The East Hampton Town Board election in November is an unexpected referendum on development in this community. Is the development we’ve seen over the past decade what we want, or do we favor the kind of balanced restraint that East Hampton Town Board member Cate Rogers has been advancing?
Rogers, who is running for reelection, has made sustainability and resilience of both our natural resources and community — and, most importantly, the livability and quality of life for local people — a focus of her service on the board. She favors studied, careful moderation and is arguably the most knowledgeable and strongest environmentalist voice on the board.
Rogers’s chief challenger is Republican J.P. Foster. He has vowed to reverse one of her signature accomplishments, the much researched and discussed zoning code modulation of maximum allowable house sizes across town.
Foster has called the code change — which was driven by a sustained community outcry to protect neighborhoods and our environment — an “overreach” that ignored key stakeholders and hurts local families. Supporters of this reduction, hundreds of whom spoke at public hearings and sent comments to the Town Board, are “wrong,” he said.
Never mind that the code change was the result of a 22-month-long process, accounting for 18 public work sessions and public hearings, where comments ran 4-to-1 in favor.
Foster has deep support in the building trades, real estate brokerages and development interests, the South Fork’s chief economic and power base. Reflecting their own business interests, those who work in that broad industry opposed the code change and, it merits mentioning, succeeded during the public process in blocking meaningful proposals and also winning limits to the eventual reductions.
This race offers a stark contrast: Between Foster, a popular local with roots that go back to the 1600s and a record of work and volunteerism in public service (president of the school board, chief of the 911 system, chairman of the LTV board), who favors the development status quo (“big houses,” he says, are a good thing and “pay high taxes that educate our children, pave our roads, pay for first responders, the list goes on …” while he asserts, illogically, that “smaller houses put more strain on housing”); and Rogers, a first-generation East Hampton resident (with 24 years in town), who is the town’s greatest elected champion for nature, the environment, sustainability, and the delicate balance between the all-important real estate development business and community cohesion.
To be completely clear, the election is a three-way race — for two seats on the board. There are two candidates on the Democratic ticket: incumbents Rogers and Ian Calder-Piedmonte, and one Republican, Foster. The top two vote-getters win the two open seats. Separately, Kathee Burke Gonzalez is running unopposed for supervisor.
Calder-Piedmonte is less vulnerable than Rogers. That’s an opinion, not a fact. He was appointed to the board in 2023 to fill Burke Gonzalez’s seat when she won election as supervisor. He is well-liked, has been active in local affairs, has been thoughtful, but also reticent and reserved. He is a farmer — everyone loves farmers.
But, most importantly, Calder-Piedmonte voted against the maximum house size modulation, meaning he and Foster are in alignment on that central question.
That also means the powerful development industry doesn’t have it in for him. They do have it in for Rogers, upon whom Foster has placed a bull’s-eye.
According to his website, he’s running on two primary issues: more resource officers at the schools, which is as controversial as improved cell service, and a strident call to revisit — if not reverse — the house size code change.
All of which explains why you see “J.P.” and “Ian” election signs together around town.
We’re fortunate people that like Foster, with roots and love for this place, step up to serve. But his position on the house size code change — a litmus test for where anyone stands on the question of community character and protecting our environment — makes him the wrong choice this November.
As the chairman of the town’s Planning Board, Ed Krug, said earlier this year in support of the code change: “Every time a new outsized house is built that overshadows its neighbors, that is incompatible, we diminish our community character. A thousand paper cuts later, we are not going to be the charming semi-rural place that attracted us all here in the first place, and this is not going to be a town that people are going to want to be in, play in, live in and invest in.”
As the house size issue demonstrates, Rogers steps up to the toughest challenges facing this community. She heard the outrage at the trend of wildly oversized homes across town and how they are completely changing the affordability and character of neighborhoods, historic or otherwise. She recognized the waste: how oversized houses consume more resources to build and maintain, use and pollute more water, create more impervious surfaces, smother more natural areas, and consume more energy and place additional strain on the environment and community infrastructure.
So, she went to work.
In public, she built a team of town leaders/experts/staffers and community volunteers and devoted months to produce research demonstrating both the visual and environmental effects of massive houses, and presented it all painstakingly at more than a dozen work sessions.
The process unfolded over some 55 hours of deliberation and public comment, which went 4-to-1 in favor of smaller houses. What was originally proposed was altered, reconfigured and reduced, in deference to real estate industry-related concerns.
Almost two years later, the Town Board voted, 3-1, with one abstention, to approve a reduction — a reduction that is significantly less than what you will hear Foster profess on the campaign trail.
The new formula correctly hits the biggest parcels hardest, and the smallest ones, in neighborhoods where most year-rounders live, the least.
The maximum size of a new house in East Hampton now is limited to an astonishingly immense 10,000 square feet, down from the absurd, 20,000. That’s a 50 percent reduction. (It’s worth noting that no building permits were issued or requested in 2023 and 2024 for houses with a gross floor area of more than 10,000 square feet.) But on lots of 2 acres or less, the change represents a reduction of as little as 14.6 percent to 18 percent.
The zoning code change didn’t go as far as Rogers had hoped, but the process had worked. The needle had moved in the right direction.
Now, she’s on to another major community concern: houses being bought up to serve as de-facto short-stay hotel rooms — the so-called “Airbnb effect” — which reduces the long-term rental and affordable housing supply, and erodes community cohesion and character. Once again, working with town staff, she’s built a mountain of data so that her board colleagues can get a handle on the problem.
Municipalities across the world are wrestling with this issue, imposing limits on short-term rentals, even bans, and levying taxes on short-term rentals to fund affordable housing. But, in her usual measured fashion, Rogers simply presented the information to the board recently without insisting upon predetermined outcomes or offering solutions. Because, as she has said, “You can’t know what you need to do until you know what’s happening out there.”
Just like the house size issue, opposition will be fierce. You’ve heard the push-back before: “We’re a tourist town! Get used to it! Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do with my own property!”
But the support will be there, too, from people who live and work here and want to know their neighbors and need volunteers to run key community services. And Rogers will be there to shepherd an equitable process and an effective solution.
There’s a balance here, between the town we have become in the past 30 years — a somewhat infuriating but beloved, booming, warm-season destination for seasonal house owners and vacationers — and a place of immense natural beauty that many of us call home all year long.
Whether it’s her advocacy in favor of limits to noisy, polluting gas-leaf blowers, her championing of beach restoration in Montauk, or advocating for working families, Rogers is fighting hard to strike that balance. She has proven time and again that East Hampton needs her gifted leadership on the Town Board.
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