The case for term limits

Last August, on stage at the Suffolk Theater, as a candidate for Town Board, I was witness to the rarest of moments in a Riverhead political debate: Everyone agreed.

The question was term limits. I had proposed them during my quixotic primary campaign for the board and the idea was quickly embraced by both my opponents, Council members John Dunleavy and Jodi Giglio. I remember commenting at the time, that while a majority of the board agreed with me, term limits remained a good idea that had yet to be proposed. John and Jodi won the primary. I got beat like a drum.

In the fall of last year, Councilman Jim Wooten appeared on WRIV and said he too was for term limits. During his campaign for re-election Supervisor Sean Walter announced he was all for term limits. Now, if you’re scoring at home, that’s four out of the five Council members. So it would seem our board is apparently nearly unanimous in its support of term limits. Hurray! Change is coming to Riverhead. Well, maybe not so much. You see, in government, it is one thing to get everyone to agree; it is an other to actually enact legislation.

Right now, term limits are kind of like diet, exercise and flossing. Actions everyone agrees are good for us but kind of hard to actually undertake.

In Suffolk, we have bred an eternal ruling class. The “ins”, seem permanently “in”. The “outs” don’t have a chance. Here, in the highest taxed county in the land, literally 99% of incumbents win. Not because they’re doing a great job, they just happen to be the people you recognize in the voting booth. Local campaigns revolve around money that is easily raised by incumbents and tough to come by for challengers and that money goes to perpetuate the same ole, same ole. It’s the same familiar names, the same families, the same tired choices.

Our founding fathers knew, they created this government to be one where citizen legislators would go from farm to office and back to the farm again, yet, today our governing class gets elected and stays elected. Modern day legislators retire with hefty public pensions and often more than one. Officials who look forward to kind of lucrative retirement and lifetime employment, worry more about their fortune than yours. Their prime objective is self perpetuation and not your concerns. They become out of touch, stale and complacent.

People often run for office to do the right thing and to enact their ideals but when politics becomes a career, the safety of the system slowly engulfs them. Each day they sell away a little piece of themselves planning for a comfortable financial future, that’s why milk tastes better when it has a shelf life. New candidates never emerge because it’s too hard to beat the impenetrable system, remember it’s never good for a sport when only one team can win.

Term limits allow fresh faces to rise and new voices to be heard. A new crop of legislators brings the promise of energy and new ideas.

This is a historic moment. There appears to be consensus to bring term limits to Riverhead. Let’s strike while the iron is hot.

Anthony Coates was a candidate for Riverhead Town Board in 2013 in the Republican party primary. He lives in Riverhead.

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