Residents of Lake Success packed a Sunday forum to size up the candidates running for local office before the village election, and the night made one thing clear: this race is about who controls the future of a tiny but complicated Nassau County community.
The “Meet the Candidates” event drew sharp contrasts between incumbent Mayor Adam Hoffman, who is seeking another term after nearly 30 years of village involvement, and challenger Anthony Baek, a member of the Lake Success Golf Commission and president of an electrical supply company. Two very different visions. Same small village.
Hoffman built his pitch around experience and fiscal results, pointing to a landscape that most Long Island villages don’t have to navigate. A majority of local property is owned by the hospital system, which means the commercial tax base carries unusual weight. “There is a large portion of this community that is commercial-based,” Hoffman said, arguing that his relationships and institutional knowledge are what keep that arrangement working in residents’ favor.
He didn’t show up empty-handed on the numbers, either. Hoffman cited $2 million he secured from Northwell Health despite the organization’s tax-exempt status, a win he framed as a direct result of his tenure. He also pointed to $1.1 million in funding he obtained for a local park track. For Hoffman, those figures are the argument.
Baek came at the race from a different angle entirely. His core complaint isn’t about whether Hoffman has done things, it’s about whether residents can actually see what’s being done. “I want to change everything on the tax side,” Baek said, calling for a spending review and new revenue streams to ease the burden on homeowners. He kept coming back to transparency, specifically the village website, which he said is actively getting in the way of public access. The current budget isn’t posted online. Only the previous year’s documents are up.
Trustee candidate Timothy Parker backed that critique. “The website looks like it’s from the 1990s,” Parker said, according to Long Island Press coverage of the forum. That detail landed. A village budget that residents can’t find online isn’t a minor inconvenience.
Hoffman acknowledged the site’s problems but said he relies on village staff to manage it while holding down a full-time job. “To be a mayor, you have to learn every day,” he said. The answer illustrated exactly the gap Baek is trying to exploit: an administration that runs on institutional habit rather than proactive outreach.
Police spending came up, as it does in almost every local election where budgets are tight. The department accounts for 52% of village spending, a figure that would stop most taxpayers mid-bite at the dinner table. Hoffman defended the allocation directly. The village is “getting its money’s worth,” he said, pushing back against any suggestion that cuts are coming. Baek’s response to a direct question about police funding was careful. “That’s a conversation we are going to have,” he said. It wasn’t a dodge, exactly, but it wasn’t a commitment either.
The candidates also clashed over zoning and development, with Baek arguing that current laws constrain the village’s ability to grow and adapt. Hoffman’s record on that front, like his record generally, is long. Whether length equals effectiveness is the question Lake Success voters are being asked to answer.
What the forum revealed, more than any single policy disagreement, is that this election turns on a generational tension about how local government should operate. Hoffman’s case is institutional: he knows the players, he’s won real money for the village, and he’s still learning. Baek’s case is structural: none of that matters if people can’t read the budget on a Tuesday night from their kitchen. The Nassau County Board of Elections has election and voter registration information posted for residents who want to check their polling place before heading out on election day.
Lake Success is a small place with a complicated financial profile, a dominant institutional neighbor in Northwell Health, and a police budget that eats more than half of every dollar spent. The candidates who win here won’t just be running a village. They’ll be managing a relationship between residents and a commercial sector that could walk away from the table if handled badly, and that’s a job that requires more than a working website.