Scheuring and Tully run for Smithtown Town Council in the fall

BY DANIEL FEBRIZIO DANIEL@TBRNEWSMEDIA.COM

of those things and then I ended up becoming involved with the Smithtown Democrats.”

Election 2023

Smithtown residents Maria Scheuring and Sarah Tully are challenging incumbents Tom Lohmann (R) and Lisa Inzerillo (R) for Smithtown Town Council this November.

Sarah Tully

Tully has lived on Long Island her whole life, growing up in Deer Park in a bluecollar family with her father working for the MTA. Her mother was a program support administrator for the IT department at the Northport Veterans Affairs Medical Center. Tully is the oldest of four siblings.

She has lived in Smithtown township for the past 14 years and in St. James since 2012. She lives with her husband and two children. They were born three weeks apart, as the couple adopted one as an infant.

Prior to this, Tully and her husband lost their first child to a congenital illness at five months old. “Through that I found so much of my own voice and my own strength, and I think that’s where I learned to advocate,” Tully said in a phone interview. “I’ll do something, and I’ll be kind of scared or nervous about it. But I can tell myself I know that I have lived my worst day, and that’s behind me. So, I sometimes feel I can do anything.”

She has a background in corporate management, which gave her experience in team building and project management. What got her into politics is that when reaching out to find a community for her children, she quickly found out that there was a lot of division and hostility.

“There were these outside groups bringing culture wars to places they didn’t belong, like school boards and library board,” Tully said in a phone interview. “I got involved in some

Her two boys will be entering kindergarten in September, so she would have additional time to do the job of a councilperson. She said that one of the things that she wishes to do is bring balance to the board, as it is currently all Republican.

One of her primary concerns is the 2023 budget, which gave a 22% raise to Supervisor Ed Wehrheim (R) and 10.5% raises to the rest of the council members.

“My first motion that I would make would be to get rid of the raises that they gave themselves,” Tully said. “It’s not about you. It’s about being a public servant.”

Maria Scheuring

Scheuring’s parents were Catholic missionaries, so she was not settled in one place as a young child. She spent time in Texas, Mexico and New Jersey, but in sixth grade she told her parents that she wanted to settle down, and they decided on the Bronx.

She has two siblings, a younger sister who is the head of the Education Department at Iona College and a younger brother who was adopted from an orphanage back when they lived in Mexico.

Scheuring and her ex-husband have three children: a daughter in college at Stony Brook University and two sons in Smithtown East High School.

Scheuring went to Fordham Law School, and she also has a master’s degree in philosophy. She teaches a class in ethics at St. Joseph’s University. “It keeps me grounded and I like dealing with students,” Scheuring said in a phone interview.

She and her ex-husband used to run a law practice together, but she started her own practice in 2013 and has practiced many different types of law, including litigation, insurance defense, family and divorce cases,