary increases would pierce the tax cap “without me ordering one more pencil.”
“Look at the budget. Educate yourself. The cost of living has gone up tremendously,” he said. “Everybody knows that. You know how expensive everything is.”
He added that he had cut $600,000 of needed equipment out of the budget, and that the average house with a value of $735,000 would see a tax increase of $22 per month. He added that people who are making decisions about whether to buy medications or food are not likely living in a house worth $735,000.
“Our police department is up to 100 sworn officers,” he said. “In a safe town, you’re getting a good bargain.”
Mr. Halpin said that, for the past 10 years, the town had “not done enough to generate income that would lower the tax base to our homes…. They’ve been kicking the can down the road.”
On the costs associated with the relocation of Town Hall to an office building on Second Street — a $20 million purchase — Mr. Halpin said the town “overbought” that property and is borrowing more money to renovate the building, “continuing to dig ourselves a deeper hole.”
“I don’t have Suffolk County recorded judgements against me,” he said, referencing materials he’d found documenting Mr. Hubbard’s personal finances. “I do have a track record of being a good steward of a dollar.”
Mr. Hubbard said the town had gotten an estimate of $31 million dollars to build a much-needed new justice court, and, instead, had purchased the Second Street building and is renovating the former Town Hall building for use as a justice court, at a cost of $6 million — at a total cost of $26 million.
“To me that makes all the sense in the world. That’s smart money and smart business where I come from,” he said.
On whether the town’s Industrial Development Agency, which provides tax incentives for businesses to locate in Riverhead, should be reformed, the two couldn’t differ more.
“The Riverhead IDA is its own entity. The Town Board has no control over how they vote and what they do…. By law, we can’t tell them what to do,” said Mr. Hubbard, adding that, of the 16,500 parcels of land in the town, 21 receive IDA benefits. He added that the businesses receiving those benefits have fostered 1,362 new jobs.
“People say ‘I don’t get a tax break on my home,’ but the IDA wasn’t designed to work for residential,” he said. “It was designed to bring in business and create jobs. Everybody who comes in for a tax break, they don’t all get it, by any means.”
Mr. Halpin said the Town Board does have control over who is appointed to the IDA.
“The IDA was created for blighted areas, to bring new styles of businesses and infuse that growth into that community,” he said, adding that he doesn’t believe that’s how it’s using its powers in Riverhead.
On the future of EPCAL, Mr. Halpin echoed Mr. Woolley’s endorsement of the Tracon idea, adding that there is money for Tracon in President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill.
“Tracon — that train left the building years ago. They lost the funding for that,” said Mr. Hubbard. “There is no Tracon and there is no funding for it.”
On what the future of waste management will be in Riverhead Town when the Brookhaven landfill completely closes at the end of 2027, both candiates said it’s not going to be pretty.
“It’s probably going to be trucked off-island,” said Mr. Hubbard. “It’s an expense everyone is going to have to pick up. It’s unfortunate, but it’s reality.”
“Our trash cannot become someone else’s problem,” said Mr. Halpin, adding that the situation echoes a recent problem Calverton residents were having with the dumping of yard waste on a former nursery property off of Youngs Avenue.
“That became a problem because you weren’t focusing on it, as the town’s leadership,” he said. “It became a huge problem. We need to make sure we’re not making our problem someone else’s problem.
On the agritourism resorts proposal, Ms. Terchun asked the candidates if they would commit to “dropping that matter altogether” if elected.
Mr. Halpin said agritourism has gotten a bad name, but “the biggest drawback to agritourism is the traffic. We need to work with farmers to make sure we have traffic flow patterns so they can be successful.”
Mr. Hubbard said that the agritourism resort proposal would have preserved 70 percent of properties and allow development on 30 percent.
“The town has preserved 17,000 acres of farmland, and there’s not any tax money coming in from any of that property,” he said. “If we preserved all 6,000 acres (of unprotected farmland), I would hate to tell you how much that would cost, because we wouldn’t have any tax base left.” he said.
“This has to be done. It’s the only way we’re going to be able to build more tax base and still preserve farmland,” he added. “The election has nothing to do with whether or not it will resurface.”
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