Carts Before Horses

A proposed revision to the East Hampton Town Code regarding large vehicles parked on house lots should be set aside to allow officials time to address the real issue: the entrenched and growing commercial use of residentially zoned property.

The parking draft is intended to provide some sense of order to what has become unsightly disorder in some parts of town as work trucks, large trailers, and other vehicles are left, mostly overnight, within view of neighbors. The new law would allow some, prohibit others, and exempt some offending vehicles that already are kept at owners’ residences. The proposal is well intentioned but misses the mark.

On one hand the town board appears ready to get tough on one form of money-making, noisy helicopters going in and out of East Hampton Airport. Yet at the same time, the town and to a less frequent extent the Village of East Hampton have ignored their codes about what can and cannot go on on residential lots. This may be because it is far easier to enforce parking rules than to ask business owners to find other locations for their operations.

Commercial uses on sites zoned for houses alone have popped up from one end of town to the other. Some operations include loud machines and road-destroying trucks while others have been allowed to expand without anyone in Town Hall lifting a finger until public complaints reach the point where they cannot be ignored. This is unfair to the thousands of law-abiding folks who ask little more than the quiet enjoyment of their houses and backyards, be they year-rounders or part-timers.

This is a moment when town board members have an opportunity to consider in whose interest they should act. The answer is that the board must consider the community as a whole, and certainly not those who try to profit from improper activities, or worse, from new rules that would protect what should not have been allowed in the first place.

As we have said in the past, the town and village should focus on illegal uses of residential properties, be they landscapers’ staging areas, contractors’ workshops, or too-busy Airbnb rentals. Sorting out what kind of vehicle should park where is, at best, secondary as long as what is taking place meets the letter of the law.

Yes, government should be sympathetic to the needs of working people and commercial enterprises, but that cannot come at the expense of other residents and attractive neighborhoods.