Candidate Profile: Thomas Ferb For Patchogue Trustee

PATCHOGUE, NY —The Patchogue Village elections are next week, and Patch will be profiling the four candidates for three open trustee seats, as well as the mayor who is running for reelection unopposed. The elections will be held on March 18th.

Thomas Ferb is part of the "Patchogue 2020" team of incumbents that includes Mayor Paul Pontieri, deputy mayor Jack Krieger and trustee Lori Devlin. He moved to Patchogue in 2002 from Brooklyn and recently retired from a career spent variously as a financial advisor, a consultant and an executive in the financial industry. He was first elected as a trustee in 2012, and served on the Patchogue zoning board before that. He's been active as a volunteer and in civic organizations in Patchogue like the Lion's Club and the Greater Patchogue Foundation.

"I have had profit and loss responsibility for multi-million dollar projects with large staff working on very complex problems. I'm very practical, down to earth in my approach to issues and problems and I'm an experienced people manager. In my role as trustee, I'm the liaison to the Chamber of Commerce and Greater Patchogue Foundation as well as the village representative on the Business Improvement District Board. I have an important role in communicating village activities to the groups I sit on as well as bringing back the concerns of residents and businesses to the mayor and trustees."

Looking ahead to the next term, Ferb feels the most important issues facing Patchogue Village are establishing a sustainable revenue stream from real estate taxes and fees, and maintaining the quality of life and security of the community.

"We have several very large-scale projects in the works: expansion of the sewer treatment plant, hooking up over 500 homes in South Patchogue, the development of Shorefront Park, the development of a hotel, and several residential and retail developments. We'll need trusted leadership to deliver on these projects."

"I have been a champion of the Mayor's strategy that if you use a village resource, you must pay for it. We have implemented metered parking focusing on visitors, not residents. We have arranged with the Patchogue Ambulance Company to collect fees from patron’s insurance companies. These costs were formerly paid by taxes. When an organization utilizes village resources, for example, when our Chamber of Commerce sponsors Alive After Five or we host the Great South Bay Music Festival, the village collects fees to cover our costs for security and sanitation," Ferb explained, reducing the burden on residents.

Balancing economic development of the downtown with residents' concerns, Ferb says, is a driving force behind a smart growth policy.

"With Mayor Pontieri’s leadership, we have implemented a real estate development plan encouraging higher density housing. With developments like New Village, Arts Space, Copper Beach, River View, River Walk, and many others, the village gets a greater return in property tax for a given piece of real estate. We have over 26 multifamily developments accounting for 37 percent of our housing. Increasing our tax base via high-density housing, allows the village to spread our increased costs over a larger tax base and minimize the necessary increases to individual homeowners."

"A second benefit to this development is the requirement that these developments have some units of affordable housing in addition to market rate units. This requirement ensures that young individuals and families will have an opportunity to live in our community. Furthermore, we have accomplished this development without significant disruption in the quality of life and security of our neighborhoods. We have a thriving downtown that improves year after year with the influx of new young families."