Supervisor: Riverhead board seats should be term limited at 12 years

Riverhead Supervisor Sean Walter used his State of the Town address Wednesday night to call for electoral reforms, including a longer term for his own job that he hoped would end a cycle of “constant campaigning.”

Walter, fresh off a contentious re-election fight last year, called for a referendum to double the supervisor’s term from two years to four. He said the supervisor is responsible for “long-range policy planning” yet is “constantly under pressure and moving through the prism of re-election politics.”

He also backed legislation creating a 12-year limit in office for all five town board members, including the supervisor, saying limits would “eliminate the lethargy that can sometimes affect local government.”

An April 5 public hearing has been set for both proposals. Lengthening the supervisor’s term would also require a referendum.

Half of Suffolk’s 10 town supervisors have four-year terms: those in Babylon, Huntington, Islip, Smithtown and Southold. Nassau’s three town supervisors have two-year terms.

Walter, forced to wage a scrappy re-election bid last year amid formidable challenges by Republican Jodi Giglio and Democrat Anthony Coates, said his campaign stretched from February to November.

“People are not well-served when any layer of government never gets to the people’s business because the campaign never ends,” he said.

A 2016 referendum on the issue, he said, “would not be clouded through the prism of a particular candidate or campaign” because no town board members are up for re-election. He said he has not decided whether to run for a fifth term in 2017.

Walter’s seventh annual address, given at the Birchwood of Polish Town restaurant before a joint meeting of town’s Rotary, Kiwanis and Lions clubs, also focused on efforts to revitalize Riverhead’s Main Street and develop the 2,900-acre Enterprise Park at Calverton.

He announced that a long-awaited study of the former Grumman Corp. property was complete, and took into account plans by a company seeking to test and build next-generation unmanned aircraft at the site known as EPCAL.

Luminati Aerospace LLC last year purchased 16 acres at the park and unveiled ambitious research and development goals, spurring town officials to alter their vision for the property, where they have been trying to site an industrial park.

Walter, a devout Catholic, peppered his speech with Bible quotes and lyrics from a Christian song. The Republican supervisor, whose town has seen rapid growth in its Latino population, denounced local and national rhetoric about Latino immigrants and praised Riverhead School District officials for accepting some 200 unaccompanied minors from Central America in recent years.

“There were no protests. There was no wailing and gnashing of teeth,” he said. “We comforted them, we served them, the way God wanted us to.”