Jerry Larsen Elected Mayor In East Hampton; Newcomers Minardi, Melendez Oust Incumbents In Sweep

Jerry Larsen was elected mayor of East Hampton Village on Tuesday night, and his NewTown Party running mates, Chris Minardi and Sandra Melendez, captured both of the trustee seats in a sweeping landslide election driven primarily by absentee ballots.

Mr. Larsen received 453 votes, besting veteran Village Trustee Barbara Borsack’s 271 and Trustee Arthur Graham’s 121.

Mr. Minardi, who at age 44 will become the youngest Village Board member in decades, was the top vote-getter in the election, with 467 votes for trustee. Ms. Melendez received 388.

Ray Harden, who was appointed to the Village Board earlier this summer and was running with Ms. Borsack on the Elms Party ticket, received 311 votes, and interim Mayor Richard Lawler, who was running to retain a trustee seat he has held since 2007, received 245. Mr. Graham’s Fish Hooks Party running mate, David Driscoll, received 181 votes.

Mr. Larsen, the village’s former chief of police, created the NewTown Party around his candidacy two years ago, first recruiting Ms. Melendez, a local attorney, and, more recently, Mr. Minardi, a title insurer and lifeguard, to ride the coattails of his massive — by village election standards — fundraising and campaign organization.

With a professional campaign manager on staff for nearly two years, a $100,000-plus war chest and a strategy focused on hosting dozens of free meet-and-greet gatherings, appeals to the businesses community, and a broad absentee ballot ferrying operation targeting second-home owners, the party upended the norms of a village campaign and rode the results to a landslide.

The absentee ballot effort, in particular, appeared to pay major dividends. Mr. Larsen and his running mates were trailing the three Elms Party candidates by a wide margin after the votes cast in person on Tuesday via voting machines at the Emergency Services Building were tallied.

But Mr. Larsen, the former village police chief who had raised and spent more than $100,000 on the campaign, along with more than $80,000 to help local food pantries, had said on Monday that he knew his supporters accounted for the bulk of the nearly 500 absentee ballots that had been received by the village. As the mailed-in envelopes were opened late on Tuesday night, his ticket shot past Ms. Borsack’s.

“As soon as I saw the machine results, I knew we had won, because I knew how many absentees we had,” Mr. Larsen said on Wednesday morning. “We had a major absentee ballot effort, and it worked.”

Mr. Larsen said his team had hand-delivered more than 350 absentee ballot applications, asking the residents to ask that the ballots be picked up and delivered by a designated agent — Mr. Larsen — and brought to the home, rather than sent by mail.

The party representatives then often waited while the resident filled out the ballot, or returned a couple of days later and picked them up, and delivered them to Village Hall.

Mr. Larsen said the scheme had actually been even more complicated, until the coronavirus pandemic struck.

“With the COVID, it actually helped,” he said. “We had this whole FedEx setup planned for the second-home owners, but, as it turned out, of course, everyone was here.”

One of Mr. Larsen’s opponents, Arthur Graham, made an 11th-hour attempt to whittle down the NewTown Party’s foundation of support, challenging the legitimacy of the residency of dozens of voters at the polls on Tuesday. Mr. Larsen’s attorney, in turn, filed a request in state court demanding that the election results not be certified until a judge could rule on the status of the challenged votes.

Ultimately, Mr. Graham withdrew his challenges, and the NewTown Party withdrew its court filing.

Assuming there are no further challenges to the polling results, the new board majority can be sworn in at the end of the business day on Thursday, September 17, and will take their “seats” on the Village Board, in virtual form for the time being, for the village’s regularly scheduled meeting on Friday morning.

While Mr. Graham, who has two years left on his trustee term, will remain on the board, Ms. Borsack, who has been a village trustee for 20 years, will depart village government.

“I am grateful to the residents of East Hampton Village for allowing me the privilege to serve for these past almost 30 years on various boards and committees,” Ms. Borsack wrote in a concession statement on Wednesday morning. “It’s been an honor for me and I’m ready to now retire from public service and find new ways to serve my community.”

The new mayor said that he and his running mates will use their majority control of the board to hit the ground running.

He said that the first thing on the agenda will be working with restaurant owners to find ways to help them prepare for the coming winter under what are presumed to be continuing restrictions on the density of seating allowed inside buildings.

“We need to find a way to assist them — but I’m not sure what that means,” he said. “Maybe we’ll allow them to a tent up over their outside space so they can continue to use that as we get into the cold weather. We’ll see. We are going to be meeting with them to talk about that kind of thing, because that is going to be a pressing issue.”