Lawns are filling up with campaign signs. A public forum hosted by the Enterprise and Lake Placid News saw 125 attendees packed into the Wilmington Fire and Rescue building to hear supervisor and town council candidates speak, and newspaper staff received about 50 question submissions for the candidates from citizens. One question, which was adapted almost verbatim from a citizen submission, was posed to all six candidates: how they plan to bring the community together following the divisive election.

On Facebook, endorsements and condemnations of candidates’ platforms, actions and even body language have proliferated in recent weeks, ramping up as the election gets closer.

The mood in Wilmington is self-evident. It is split. It is hurting. That is the one point upon which all citizens and candidates in the town, no matter their political beliefs, seem to agree.

How did a small town like Wilmington — which clocked in at 772 residents in the 2020 census — end up in such a divided place? In that instance, it depends on who you ask.

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Growth and STRs

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The Wilmington STR Committee said in August that, of the 414 households in Wilmington, 120 are short-term vacation rentals, meaning that around a quarter of the houses in town are STRs. The website AirDNA, which provides STR data analytics, said Wednesday that Wilmington has 169 active STR listings. However, some of these listings are rooms in a home or secondary structures on other properties. STRs are often identified as a factor of the region’s housing crisis; the committee calculated that only 15% of housing in Wilmington is currently geared toward long-term renters, and “the vast majority” of structures currently in use as STRs are viable LTRs.

All six candidates brought up STRs as a key issue in Wilmington — their existence, their regulation (or lack thereof) and the ways in which they may help or harm the community.

“(Citizens) are concerned about, when we look at what happened in Lake Placid years ago, that kind of growth is a little bit unbalancing,” Favor Smith, town supervisor candidate, said. “So, they will look at it, and do they want Wilmington to experience that kind of a growth pattern, which suddenly changes the character of the town. And, because of that, there are certain parts of the town that look upon the Lake Placid-fication of Wilmington to be not something they’d like to see.”

Timothy Follos, who is also running for town supervisor and currently sits on the town council, said that STRs account for “75% of where the heat comes from” in Wilmington right now, referring to the divison.

“I think people live in Wilmington because they like it the way it is and they see it going in a direction that they don’t support,” he said. “A meaningful, significant percentage of the community has these concerns, and they’re legitimate concerns. But, rather than moving at all, the town board dug in its heels, refused to compromise, published an article titled ‘Standing by our approach’ and then accused me of being divisive for trying to make progress on the issues that I campaigned on.”

The July 24, 2022, article Follos referenced, written by current town Supervisor Roy Holzer, defended the town council’s approach to STR regulations as “systematic and realistic.” Follos’ time on the town council has been characterized by a desire to regulate STRs to a greater extent than other town council members are willing.

“I kind of feel that we have enough short-term rentals with 125 and I’d like to see it capped at that number,” Forest “Randy” Winch, town board candidate, said. “I don’t really have anything against short-term rentals, but I don’t really want to see the town right full of them, either.”

Darin Forbes, who currently sits on the town council and is running for another term, also said that the divisions have been “created by STRs.”

“We have to get that behind us somehow or another, and if it’s making new laws to do that, then that’s what we have to do,” he said. “If it’s being less restrictive on STRs, then that’s what we have to do. But we have to work together and compromise as a board and listen to the community and each other to come to a common goal, and that’s to reunite Wilmington.”

Laura Dreissigacker Hooker, town council candidate, said that those concerned about STRs “feel like they’re not being listened to.”

“There are people in neighborhoods that don’t have neighbors anymore,” Dreissigacker Hooker said. “They have hotels next to them, and it’s just changing, so I think that the people who have been here for a long time are noticing that and they are frustrated and they feel like they are not being listened to. And the people who are profiting off of the short-term rentals are not really caring about what’s happening around them, as far as the frustration goes.”

Michelle Preston, who currently sits on the town council and is running for another term, said that STRs are “probably the hottest topic” in Wilmington.

“There seems to be people who feel very passionate that we need to regulate and we need to put caps on them,” she said. “However, they’re forgetting that there’s equally passionate people who feel as though they bring value to the town. … There’s a lot of people in town who benefit from those, and so I think that for it to be said that STRs are a problem in town as a blanket statement is unfair to the people in town who financially benefit from it, and so I think that is a division that has been drilled in people’s heads.”

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Board tensions

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The current Wilmington town council has seen mounting tensions as arguments over STR regulations and board member affiliations arise.

“I think it’s pretty apparent how the town is divided, because I’ve been going to the town board meetings for, like, eight months now, and it’s pretty obvious to me that it’s divided, and I don’t think that’s a good thing for a town this size,” Winch said.

“The board meetings have tended, from what I’ve seen, going into that kind of a direction when hard feelings become apparent,” Smith said. “At board meetings, you would see that there is sort of the accusation of conflicts of interest between one board member because of their job on the visitor’s bureau. … There’s various things, correspondence going around in emails and stuff about, well, one board member quit in the middle of (her term) because of some sort of innuendo that, oh, you own short-term rentals, and therefore, you’re blah.”

