The Eighth District includes Bayport, Bohemia, Holbrook, Oakdale, Sayville, West Sayville within Islip Town, and parts of Holtsville within Brookhaven Town.
Sometimes, home-grown roots make all the difference.
Anthony Piccirillo sent shockwaves through the County when he ousted an entrenched incumbent in a once-solidly-blue district in 2019. Since then, he’s been re-elected twice with flying colors, and it’s easy for us to see why.
The Holtsville Republican has called his district home his entire life, primarily as an alum of both Sachem High School and Dowling College. Legislator Piccirillo has carved out a niche independent voice in the Legislature while also asking the important – and, at times, tough – questions from the horseshoe.
Currently, he’s guiding the first phase of the Oakdale sewers into play. A long-awaited project that was harangued by a rejected referendum in neighboring Great River, Legislator Piccirillo has made constituent understanding and support paramount to the project that will greatly remediate water quality issues plaguing the economic engine and cultural touchstone that is the Great South Bay.
As Chair of the powerful Environment, Parks, and Agriculture Committee, Legislator Piccirillo has served as an open-minded voice that will entertain any creative solution to get the job done, especially as it relates to preserving our pristine and precarious environment while balancing it with economic prowess and horse-before-the-cart policy. In that role, he co-sponsored Riverhead Republican Legislator Catherine Stark’s Working Waterfronts Bill, a first-in-the-nation initiative taken at the County level that is invaluable to Suffolk’s economic and environmental viability moving forward.
Legislator Piccirillo has also been at the forefront of the successful demolition of the Sachem administrative building on Union Avenue in Holbrook, paving the way for a village green and all-accessible playground – a much-needed bolster to Holbrook, a quiet community with aspirations of a walkable downtown. It is essential he remains in office if at least to accomplish that goal, as sewers remain in the works for the hamlet.
His ear is to the rail in Sayville and Bayport with quality-of-life issues, streetscape improvements, and further sewering of Montauk Highway. Open-space preservation also ranks high on his list of priorities for the entire district.
As sharp as he is congenial, it’s no wonder why Legislator Piccirillo has been sent back to Hauppauge twice.
He faces first-time candidate Dr. Kelly Perry-Hyland this year. A Bayport Democrat, Dr. Perry-Hyland is staking her candidacy on more or less the same issues that the incumbent is, except she can’t speak truth to power like the incumbent can. She flatly stated in our interview that the only reason the Oakdale sewers are coming online now is because this is the first active opponent the incumbent has had since he was first elected six years ago. Not only are there many moving parts to why Oakdale sewers are just now coming down the pike, but Legislator Piccirillo did have an active opponent last year. He received the most raw votes of any Legislature candidate between Suffolk and Nassau last year – save for those who had zero opposition, not even nominally.
Our biggest issue with Dr. Perry-Hyland is not only her recent move to Bayport – she’s been here for just over a year – but her assertion that merely knocking on doors and “listening” to people will help her be an effective Legislator. We don’t disagree that those are prime ways to get one’s ear to the rail – both of which her incumbent performs over her in spades – but she simply cannot speak to the issues like a home-grown candidate can. Moreover, she regaled us with stories of her humanitarian aid and volunteerism around the world – our hats off to that, genuinely – but creating communal programs for indigenous communities in Mexico doesn’t exactly equate to representing a chunk of the largest suburban county in the nation, we find.
Moreover, she also said the three magic words that make it easy to spot an out-of-towner – “in Long Island” – but also referred to Great River as “Grand River” in our interview. It’s not the make-or-break on this endorsement, but it certainly doesn’t help.
She also dodged our question of her campaign staff leaving palm cards at the Legislator’s District Office in Holbrook. What didn’t require a vociferous response instead became a referendum on her status as a “woman in the United States”, meaning she faces more danger than the average person. She pointed to door-knocking as an example of unpredictable hazards.
Fair enough, except that uncertainty is faced by anyone who knocks on doors, her opponent included.
However, the biggest demerit we’ve seen is her actions at a recent meet-the-candidates night in Sayville, in which she attempted to take the microphone from a fellow candidate and even got verbally and somewhat physically confrontational with said candidate – another woman facing what we would describe as an unpredictable danger, no less.
It’s one thing to parachute into a community and decide to run for office immediately – on top of pitching herself as an “independent” voice while also serving as the Islip Democratic Committee’s Recording Secretary – but it’s another to downright not play nicely in the sandbox with those who have spent their lives here. We don’t assume she’d do so with seventeen other teammates if elected. Moreover, while she hails recent legislative achievements on water quality and housing, she continues to ask why it couldn’t happen sooner. In an ideal world, it would all happen sooner, but her Monday-morning-quarterbacking of landmark accomplishments doesn’t tell us what she would do differently.
Dr. Perry-Hyland is also leveraging her storied career in scientific research and policy-making, a welcome voice in general, but with her lack of intimate knowledge of the district, it might be better used at Brookhaven National Lab than the County Legislature.
The Messenger endorses Piccirillo.
