Riverhead Democrats oust party chair after last year’s landslide losses; former town supervisor leads slate of new party leadership

After Democratic voters ousted the incumbent party chairperson and elected 10 new members to the Riverhead Town Democratic Committee in the June party primary, the newly reconstituted committee on Tuesday elected Laura Jens-Smith as its chairperson and replaced all of its other officers.

The goal is to reinvigorate the party in advance of next year’s local elections, following landslide losses at the polls up and down the ticket in 2021 — a repeat of the Republican sweep in 2019, when political newcomer Yvette Aguiar won a stunning upset, defeating one-term supervisor Jens-Smith by nine percentage points.

Committee members elected Ellen Hoil of Riverhead as vice chair, Patrick Derenze of Jamesport as secretary and Maxine Kleedorfer of Baiting Hollow as treasurer. 

Another slate of officers, which included Josephine Makowski as chairperson, was nominated, but failed a vote, Jens-Smith said.

In an extremely unusual coordinated challenge to party committee leadership, Jens-Smith led 10 new committee members to victory in the June primary. One of the incumbent committee members who lost in the primary election was the committee chairperson, Mike Roth. Roth did not return a call seeking comment.

Riverhead’s Democratic party has historically lacked political power. After the retirement of Highway Superintendent George Woodson, longtime Town Clerk Diane Wilhelm is the only sitting Democrat to hold elected office in Riverhead. Her re-election bid went unchallenged last year. Republicans have an enrollment edge over Democrats of more than 1,400 registered voters, according to February 2022 election data.

“I think the committee has been stagnant for a while,” said Jens-Smith, who was elected to the committee in June. “And then there was a lack of meetings going on. So it, you know, became apparent that we weren’t winning elections. And there just was not a lot of energy.”

Jens-Smith, of Laurel, pointed to Southold as a model of how to reinvigorate Riverhead’s Democratic residents. Democratic candidates last year won six out of the seven key races in Southold, making history in a town that, similar to Riverhead, has been historically Republican.

Jens-Smith said the committee needs to engage with new voters to move the party forward.

“I think it involves identifying the Democrats that are here, communicating with them in a meaningful way, whether that’s through emails or Facebook, to engage,” she said. 

“Right now, in Riverhead, we have one-party rule. And we know how that’s working…we have a comprehensive plan that’s been sitting on the shelf. We have a huge amount of development that’s happening over in Calverton. The sale at EPCAL seems to be moving forward with little concern for the public’s input. And the Democrats need to work harder so that we don’t have one party rule here that ignores the community’s voice,” Jens-Smith said.

It is likely that many of the issues Jens-Smith raised — including the sale of town-owned land at the Calverton Enterprise Park, industrial development in Calverton and finalizing the comprehensive plan update — will gain approvals before the November 2023 election. Yet, she said that even though they don’t currently hold office, local Democrats need to be more engaged on important issues to counterbalance the “one-party rule” present on the Town Board, which she said is not listening to the community.

There hasn’t been a Democratic majority on the Town Board since 1998. The Riverhead GOP has held all five seats on the board for nearly all of the last decade, from 2010 until 2018 — when Jens-Smith and former Council Member Catherine Kent were sworn into office. After Jens-Smith’s loss to Republican newcomer Yvette Aguiar in 2019, Kent was the only Democrat on the board for two years. She chose not to seek re-election to the council seat and instead challenged Aguiar for supervisor last year, losing in a rout by Aguiar, who won 59% of the votes cast.

Though the party’s executive committee has changed, most of its members are not newcomers to local politics. Jens-Smith, as the town supervisor for two years and an occasional oppositional voice in Town Hall since her exit, has been one of the biggest figures in her party the last few years and assisted in last year’s Democratic campaigns. Hoil, now the vice chair, was herself a candidate for office in the party’s landslide loss last year, and is also a frequent critic of the current Town Board. Derenze was a member of Jens-Smith’s staff when she was town supervisor.

Asked how she would assure her fellow Democrats that the new executive committee will bring the changes necessary to win elections, Jens-Smith said the party will use “tried and true methods” of outreach to get people involved in the party.

“In order to have people to want to come out to vote, they need to feel engaged, they need to feel connected,” Jens-Smith said. “And I think that’s what the gist of all of this is, is to be more inclusive as a party.”

Among the winners of the primary election who took their seats in the committee Tuesday were winemaker and former town council candidate Juan Micieli-Martinez, and thespian and Riverhead School Board Trustee Colin Palmer. Two party committee members are elected at-large in each of Riverhead’s 22 election districts; party members are not required to run in the districts they live in, as long as they live in Riverhead Town. In total, seven election districts were contested in the June primary.

Jens-Smith said the new committee members who challenged sitting members were interested in getting involved with the party but felt “shut out” in the past.

“If people are having an issue and might want to see things change, you go through the democratic process to do it — and that’s what people did,” she said.

“My hope is that having gone through this process, which is really, you know, the American way of putting people in these positions, that the party will come together and work to make the party stronger,” Jens-Smith said. “I think the whole impetus of all of this is to have a stronger party in the Town of Riverhead, because it’s been far too long that we have not had a very strong voice here in the town.”

Micieli-Martinez, who voted for the new executive committee, said his vote was for “change within the party, and hopefully a new focus and an ability to better support candidates.”

Micieli-Martinez, a council candidate last year, said last year’s election effort could have used more “boots on the ground” from the committee.

“I don’t want to say that they didn’t do anything, because not that’s not the case at all,” he said.  “They did do things, but I think there could have been more done. And I think the results of the election showed that. The proof is in the vote tally, right?”

Micieli-Martinez, who worked with Jens-Smith during the last campaign, said she has the skills to create the “roadmap” that the committee’s leadership lacked last year.

“I got more guidance from her by far than anything from the party,” he said.

Marge Acevedo, a longtime member and longtime past chairperson of the committee, was one of the few committee members who survived a challenge to their seat in June’s primary. In phone call Friday, she declined comment on the committee’s new leadership.

“I support the Suffolk County leader, Rich Schaffer. He is my county leader and my loyalty is to Rich,” Acevedo said.

Schaffer, the town supervisor of Babylon Town, did not return a call seeking comment. In an email, county committee spokesperson Keith Davies said: “The Suffolk County Democratic Committee is excited about the election of new chair Laura Jens-Smith and looks forward to working with her and her new executive board to elect Democrats up and down the ballot in Riverhead.”