Charging Stations Yes, Branding No

Electric-vehicle charging stations will be installed in the Town of East Hampton, the town board was told this month, and five more electric vehicles will soon be added to the town’s fleet, but the number and type of charging stations that could be added will have to be negotiated.

Kim Shaw, the director of the town’s Natural Resources Department, told the board on Tuesday and on Dec. 11 that the town is a recipient of a $100,000 award from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority’s Clean Energy Communities program, with which it is purchasing five Nissan Leaf electric cars. “Our commitment back to the state was to install charging stations,” for which a site at the Town Hall campus has been earmarked, she said, “and also to install stations throughout the community.” Charging stations at Town Hall would be available to both the town’s fleet and to the public.

Along with six charging stations at Town Hall, the municipal parking lot north of Amagansett’s Main Street is a potential site for four others, Ms. Shaw said, while the parking lot on South Euclid Avenue in downtown Montauk and the town-owned portion of the parking lot at Amagansett’s Long Island Rail Road station could also see installations in the future.

East Hampton Village installed a public charging station in its long-term parking lot in October. That installation was funded by a $16,000 grant from the State Department of Environmental Conservation’s Zero Emission Vehicle program, Becky Molinaro Hansen, the village administrator, said yesterday.

Lauren Steinberg, an environmental analyst in the Natural Resources Department, accompanied Ms. Shaw to the Dec. 11 meeting. Multiple car manufacturers have or will soon introduce fully electric vehicles, she said, as the industry moves to phase out combustion engine-only cars. Charging stations accessible by the public will become increasingly important, she said.

On Tuesday, Linda James, chairwoman of the town’s energy sustainability and resiliency committee, read a list of manufacturers offering electric vehicles that “runs the alphabet” from Aston Martin to Volvo. The list was part of a larger statement supporting the town’s “consideration of creating public electric vehicle charging stations directly and through public-private partnership.”

That latter path to wider proliferation of charging stations was received with less enthusiasm by the board, however. Last summer, representatives of Tesla Motors, which, one official said, enjoyed more than 50-percent market share in the electric-vehicle category, made a pitch to the board for a charging station to be situated in the municipal lot at Kirk Park in Montauk. The board was interested, but with reservations.

The California company has again approached the town to propose multiple charging stations, Ms. Shaw said on Tuesday, most of which would be dedicated to Tesla models.

“I’m not supportive of dedicated spaces on town property,” Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said flatly.

Councilman Jeff Bragman, mindful of the branding and advertising that would be included on Tesla’s charging stations, said, “I don’t want to corporatize our landscape. These are mini-billboards. . . . We’ve got Chevys, all sorts of other [electric] cars ordinary people buy.” Tesla’s Model S starts at $78,000, but its newer Model 3 has a base price of $46,000. A federal tax credit of $7,500, which expires on Dec. 31, and other incentives lower an electric car’s cost, however.

Tesla has a “Supercharger” station at Cafe Crust on County Road 39 in Southampton, and the company’s website lists a “target opening in 2019” at an unspecified site in East Hampton.

Councilwoman Sylvia Overby had asked the Tesla representatives in July why the company sought to situate a charging station in the town’s easternmost hamlet. Primarily, it was because congestion is better avoided with a single large installation than with distributed smaller sites, was the reply. On Tuesday, she again questioned why Tesla’s charging stations would not be situated in a location more convenient to the entire community and “not have somebody have to go all the way through every hamlet we have” to Montauk.

The supervisor repeated that a Tesla-specific charging station “is going to be a nonstarter, for me, in a public space. I don’t have an objection to having a public-private partnership in this case, where they supply charging that the general public can use nonspecific to their brand.” The board wants to encourage the transition to electric cars, he said, which will require charging infrastructure throughout the town.