Hubbard closes civic roundtable meetings to press, citing need for candid discussion

Riverhead Supervisor Tim Hubbard has excluded the press and the public from certain meetings at Town Hall because, he said, their presence deters people from speaking candidly and hinders discussion.

Hubbard has barred the public and press from attending quarterly civic roundtable meetings, where he fields questions and concerns from local civic leaders in the third floor conference room at town hall. 

Civic roundtable meetings were open to the public during Walter and Jens-Smith administrations; they were canceled during the administration of Hubbard’s predecessor, Yvette Aguiar. Reinstating the meetings was one of several initiatives Hubbard announced during his inaugural address to improve communication between Riverhead residents and their local government. 

The civic roundtables are “a meeting for me and they’re a meeting for the civic people,” the supervisor said in an interview last week. “And if we have the press there we may not get everything out of the people that they want to say if the press wasn’t there.”

Hubbard said people “clam up” when the press is at a meeting. The media hears something at a meeting and “the next day it’s a headline, and it’s not really ready for a headline yet,” the supervisor said. 

“I haven’t heard that at all,“ Wading River Civic Association President Sid Bail said. “I think some people are afraid to speak candidly to the Town Board, because they’re afraid of the negative repercussions for… a civic group or particular group, and anything that rattles the cage of someone on the Town Board seems to be taken as a political assault.”

Bail and five other civic leaders interviewed for this article said the policy of excluding the press and the public was not discussed or agreed to in advance by their civic groups. Most said they didn’t know about the policy at all. 

“I’m surprised, and I’m embarrassed I didn’t know about it,” said Phil Barbato, the president of the Riverhead Neighborhood Preservation Coalition, a civic group that advocates for land preservation.

Almost all of the civic leaders said they don’t mind the press sitting in on the meetings. 

“We’re civic organizations. We are supposed to be representing the public. So why wouldn’t the public be allowed to hear what we have to say?” Barbato said.

Cindy Clifford, president of the Heart of Riverhead Civic Association, said “it would be valuable, probably, for the public to have the press included.” There are some topics raised by the civics that would have more attention paid to it by having the press in the meeting, she said. 

“Like in the case, for instance, of the Vail-Leavitt [Music Hall], I don’t think the community at large knows what’s going on with the Vail-Leavitt except that because the… Heart of Riverhead Civic members wanted to know, and some of them had written and not gotten a response, so I brought that to the table,” she said.

Clifford sent an email to her membership after the roundtable meeting with Hubbard’s answers to the questions she posed at the meeting. In the case of the Vail-Leavitt, the meeting revealed the town would look to sell the property to an outside group to manage it as a performing arts center, rather than hire a group to manage it. 

“The only reason that I can think that it might not be open just to whoever wants to come and sit down is to keep, like, some type of time constraint on it,” said Kelly McClinchy of Manorville, who has organized her neighborhood to lobby the town on environmental issues. Although McClinchy is not the leader of a civic group, she has been invited to and has attended the roundtable meetings.

A RiverheadLOCAL reporter attended Hubbard’s first civic roundtable meeting on March 12, 2024. (When asked whether policy changed since then, Hubbard said he didn’t recall a reporter attending the meeting.)

Last March, the supervisor explained his purpose for reinstating the meetings to the group assembled in the conference room. “I want to have an open communication with all the civics and it’s self-serving for me. But it’s helpful for me as supervisor to know what the needs of the people are,” Hubbard said. “Yes, we get phone calls, yes, we get letters, yes, we have people that show up. But each person here that runs their own civic is now the voice of whatever number of people you have in the civic. So that’s a great line of communication for me as a supervisor to have. Again, you’re the ears and a nose on the ground for me,” Hubbard said. That meeting lasted 1 hour and 23 minutes. It was cordial and the discussion was wide-ranging and friendly.

A RiverheadLOCAL reporter who tried to attend the civic roundtable meeting last month was asked to leave by Deputy Supervisor Devon Higgins. 

Toqui Terchun, the president of the Greater Calverton Civic Association, has a different view from others interviewed. Terchun said she was “uncomfortable” seeing a reporter at the civic roundtable meeting last month. 

