The Clerk is considered the “cover on the book” of local government. Documents, resources, chains of custody, and storage is all under the purview of the Clerk.
And while it’s not exactly the most riveting topic, it’s arguably the most important one.
Incumbent County Clerk Vincent Puleo is seeking re-election to a second, four-year term. He was first elected in 2022, just as the County was grappling with the crippling cyber attack that took systems offline for months and left Suffolk with two options: fixing the infrastructure from within or negotiating with the hackers.
The County took the former option. Their report showed the hack originated in the Clerk’s office due to the amateur-hour – at best – policies that were more to do with the IT Department than anyone else.
Clerk Puleo, a Republican of Nesconset, has made IT services one of his top priorities over the last four years. He puts immense faith in his IT department and they’re not looking to be complacent with the relative safety the County has after the 2022 hack. He’s shopping for new software to replace an outdated contract and is carving a respectable balance between using AI as a tool but not displacing workers.
A big task Puleo has had is dealing with the ever-growing storage needs for police bodycam footage, something we view as a necessity, but also something that the State mandates to be preserved. Since the State has not provided specifics and how and for how long those footages need to be held, Puleo has been working to scale their internal storage.
This sounds easy on paper, but the terabytes add up quickly. For reference, the average home PC’s hard disk has maybe 500 gigabytes of space to maybe 1 terabyte – and most users won’t take up about half that space. Video files are an easy way to fill up a hard drive, and with footage constantly pouring in, it’s easy for an operation like that to face a serious backlog.
For Puleo, that’s consisted of growing the size of the storage room, adding more servers, and even improving the HVAC to keep the room cool so those machines work without a hitch. In the meantime, he’s looking to secure cloud storage while lobbying Albany for much-needed guidelines to ease at least some of the burden.
Puleo’s customer service and community-oriented background also makes him deserving of a second term, we think. He pointed out in our interview that the day-to-day is making processes easier for applicants, which trickles down to development and redevelopment on Main Street. He seeks to prevent as many redundancies in those processes as possible.
Puleo’s opponent is Abigail Field, a Cutchogue Democrat who is running a write-in campaign. Field’s core promises are to revamp the website and look into whether satellite Clerk’s offices for the East End are necessary. She gets credit for having lobbied the New Jersey Legislature for identity theft legislation, which is her primary claim to understanding the IT and cybersecurity workings of the Clerk’s office.
Field opened her interview with us by saying she’s running a “positive campaign,” but hardly said anything positive.
Field seems to think she could be better at many jobs than other people. She not only said that of Puleo, but of her 2025 opponent in Southold Town Clerk Dennis Noncarrow. She called the latter a “lovely human being,” but not one who is good at his job. Field has also lambasted the inner workings of the Clerk’s office, claiming to have insiders talking of bureaucratic backlog and testimonies from real estate agents that Suffolk’s Clerk’s Office is the “worst in the state,” but she can’t back up any of her claims.
She’s said the job isn’t “rocket science.” We think she’s underestimating the task ahead of her should she prevail. For such a “positive campaign,” in her words, she tossed around phrases like “corrupt,” “clueless,” “gullible,” and “grossly inefficient” – among others. There’d be more weight to these claims if they could be corroborated and had there been consistent reporting from various sources throughout the last four years.
Field spared no expense in digging into Puleo on a Newsday story this summer that claims he is the landlord for a strip mall in which an illegal massage parlor was operating. Puleo didn’t shy away from it; in fact, the tenant up and left at his behest. But Field made the jarring claim that Puleo “profited off of sex trafficking” and that during his time as Smithtown Clerk, was somehow involved in derailing a bill that would have cracked down on those types of businesses.
We think she should choose her words more carefully, and we also think that had Puleo been such a “slick dude” – as she described him in our interview – the Town of Smithtown, known for its community values and retail politics – wouldn’t have retained Puleo as their Clerk for over a decade.
Field has waged an angry campaign and we see it as nothing more than an avatar for the disaffected Democrats who lost their insurgency against Chairman Rich Schaffer. We think they’re taking their anger out on the wrong guy.
The Messenger endorses Puleo.
