Advice Means Just That

As if to prove a point we made in an editorial last week about the various hamlet advisory committees’ going off the rails, the Amagansett group outdid itself on Monday night. The occasion was a visit by the Rev. Denis C. Brunelle of East Hampton’s St. Luke’s Episcopal Church to talk about the summer chapel on the corner of Indian Wells Highway. The Episcopal bishop of Long Island has been reviewing some of the diocese’s underutilized properties and has an idea that the Amagansett chapel might be a suitable place for a new year-round Latino ministry.

The welcome Mr. Brunelle received on the bishop’s behalf from the citizens committee was less than friendly, which may not be surprising. But what should give pause is that the membership thought it even appropriate to take up discussion of the diocese’s preliminary ideas.

Citizens advisory committees were created to be just that — advisory and to give thoughts on policies affecting their hamlets, but solely to the East Hampton Town Board. If and when the diocese decides to seek permission for changes that might intensify the use of the property, the matter would be handled by the planning board and perhaps the architectural review board or zoning board of appeals. The town board — and by extension the Amagansett Citizens Advisory Committee — would get no say. That did not stop many of its members from doing what they could to discourage Mr. Brunelle under a spurious mantle of authority and under the pretense that they speak for all of the hamlet’s residents.

This and other examples of the various committees’ overreaches are wrong and should be curtailed.