Candidate Profile: David Gruber For East Hampton Town Supervisor

EAST HAMPTON, NY — Suffolk County residents will be hitting the polls soon to elect local representatives.

The race is on in local town and village races leading up to Election Day, which, this year, falls on Tuesday, November 5. Patch asked those running for office to answer questions about their campaigns and will be publishing candidate profiles in the days leading up to the election.

David Gruber, 67, of East Hampton, is running on the Independence and Libertarian lines for East Hampton Town Supervisor.

His opponent is incumbent Peter Van Scoyoc, a Democrat also running on the Working Families line.

Gruber has two daughters, 22 and 19; the older is a graduate student in art therapy, the younger a college sophomore. He earned a BA in Physics from Hampshire College in 1975; graduated JD magna cum laude from the University of Michigan Law School in 1978; earned a M.S in Econ. from New School University in 2015; a M. in Phil. Econ. from New School University in 2017, and attended NYU Graduate School of Business and Columbia University Business School. He worked in statistical arbitrage for 20 years and retired in 2011; previously, he worked in merchant banking for 10 years and was a commercial banking lawyer for three years.

Check out Patch's full Q&A with David Gruber below.

Patch: The single most pressing issue facing our community is _______, and this is what I intend to do about it.

Gruber: Affordable housing for local seniors, working families, and young adults who want to stay in the town where they grew up so that they are not forced to leave by housing costs. The East Hampton Comprehensive Plan adopted 15 years ago says we need 1,300 units, but we have created only 100 in all that time. I intend to build for local people 1,200 units of low-rise apartments, densely built, spread across town, that people with local incomes can actually afford without government subsidies.

P: What are the critical differences between you and the other candidate seeking this post?

G: They only talk about affordable housing, as they have for decades, with very, very little to show for it. The incumbents have created only 20 units of affordable housing in eight years. At that rate it would take hundreds of years to meet the publicly adopted goal of 1,300 units.

P: If you are a challenger, in what way has the current board or officeholder failed the community?

G: Almost total inertia on every issue of importance in addition to affordable housing: no testing of drinking water and sluggish response to known toxins in drinking water, trivial numbers of I/A septic systems installed, six years with no fix for life-threatening gaps in emergency communications, 15 years with no progress on gaps in cell phone communications, six years with absolutely no idea or plan how to meet the stated 100% renewable energy goal, eight years with no plan to replace a dilapidated senior center or to provide support so seniors can stay in their homes, no plan to deal with sea-level rise other than a vague 'retreat from the beach' rejected resoundingly by the community, and official lawlessness and secrecy, evading SEQRA at every turn and making improper deals with cronies behind closed doors to allow evasion of laws and to give away town assets.

P: Describe the other issues that define your campaign platform:

G: Dismal wages for town employees, failure to enforce the town code and favoritism in enforcement, failure to update outdated regulations, lack of beach access.

P: What accomplishments in your past would you cite as evidence you can handle this job?

G: I am a pragmatist, interested only in what can work in the real world. In addition to inventing a highly successful proprietary statistical algorithm for securities trading that could not have succeeded without rigorous attention to reality, I was at a young age appointed as the acting CEO of a failing apparel company and successfully stabilized it. I have acquired and supervised business in diverse industries, including animal feed manufacture, a chain of 400 movie theaters, one of the country's largest fleets of bulk hauling trucks, and a fleet of factory fishing trawlers in the Pacific Northwest. I have learned by long experience to separate rhetoric and reality.

P: The best advice ever shared with me was ...

G: "Even a mediocre strategy pursued consistently will beat no strategy every time."

P: What else would you like voters to know about yourself and your positions?

G: Unlike my opponents, I am not looking for a job or a pension. I have no motivation other than to solve for my community serious problems that have been talked about but neglected for decades. I know how to do the things I say I will do and I will do them. I have no patience for empty rhetoric.