WELLFLEET — Steven Kopits turned in select board nomination papers on Monday, along with challenger Sheila Lyons and incumbents John Wolf and Tim Sayre. The four will vie for two three-year seats in the voting slated for Monday, April 29.
Kopits told the Independent he decided to run because he believes he can right Wellfleet’s ship. Currently vice chair of the cable advisory committee, Kopits has worked in finance, primarily as a market researcher and consultant in the energy industry.
“I felt it is a good time to put someone in there who understands organization, finance, and accounting,” he said. “It is clear that the current structure and organization of town administration is not stable.”
Kopits moved to Wellfeet in 2020 after splitting his time between here and Princeton, N.J. In 2014, he founded a consulting firm, Princeton Energy Advisors. He writes blog posts on topics ranging from oil to immigration and is listed as the firm’s sole staff member.
The Princeton Energy Advisors website says it serves “hedge funds, high net worth individuals and family offices. Our clients typically hold more than $100 million in E&P equities or oil futures and derivative projects… They turn to us for different, but related, reasons.”
Kopits previously did energy market research and worked as an investment banker with Dahlman Rose & Co., where he focused on raising capital for oil field technology companies.
He said he has diagnosed the select board’s dysfunction as a symptom of weak financial systems. “The edifice is collapsing from the foundations up, not from the top down,” Kopits said. Kopits cited a squabble between members Ryan Curley and Michael DeVasto at the April 2023 town meeting, where the two debated how to fund a harbor master plan.
“That is something that should have been done three levels lower,” Kopits said. “Things that should be handled at a lower level tend to bubble and become politicized. It’s not that we have to become more civil, it’s that we have to remove the causes of incivility.”
Kopits listed other “quantitative” goals: “I would like to see the board’s workload decrease by 60 percent and the stress levels to fall by about 70 percent.” Kopits would also like to find a way not to pay the $4.5-million fee imposed by the Army Corps of Engineers to dredge the harbor. “The board should have figured out a way to handle that,” he said.
He said he wants to find ways to avoid asking residents for money, naming the affordable housing initiatives at 95 Lawrence Road and Maurice’s Campground as “very large, very expensive projects.”
“I am broadly supportive of helping people afford housing, but you have to be very careful,” Kopits said.
He is sometimes cited as an expert in right-wing news sources including Breitbart, the Epoch Times, and the Washington Examiner, as well as more mainstream outlets like CNBC. “I am in the press fairly often,” Kopits said.
He said he would place himself just right of center. “I’m not a Communist, I can tell you that,” he said. “The Communists all think I am a fascist, and the fascists think I am a Communist. What I am is a good technical analyst.”
In his most recent blog post, dated March 7, Kopits forecasts the number of “illegal immigrants” and “got-a-ways” — migrants who elude the border patrol, according to Kopits — that will arrive in the U.S. in 2024. According to the post, Kopits’s predictions are based on statistics from Customs and Border Protection and the House Judiciary Committee’s October 2023 report, “The Biden Border Crisis.” (“Well worth reading for the outrage alone,” Kopits wrote.)
Kopits said his political leanings would be an asset on the select board. “To me, conservative means that you are involved with your community,” he said. “Liberal is about the individual, and conservative is about the group. If you are going for the select board, you are prioritizing the concerns of the group.”
