The fashion designer Stella McCartney, who is a daughter of the musician Paul McCartney, and her husband, Alasdhair Willis, are seeking a long-term extension of an expired emergency permit to allow a 100-foot double-tier sandbag revetment on Gardiner’s Bay to remain in place until they can build a new house at the site. Their application, which came before the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals on June 4, was the backdrop to a long and argumentative hearing.
In 2016, the couple bought adjacent parcels on Lazy Point in Amagansett, 114 Bay View Avenue and vacant acreage to the south. They plan to merge the two parcels and construct a new house, landward of an existing house, which is to be demolished.
The property is in a zone where all hard structures, including sandbags, are prohibited. Under town and state law, sandbags are allowed there only as a temporary measure to protect structures in imminent danger. According to their lawyer, Jon Tarbet, the applicants were given a six-month emergency permit to install the sandbags, also called geocubes, after a town building inspector found that the house was in imminent danger and that the revetment would have no detrimental environmental impact. The sandbags were installed last July.
The emergency permit can be extended for three months, but it expired two months ago and the sandbags still remain, preventing access to the beach from the end of the private road. Adding another wrinkle, a five-year permit from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, also required, stipulates that the sandbags remain covered with sand. They were exposed by storms last winter and have yet to be covered again — but the town will not allow it, Mr. Tarbet said, because, the emergency permit having expired, they should no longer be there at all.
Thus the applicants’ predicament. “We’re going to merge both properties and try to retreat,” said Mr. Tarbet, who told the board that an application to demolish the existing house and construct a new one is ready to be submitted. “But before we do that, we need to protect what’s there. That’s why we want an extension of the sandbag permit.” The existing house remains “in imminent danger,” he maintained.
Board members seemed skeptical from the start. “Somebody buys it and declares imminent danger to the house?” asked Roy Dalene. Forty feet of lawn was lost to erosion just last winter, Mr. Tarbet said. The point, Mr. Dalene said, was that “this massive revetment” was constructed soon after the property was purchased, despite the house’s precarious position since the 1970s, when it was built. “Now all of a sudden we have this influx of revetments on this shore because houses are changing [ownership] and there’s wherewithal to get these permits, and we’re getting a long line of revetments . . . where the town doesn’t want them.”
Mr. Tarbet, who said that 300 feet of land has been lost to erosion over the last 30 years, made frequent reference to the board’s 2012 approval of a stone revetment at a waterfront property immediately to the east, at the end of Mulford Avenue, which he said grants his client “a constitutional right to equal protection,” although board members disagreed.
That revetment, granted in the wake of Superstorm Sandy, has yet to be constructed, and none of the board’s present members were involved in that 2012 decision. But its then-chairman, Alex Walter, made a prescient observation when the Z.B.A. was debating the application from Joshua Young and Christine Lemieux, who bought their Mulford Avenue property in 2010. “The neighbors on Bay View have a vested interest in this,” Mr. Walter said at the time. “They may want to come down here and ask for the same thing.”
John Whelan, the board’s chairman, wondered why the applicants did not cover the sandbags again once they were exposed, as stipulated by the D.E.C. permit.
“I would not suggest trying to re-cover these sandbags in March,” Mr. Tarbet answered. “It’s not practical to keep them covered every time there’s a storm.”
That, Mr. Whelan said, “goes to show that the solution doesn’t make sense.” The revetment is supposed to be covered with sand and beach grass planted atop it, he said. Instead, the sandbags are exposed, Bay View Avenue’s residents cannot access the beach, and residents “might be looking at these . . . geocubes for a couple of years.”
Frustrated, Mr. Tarbet said that the town was in fact responsible for the erosion in front of his client’s property, by permitting groins and revetments to the east and by continually dredging Napeague Harbor’s western channel. “By all rights, there should be a mass lawsuit,” he said, but “I’m saying, ‘Just give me time to retreat with impermanent sandbags.’ ”
Brian Frank, the chief environmental analyst in the Town Planning Department, seconded board members’ contention that erosion at the property was not a new phenomenon. “Inadvertently,” Mr. Tarbet “has contradicted himself a lot by saying what’s going on right now is an emergency,” he said, “but at the same time the erosion has been going on for years, and they’ve lost 300 feet over a certain amount of time.”
Much development occurred prior to modern environmental regulations, Mr. Frank said. “A lot of the groins Jon is talking about — when he says the town allowed these to be built, that’s not accurate. They were built at a time when they weren’t regulated. . . . When you say ‘This is the town’s fault, the town did this’ — we’ve been developing our shorelines for centuries here.”
“And,” Mr. Frank continued, “there is an art of regulatory ambulance-chasing where nobody’s erosion is ever ‘natural.’ ” Property owners, he said, are quick to blame erosion on nearby activity, be it dredging or construction of hard structures. “And we have to break that cycle. Otherwise, we’re just going to keep perpetuating the problems that people are attributing to the source of their problems, until there is no shoreline left.”
Mr. Frank wondered if the applicants had done due diligence before buying the two parcels. “You don’t have to be a coastal geologist [or] an environmental analyst to go to the end of Bay View Avenue, look to your right, and see houses at the edge of the water” — including the Young/Lemieux house — “and one that’s in the water.”
The history of erosion on the applicants’ property is well documented, he said. “There have been nonstructural restoration activities on this property going back to at least 1993,” including a 2013 beach replenishment that did not involve sandbags or any other hard structure. Answering a question from Mr. Dalene, he said that sand replenishment was an adequate method for maintaining the beach in question.
Although Mr. Tarbet had said that keeping a sandbag revetment continually buried was impractical, Mr. Frank continued, “a condition of the D.E.C. permit is that the sandbags not be exposed for more than 30 days, and if they are exposed for more than 30 days, the revetment is supposed to be removed. . . . You’re getting the sense from Jon that you cannot keep this thing buried over the winter, and that makes sense: It’s in a location that’s too far seaward, it’s interacting with the shoreline.” For that reason, the sandbag revetment does not meet the board’s permit standards, he said.
Moreover, since the revetment’s construction, storms have deposited more sand in the wetland on the west side of Bay View Avenue than he has seen previously, the environmental analyst said. “The sand in the wetland, obviously, buries the vegetation, alters the habitat, reduces these wetlands’ capacity to hold water, which is important to minimizing the flooding for the properties behind them.”
The purpose of an emergency permit, Mr. Frank said, is to provide immediate options in a short-term crisis. “It was not intended to be an interim solution while other permits were pursued.”
Along with two residents of Bay View Avenue, both of whom complained about their loss of access to the beach, Kevin McAllister, founder of Defend H2O, which advocates for clean water and sustainable shorelines, told the board that the D.E.C. projects sea-level rise of 11 to 30 inches over the next
40 years, after a 4-inch rise in the previous 40. He recommended sand replenishment. “We need to hold the line,”
he told the board. Shoreline-hardening structures inevitably cause erosion to adjacent properties, he said. “If there’s a home, it would force that neighbor to follow suit with another structure, and right on down the line.”
At one point, Mr. Tarbet complained from the audience about Mr. Frank’s “35 minutes of uninterrupted inaccuracies,” and called the hearing “a circus.” Later, Aram Terchunian, of the applicants’ contractor, First Coastal Corporation of Westhampton Beach, also complained about “numerous factual inaccuracies.” He and Mr. Tarbet asked that their clients be allowed to rebut Mr. Frank’s testimony. “To offer a solution that will not work is not a solution,” Mr. Terchunian said. “ You are ruling on incomplete and inaccurate information.”
The hearing was closed, but Mr. Tarbet and Mr. Terchunian were allowed one week to respond to the comments by Mr. Frank and the others.