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Village of Westhampton Mayor Maria Moore
Westhampton Beach Village Mayor Maria Moore likes to talk about the big whiteboard she has in her office to keep track of various issues and endeavors afoot in the village — and agrees that she’s going to need an even bigger one if she’s elected as Southampton Town supervisor on November 7.
Moore has been leading a village with an annual budget in the $12 million range for the past nine years and is hoping to take the top spot in Southampton Town, whose annual budgets are typically about 10 times that amount.
But she’s ready to make the leap, Moore said, noting that the village and town face similar issues, if at different scales, “the big one being water quality,” as she highlighted her successful effort to secure multi-source funding to fix the village’s chronic drainage and sewerage issues, now largely resolved thanks to $19 million and a lot of arm-twisting.
“I have developed a lot of skills and knowledge over the past nine years,” said Moore, who worked as a lawyer in the banking industry in New York City — she commuted from the South Fork — before getting into local politics.
There were stops along the way that provided Moore with a grounding in some of the toughest local issues, including working as a longtime coordinator on the board at Maureen’s Haven, an outreach organization to assist local unhoused people get on their feet and into a home.
As mayor, she said that “each term is a distinct two-year opportunity to get as much done as possible” and that she’s never taken her position for granted.
“I try to make every day count,” she said.
Moore is a Democrat but stressed that in her Westhampton Beach races candidates don’t run on traditional party lines. Hers was Progress for Westhampton Beach, and she believes she’s made good on that by “collaboratively working to get things done” in an environment where other elected officials, refreshingly enough, “don’t even know each other’s politics.”
Moore believes this will help her achieve similar, if scaled-up goals in Southampton Town around water quality, affordable housing, traffic, and other top-of-mind issues among voters here.
“I know that the town is more political, but even at the town level, we can agree on what the issues are,” she said. “We need solutions for traffic, we need to be very mindful of the aquifer, and we need to put differences aside to take steps forward.”
In conversation, Moore doesn’t come off so much as soft-spoken in her personal demeanor but as someone who is highly grounded and down-to-earth. “I am more of an analytical person,” she said. “I like to have the facts in front of us.” Moore highlights that her way of doing business is to “approach things in a thoughtful manner, rather than in panic mode or in reactive mode.”
Her near-decade of local service and training in dealing with various village agencies and personnel has, she said, served her well as an executive now seeking to expand her commitment to service to a larger constituency.
“It’s not my nature to be pushy,” said Moore, “but if there is something I know has to be done — I’ll do it.”
