In a scene some painted as just another example of government running roughshod over the desires of the citizenry, the East Hampton Town Board, with one abstention and over the furious objection of some residents, voted last Thursday to authorize the restoration of signs welcoming motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians to Springs.
Signs on Three Mile Harbor Road and Springs-Fireplace Road welcoming visitors to “The Springs” have fallen into disrepair after 20 years, a member of the hamlet’s citizens advisory committee had told his colleagues in the spring, and the hamlet would benefit from their restoration. Moreover, a sign welcoming visitors traveling north on Accabonac Road toward the hamlet, which had disappeared, should be replaced.
But, David Buda later realized, he had unwittingly set in motion the removal of the article “The” from the signs’ message. This, the committee’s chairwoman told the board last Thursday, was “a slap in the face” to the hamlet’s advisory committee.
Acting on the initiative of its beautification subcommittee, the committee had asked the town board, through its liaison, Councilwoman Kathee Burke-Gonzalez, to refurbish the existing signs and replace the one that had gone missing. “My comment,” Ms. Burke-Gonzalez said, “was, if we’re going to spend the time and the money . . . is it ‘Springs’ or ‘The Springs’?”
Seeking counsel, she wrote to Averill Geus, the town historian. Ms. Geus responded, “Springs has always been Springs since the late 1600s.”
• RELATED EDITORIAL: Springs vs. The Springs
But Hugh King, the town crier, muddied the waters at the Aug. 15 town board meeting, asking, “Is it ‘Springs’? Is it ‘The Springs’? Is it ‘Accabonac Springs’? Well, guess what. It’s all of those.”
The town’s official seal, designed and drawn by the late Montauk artist Frank Borth and approved by the town board in 1957, refers to the hamlet as Springs.
And last Thursday, the board authorized the restored signs to read “Welcome to Springs.”
Since discussing the signs with the board in the spring and on Aug. 6, dozens of Springs residents had approached Ms. Burke-Gonzalez to urge that the restored and replaced signs read “Welcome to Springs,” she said. “The official seal says ‘Springs.’ ” While she honors the committee’s opinion, “it doesn’t really represent the entire Springs community.”
At an average age of around 38, it is the youngest hamlet, she said. “We are also the second most popular for families,” yet “there’s only one gentleman on our 27-member board that has school-age children.” Many on the committee are retired, she said, and “not completely representative of the Springs community.” (A 2010 resolution states that members of any town-appointed committee “shall be representative of all perspectives of the issues surrounding the project assigned” to it.)
In an email to the committee’s members sent before last Thursday’s meeting, Ms. Burke-Gonzalez said that she would recommend signs deleting the “The,” adding, “I hope we can all move forward and agree to disagree.”
But angry objections greeted the councilwoman that evening. “Our request was specifically that the signs be replaced as they were designed and built about 20 years ago,” said Loring Bolger, the committee’s chairwoman. Despite the “never-to-be-resolved controversy” over the hamlet’s name, “the committee was unanimous in their decision that the signs should retain the ‘Welcome to The Springs’ wording and not be redesigned.” While she and others on the committee may prefer “Springs” to “The Springs,” “we all agreed it would avoid future controversy about those particular signs if we retained the original wording.”
Ms. Burke-Gonzalez had “taken it upon herself to query other Springs residents in her effort to find the ‘right’ wording for the signs,” Ms. Bolger said. “But these residents did not ask for the signs to be refurbished; we, the Springs Citizens Advisory Committee, did.” If the board will not act on the unanimous recommendation of the C.A.C., she asked, “What are we doing? Why are we meeting every month?” The resolution, “totally ignoring our recommendation, seems like a slap in the face.”
Mr. Buda, who registered his protest by resigning from the committee shortly after the meeting, complained that “this whole thing is like being punished by unintended consequences,” as he had brought the signs’ deteriorating condition to the committee’s attention in the spring. “Now, everything’s coming back and biting me in the ass.”
The signs’ creation resulted from an effort initiated by the Springs Improvement Society and not the town, Mr. Buda noted in his resignation letter to the board. If the board was determined to “change the status quo that’s been there for 20 years,” he said, “I frankly would request that the Springs C.A.C. notify you officially so that we withdraw our request and just take care of it ourselves.”
He read a letter from Fred Overton, a former councilman and town clerk, who referred to “Discovering the Past: Writings of Jeannette Edwards Rattray (1893-1974) Relating to the History of the Town of East Hampton,” in which the publisher of The Star wrote in 1953 that “Accabonac is Indian for The Springs, which is the official name of the community of three or four hundred people the year round, with many more in summer.”
But Ms. Geus objected to “The Springs,” which she said “sounds like some wacky-doo spa that suddenly sprang up and created a golden door or something in East Hampton.” Like the pronunciation of Montauk — the emphasis is properly on the second syllable, she said — “The Springs” is another manifestation of the “Manhattan-ization of this town.”
Brad Loewen, a committee member whose family has lived in the hamlet for generations, said that the controversy was “possibly trivial” but nonetheless important. “There are so many people who assume that history begins with them,” he said. People can call the hamlet whatever they want to, “but it’s a point of pride. . . . I remember some of the older people who go back at least three generations. . . . Not one time can I ever recall them calling it ‘The Springs.’ It’s always been ‘Springs.’ ”
Restoring that name is “important to those who are tired of losing everything,” he said. “For God’s sake, don’t take our name away from us.”
Councilman Jeff Bragman asked that a vote be delayed so that research could establish the correct name for the hamlet. “As an old country lawyer,” he said, “I think what we have here is a factual question.”
But Carole Brennan, the town clerk, said that records in her office refer to Springs in “every way we have heard tonight.”
In the end, the board voted 4 to 0 to delete “The” from the signs.
“Yes yes, Bub,” Councilman David Lys, who lives in Springs, said in voting for the resolution.
Mr. Bragman abstained “because I’d like to look at some historic evidence.”