Riverhead Town is governed by a five-member Town Board comprising the town supervisor and four council members. Each is an equal voting member of the board under state law, but the town supervisor has certain additional powers and duties.
In addition to its duties as the town’s legislative and governing body, the Town Board sits as the governing body of the Riverhead Community Development Agency, the Riverhead Water District, Riverhead Sewer District, Calverton Sewer District, Riverhead Business Improvement District and Riverhead Ambulance District.
Town Supervisor
Term: Two years
Salary: $115,148
The town supervisor is a voting member of the Town Board. In addition, the supervisor acts as treasurer of the town, responsible for custody of funds and for the financial records and books of the town. The supervisor is responsible for filing annual financial reports and for preparing the tentative budget for each fiscal year.
The town supervisor is also the commissioner of the town police department.
The town supervisor presides over all meetings of the Town Board, and of the Community Development Agency and governing bodies of various town districts for which the Town Board is responsible.
In addition to the powers and duties of the town supervisor spelled out by state law, the Town Board has delegated to the town supervisor the powers and duties required for the day-to-day administration and supervision of all town and special district facilities and employees.
Angela De Vito (D)
Angela De Vito of South Jamesport is a 23-year resident of Riverhead who has been active in the community with the the Jamesport-South Jamesport Civic Association, has served on various town advisory committees (handicapped, animal shelter, assisted living) and on the Riverhead Anti-Bias Task Force; she is a past member of the board of directors of the Riverhead Industrial Development Agency. She is a volunteer with the Church of the Harvest food pantry, is a member of the board of directors of Rise Life Services and past member of the board of directors of the Council for the Vail-Leavitt Music Hall. She is also a founding member of the EPCAL Watch Coalition.
De Vito has a background in the field of labor, occupational safety and health. She works as a labor specialist with the Suffolk County Department of Labor, a position she’s held for nine years. Prior to that, she worked for 12 years as the director of workforce development with the Building and Construction Trades Council of Nassau & Suffolk.
She has a master’s degree in public health and is a certified industrial hygienist and certified OSHA instructor.
This is De Vito’s second run for town supervisor. She mounted an unsuccessful campaign in 2013, challenging then-incumbent Sean Walter.
De Vito has made getting out of the EPCAL deal with CAT/Triple Five a central tenet of her campaign platform. She says the town should pursue the 50-lot subdivision it has already started, and should consider entering into land leases for the individual lots, rather than selling them. She is opposed to transferring the runways or otherwise relinquishing control of them. She is opposed to allowing any air cargo at the EPCAL site.
She argues that the Town Board’s recent opposition to the EPCAL deal is a cynical election season about-face aimed at appeasing voters who rose up in opposition to CAT’s plans for air cargo and mega-warehouses at the EPCAL site.
DeVito believes the town’s zoning allows for too much warehouse development — a potential 15 million square feet, she says —and should be scaled back. The code must also be updated to address modern warehouse uses, such as logistics and distribution centers.
She supports a moratorium while the comprehensive plan update is underway. She does not support exempting existing development proposals from moratoriums while the comp plan is underway, or from new zoning that would implement the comp plan.
De Vito says the town should use conservation easements to preserve farmland at risk for development and should also demand more farmland preservation funding from the county to purchase development rights. She argues that the county is “sitting on” a lot of Community Preservation Fund revenues. She says she has reservations about changing some of the sending and receiving areas in the hope of boosting the transfer of development rights program, which the comp plan steering committee is looking at.
De Vito advocates for the dissolution of the Riverhead Industrial Development Agency. She dismisses worries about the county IDA operating in Riverhead as “fear-mongering,” and argues that the county IDA is not going to harm Riverhead. It has not hurt the other towns where it operates, she says. She calls for the Riverhead IDA to be audited by the State Comptroller.
Read the transcript of RiverheadLOCAL’s interview with De Vito.
Timothy Hubbard (R)
Tim Hubbard is a lifelong resident of Aquebogue.
He is a town council member, a position he was elected to in 2015. His second term as a council member expires Dec. 31. He chose not to seek a third term and to run instead for town supervisor, which he says he considers a “natural progression.”
Hubbard is a retired Riverhead Town Police detective and served on the town police force 32 years before his retirement in 2014. He was a member of the department’s street crime unit and was the commanding officer of the Juvenile Aid Bureau.
He is also a past member of the Riverhead Board of Education.
Hubbard is a graduate of Riverhead High School and studied criminal justice at Suffolk County Community College.
He was honored by the Riverhead News-Review with an educator of the year award and named member of the year by the Riverhead PBA and person of the year by Suffolk County Lacrosse.
Hubbard is married and the father of five children and the grandfather of two.
Hubbard says he’s always been opposed to the EPCAL contract of sale with Calverton Aviation & Technology. He points to his vote against authorizing the contract in December 2017, which he said was based in part on the two runways being included in the sale and the 1,000 environmentally sensitive acres being included in the sale. “To me, it wasn’t a good deal,” he said.
Hubbard cast the deciding vote in favor of finding CAT/Triple Five “qualified and eligible” in November 2018, but says “that was a different vote” and “a different decision” than the vote on the contract the year before. The “qualified and eligible” determination allowed the deal to move forward, requiring then-supervisor Laura Jens-Smith to sign the contract of sale.
Hubbard says he will work to change the zoning at the site so that it clearly prohibits any commercial airport, jetport or cargo port. He says he believes runway uses should be limited to only the runway’s current uses and those allowed under the first reuse plan for the site, which he said were restricted to testing planes and flying in parts for manufacturing activities in the industrial park.
Hubbard and the rest of the Town Board voted on Oct. 24 to declare the contract with CAT null and void. He says he stands firm in defending that decision in court, if it comes to that.
Hubbard says the town’s zoning code should be revised to update its definition of “warehouse” to account for logistics and distribution centers. He said he does not think large logistics/distribution centers should be developed outside of the EPCAL site.
“The only way you could sell me on a logistics center is if it backed right up to the (Long Island) Expressway, and the entrance and exit were right to the expressway,” Hubbard said.
He says he would also favor reducing the amount of industrially zoned land in the town, he said.
Hubbard has twice sponsored moratorium legislation that would halt development of logistics and distribution centers, as well as battery energy storage facilities. His initial proposal did not garner majority support to hold a public hearing. His second try had support for public hearings, which were held this month. The legislation has not been acted on.
Read the transcript of RiverheadLOCAL’s interview with Tim Hubbard.
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