Preston, who is the operations manager at the Whiteface Mountain Regional Visitors Bureau and the widow of former town Supervisor Randy Preston, was appointed to fill the unexpired term of Paula McGreevy in August 2022 after McGreevy resigned. At the time of her resignation, McGreevy said that she felt her integrity was being questioned. All board members except Follos voted to appoint Preston at the Aug. 18, 2022 board meeting. After voting “no,” Follos said that he would prefer the seat go to Stephanie Gates, who was on the ballot in 2021.

“I think that, unfortunately, people are hearing things secondhand instead of coming to meetings or talking to candidates themselves, and that’s where the emotions get run away with and people’s perception of other people is swayed because they’re hearing other people’s opinions,” Preston said. “And that’s where the emotions and the drama gets pulled in, unfortunately, is that you’re hearing other people’s opinions of someone and then it just gets blown out of proportion.”

Follos said that “no one should be surprised” that the issues he campaigned on — such as STR regulations — are the ones he’s brought to the town council.

“All of the things that I’ve been saying as an elected official are identical to the things that I was saying when I was running for office,” he said. “So, no one should be shocked that I am putting these ideas forth. I think they expected me to be more passive. … As I tried to say at the forum, there were many, many, many ways that my colleagues on the board could have compromised on these issues rather than digging their heels in.”

Follos later clarified in an email that he believes the division in town is because the current administration “has not shown a willingness to compromise, a willingness to work toward consensus, or respect for the beliefs and priorities of hundreds of members of our community,” both regarding STR regulations and other issues.

“(Citizens’) concerns are just not even taken into account when their policies and things move forward by the board, and, not for nothing, Tim has advocated for really smart changes that not one person has really budged an inch on,” Dreissigacker Hooker said. “There’s been things that I think could’ve been handled differently and maybe not really taking into account all aspects of things. They’re pushing forward with things instead of really talking to people.”

Forbes said that the board’s division has resulted from differences of opinion being “brought to the forefront.”

“So, you know, you have people that sometimes prefer to just go with the flow, and now since those issues have been really brought into the limelight, people are kind of, like, you know, we’re tired of status quo and we want change,” he said. “And then, other people are like, we don’t want to see any change, we want to see stuff stay the way it was, or we want, you know, things to go back 10 years. So I think it’s a little bit of give-and-take there, but I think it’s definitely … because of the issues, but I think the issues have been created by different individuals.”

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Social media

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On Facebook, an anonymous page titled “Wilmington Election 2023” has been posting and commenting in favor of Smith, Preston and Forbes. The person or people who operate the page do not claim to be affiliated with any particular campaign. They also declined to reveal their identity, responding to a request via Facebook Messenger by saying, “Given the current tensions, we prefer to remain anonymous taxpayers.”

The page’s main sticking point is the claim that Follos does not live in Wilmington. Its description is “Electing politicians who live in the town they represent,” and its posts, such as one from Oct. 11, often ask questions such as “Should a NON-RESIDENT of Wilmington be able to present themselves for the election?”

Follos is a resident of Wilmington; his business is in Lake Placid. He said that he sometimes stays in Lake Placid, but he lives in Wilmington.

“I pay rent in Wilmington, I sleep in Wilmington, work in Wilmington, stand around the campfire in Wilmington. In every way, I am a resident of Wilmington,” he said. “If they thought I wasn’t a resident of Wilmington, they would have, a year-and-a-half ago, taken this to court and tried to get me kicked off the town board. But they know that it’s not legitimate. … They know that a majority of the townspeople agree with me on the issues, so they just try to distract with mudslinging.”

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Turnover

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Holzer thinks Wilmington is “at a crossroads.”

“Wilmington is in transition, I like to call it, because in the time I’ve been here, we’ve had three different town clerks because of people retiring and stuff, two different highway superintendents (and) different town board members,” he said. “We’ve seen an influx in newer people moving into our area that are used to maybe stricter land-use controls than what people that have lived here their entire lives feel.”

Part of the town’s transitional turnover is Holzer himself. He announced in January that he was not running for another term and said that the time that he never intended for his current stint as town supervisor to “become a second career.”

Holzer first broke into Wilmington politics as an 18-year-old, running a winning campaign for the town council from his bicycle. He later served as town supervisor from 1996 to 1999. When Holzer’s friend and then-supervisor Randy Preston died from cancer in 2019, he was asked to finish out Preston’s term. He was elected to a full term in November 2019, a term that he intended to be his last. But when the coronavirus pandemic arrived in March 2020, he said that he felt a duty to see the town through the worst of the crisis and ran for another full term in 2021.

As his final term ends, Holzer said that he wants people to see the good in Wilmington — not just room for improvement.

“I want people to realize that, in spite of some of the issues one will hear during a local election campaign, there’s still a hell of a lot more right about Wilmington than what’s wrong,” he said. “They really need to do some soul-searching when they decide who they want representing the community because a lot of people feel that we’ve been on the right track. Some might totally disagree with me, but you know, I think we’ve got a hardworking group of people that really do have Wilmington’s best interests at heard. And, you know, I have to say this: I think both sides have a true passion for what they believe. I just don’t always agree with those views.”