Mark Woolley, seasoned government liaison, makes bid for Riverhead Town board

Mark Woolley, a Riverhead native, is running for Riverhead town board as an independent on the Democratic ticket. Mr. Woolley recently retired from 30 years of public service working with six different members of Congress, including Congressman Tom Suozzi and former representatives Lee Zeldin and George Santos. 

Through his experiences at the state and federal level, Mr. Woolley aims to bring a “more sensible approach to public service,” he wrote. 

Mr. Woolley hopes to return town board meetings to a more robust exchange of ideas, where constituents can bring their concerns and be confident that they will be heard.

“You sit across from people and you try to work things out and you work so that their lives are better. You don’t treat them with disrespect because they don’t agree with you or you don’t agree with them,” said Mr. Woolley. “We always said, ‘What’s your issue? How can we go ahead and work on your issue?’”

He also has experience working with farmers and the Long Island Farm Bureau and, if elected to the Town Board, would like to continue to help sustain Riverhead’s agriculture, as well as protect its bluffs, beaches and groundwater. He also hopes to work to resolve issues at EPCAL and jumpstart new technological developments there.

“We have so many original technologies out there, we have young people that are here, that have gone to school, there’s either engineers or IT, go ahead and you put that into play where you can actually do something out there where it’s not Grumman anymore,” said Mr. Woolley. “There are ways that you could be put into play, but you can’t do anything where there’s a lawsuit.”

In response to recent news about the town budget piercing the tax cap, Mr. Woolley said, “What I really would like to get from these guys as far as the budget is a fiscal impact statement on every single resolution that they put out. When they hold their meetings and they’re hiring or relocating or spending this amount, you don’t know what it is because they’re not providing physical impact statements for the public to see at the time that they’re doing this.”

Mr. Woolley plans to meet with residents regularly in designated office hours, a concept he brought over from his experience in government. 

“You carve out two hours at a library, and people sit down with you one on one or in groups, because they want to go over their issues, because they’re maybe hesitant to talk about it in public,” he said.

When it comes to immigration, Mr. Woolley would like to see a path for people to reach legal status without fear. He hopes to implement steps to expedite this process for Riverhead residents.

“It’s not that they are bad people. They’re here for good reasons. They’re looking to get processed. And so our job is to get them processed or let them know it’s not going to work out,” said Mr. Woolley. “What I do, even at the town level, is be able to at least get them access to knowledge, so that they know, ‘Hey, I can approach my representative in Congress because they have a person who handles immigration issues,’ and we can actually check on status of your paperwork and or we can get you going so that you start to become processed.”

Mr. Woolley is also Tim Hubbard’s brother-in-law, but said in a phone interview that he is solely running for a seat on the Town Board, not against Mr. Hubbard himself. 

“I run because our town is threatened by overdevelopment, poor planning and a zeal to grab onto whatever is presented without research, without considerable discussion [and] without public input that is not first ridiculed, chastised, bullied and quashed,” Mr. Woolley said in a written statement. “I do not … run to oppose any one man, but instead to oppose the policies and the procedures under which they are carried out by the current Town Board … It has become obvious over recent years that the future of our town is at risk.”