Huntington GOP Nominates Lupinacci and Mari for Town Board

By Chris O’Neill

Brooke Lupinacci and Theresa Mari have been nominated by the Huntington GOP to contest the two Town Board seats up for election this coming November.

The Republicans are hoping to repeat their historic Long Island 2021 sweep, when they won most local races, including winning a majority on the Huntington Town Board, and flipped control of the Suffolk County Legislature.

The Town board has five members, including a Supervisor, with each having one vote. The body is entrusted with the town’s legislative, policy, budget-making and appointive authority.

Both Lupinacci and Mari are lawyers.

Lupinacci began practicing law in 2005, and served as a Suffolk County Assistant District Attorney (“ADA”) in the Economic Crimes Bureau. She also served as Assistant Huntington Town Attorney, and most recently, as Huntington Town Director of Labor Relations. She is not related to former Town Supervisor Chad Lupinacci.

Mari has nearly 40 years of legal experience, mostly in private practice, and currently works as a Legal Aid Attorney with the Suffolk County Family Court. She has served as a Director of the Suffolk County Bar Association, Associate Dean of the Suffolk Academy of Law, and is active in many charitable organizations.

The Democrats are putting up Jen Hebert and Don McKay.

Hebert ran for the Town Board unsuccessfully last year and has served three terms on the Huntington School Board. She works with Kerber’s Farm.

McKay became town parks supervisor in 1995 under then-Supervisor Frank Petrone, and is now deputy commissioner of parks for Suffolk County. He previously worked for former congressman Steve Israel when the latter served on the Huntington Town Board.

All the town Board candidates run at-large across the entire town, with the top two vote recipients winning the elections. In past years that sometimes means one Republican and one Democrat win – as was the case four years ago, in 2019, when Eugene Cook won as a Republican and Joan Cergol won as a Democrat.