“I don’t consider it a public meeting, and the media had not been a part of it for any of the supervisors that I’ve attended one for. So the oddity struck me,” she said. Terchun attended the March 2024 meeting on behalf of the Calverton Civic Association, but said she did not remember a reporter being there.

“I don’t know,” Terchun said, when asked whether the press and the public should be allowed in the meetings. “There are certain things where there are private meetings, right? That aren’t meant to be public — because it does add a flavor, right?”

Civic leaders said there is value having the roundtable discussions with Hubbard. The leaders said they are able to raise smaller, neighborhood-level issues with the supervisor that wouldn’t necessarily be something discussed at a Town Board meeting. 

“Holding the meetings, I think, are helpful for the civics, for communication to the administration,” said former Supervisor Laura Jens-Smith, the current president of the Greater Jamesport Civic Association. “But nothing we discuss is secretive or things that the public need not be aware of,” she said, because they’re matters of public concern.

Bail said the roundtable meetings with Hubbard have been a worthwhile endeavor so far. Civic roundtables during past administrations were held at irregular times and sometimes not worth attending, he said. Hubbard has been “attentive,” Bail said.

“Some of the council people… have been less enthusiastic about civic participation and civic points of view than what the supervisor appears to be,” Bail said. “So by not allowing the press there, that’s a compromise, I guess. That’s the condition that we have these things under.”

The civic roundtables aren’t the only committee meetings Hubbard said should be private. Meetings of the Citizen’s Cooperative Development Team, a group of residents created by Hubbard last year to help town officials plan the future of the Calverton Enterprise Park, are also private, Hubbard said. 

If there is a proposal for EPCAL “we can go through that, and we can look at it, and then we can weed out the crazies — because there’s a lot of them out there — and then present something that we could eventually maybe go to the town board with and say, ‘hey, look, this is what somebody wants to do up there,’” Hubbard said.

A resolution to officially create the committee and appoint members was tabled by the Town Board shortly after its members presented to the Town Board last July. Hubbard said the committee was never officially appointed by the Town Board because other members “don’t like the people” Hubbard put on it “and they don’t think I should be having conversations with them.” 

“And my argument right back at them is I’m definitely having conversations with them,” Hubbard said, “because I want to know what they’re thinking, and they need to know what I’m thinking. And together, we can work together on this.”

In the closed meetings “I’m learning, and we’re talking, we’re shooting ideas back and forth. No decisions are made,” Hubbard said. “They don’t have any voting power or anything like that. So it’s just a matter of, kind of sitting around the table like a coffee klatch and shooting ideas out.” 

The civic roundtable, the Citizen’s Cooperative Development Team and town advisory committees are not “public bodies” like the Town Board and Planning Board, and are therefore not required to abide by the state Open Meetings Law. The law ensures transparency in government, but does not apply to groups that give “recommendations or guidance which is purely advisory” Advisory committee meetings have traditionally been open to the public, though there is no rule in town law to require that they are; the Open Meetings Law gives a municipality the ability to impose rules for committees requiring greater public access than required by state law.

“The press can sometimes get out ahead of things, and sometimes that’s a good thing. In certain situations, it can be a good thing,” Hubbard said. “But more often than not, coming out of this building, it hampers a lot of people — what they’re trying to do.”

Pre-submission conferences — meetings in which developers meet with planning and town staff to discuss prospective projects — are one example, Hubbard said. According to town code, those meetings are required to be open, but had been closed to the public before last year. Hubbard said there has been a “big decline in the number of people coming in for” those meetings since they became open, because of the potential for the press to cover them.

“And that’s a shame, because that’s a great tool for [developers] to come in free of charge, talk to the people in the planning and building department and find out” what the developer needs to change before they make a formal application, Hubbard said.

In his inaugural address, Hubbard pledged that his administration would operate at “a level of transparency…that has not been seen before.” 

Hubbard has scheduled monthly work session discussions for board members to give reports on their committees — a promise he made in his inaugural address. He also said he would “encourage department heads to place more items for open discussion on the work session agenda.”

In a Town Board meeting last September, Hubbard said the current Town Board was “the most transparent board you have seen… probably in your lifetime, or since you’ve been a Riverhead resident,” after being criticized by a resident for lacking transparency.