Country School Hearing

It was the night neighbors of the proposed Country School on Route 114 had been waiting for, and they arrived in force. The East Hampton Town Planning Board's public hearing on the nursery school Feb. 4 drew a number of supporters, too, turning the hearing into a three-hour discourse not only on the pros and cons of a school on Route 114, but on the state of day care in East Hampton.

The hearing followed a year of review by the Planning Board, which took the school plans through numerous revisions before they were deemed ready for public debate.

Deena Zenger, who co-founded the Country School and runs it at the Amagansett Presbyterian Church's Scoville Hall on Meeting House Lane, wants to relocate to a 5.4-acre lot on Route 114 just south of Swamp Road. The latest site plan calls for a 4,260-square-foot, one-story building and a 29-space parking lot with a driveway on a now unopened portion of Wainscott Northwest Road.

Location, Location

Opponents of the school repeated what they have argued to the Planning Board since day one of the application: that the location was inappropriate for reasons of traffic safety, environmental sensitivity, and general incompatibility with the residential neighborhood.

Randall Parsons, whose consulting firm LandMarks is representing Ms. Zenger, disagreed with those points and went step by step through the town's special-permit standards.

He argued that the school "meets or exceeds" each of the standards. He also stressed that all but two of East Hampton's public and private schools (the Ross School and St. Therese Nursery School) are located in residential zones.

Answering the suggestion by some neighbors that Ms. Zenger should have chosen a commercial-industrial lot for her school, Mr. Parsons said locating a school "adjacent to industry is both contrary to the purpose of zoning and inconsistent with the historic small-town pattern of development. . . ."

Mr. Parsons stressed that 85 percent of the school's wooded lot would remain untouched and that even the closest house would be 240 feet away from the building.

He urged the board to look beyond the concerns of immediate neighbors and consider the "townwide" issue of day care when weighing the application.

Day-Care Need

Ms. Zenger herself was among those who spoke in support of the school. "To say that small children should be subject to loud machinery and hazardous chemicals is absurd," she said. "Children belong in neighborhoods."

Gail Schonfeld, East Hampton's longtime pediatrician, said the town offered "very, very limited choices for child care." Much of the day-care choices available are "in-home and unregulated," she said.

Laurie Wiltshire, a consultant with LandMarks and a parent herself of a 2-year-old, agreed with Dr. Schonfeld and presented the board with a petition of 225 signatures in support of the school.

On A Highway

The Country School currently takes children 2 years old and up. In the new facility, it would take children starting at 18 months, offering straight day care as well as a pre-school program.

Among the 17 people who spoke against the plan, none denied the need for day-care facilities. The neighboring residents concentrated, instead, on the site itself.

"No person moral and decent could be against day care," said Richard Camacho of Route 114. However, he said traffic concerns alone should be enough to deny the permit.

Like others who spoke, he noted that while other schools in town are in residential neighborhoods, none is located along a 55-mile-per-hour highway. The Swamp Road and Wainscott-Northwest intersections are particularly dangerous, he said.

Quality Of Life

"If I were running a school, I would never subject kids and parents to an obviously unsafe and extremely dangerous environment," Mr. Camacho said. "It won't be a question of whether there will be an accident, but when the accident will occur."

Quality of life was the concern for Russell Wirth, who lives on Merchants Path, right across the street from the site.

"We have chosen to live in a secluded, wooded area," he said. "We invested our money in wildlife, not to look at a glowing, 4,000-square-foot building. If this goes through, it will open the door for other self-promoters to follow suit."

Summer Camp

Neighbors pointed out there were no other commercial operations near the site, especially on the east side of Route 114, which has almost no businesses along its entire length.

The Country School's summer-camp proposal worried other residents, including Dr. Ted Calabrese, whose house on Swamp Road is the closest to the site.

He currently rents out the house, but said he and his wife had planned to move there after their daughter was born. A nursery school, day-care facility, and summer camp next door would dash those hopes, he said.

Safe Traffic

The Country School now runs a summer camp at its Amagansett site, a program that Ms. Zenger said was crucial to the school's financial well-being. The summer program at the new site would accept up to 90 children, she said, while the school-year population would be limited to 65.

Mr. Calabrese, who has helped rally the neighborhood against the plan over the past year, argued that the school "does not meet any of the standards" for a special permit, especially safe traffic.

"The [State Department of Transportation] may have given them the okay," he said, "but the D.O.T. will not be traveling on this road each day with their 4-month-old baby."

Environmental concerns were also raised, with opponents challenging the Country School's septic-flow estimates and stressing that the property was in an important water-recharge area. Stuart Vorpahl, a former Town Trustee, warned that waste water from the area flows straight toward Northwest Harbor.

"We're going to have a compounding pollution problem here, and everybody is going to be scratching their heads trying to figure out where it's coming from," he predicted.

Mr. Vorpahl also spoke as a trustee of the Amagansett Presbyterian Church, saying the church has had problems with the school. Enrollment, for example, was supposed to have been limited to around 30 children, he said, but was now at more than 50.

Ms. Zenger began seeking a new location after the church decided it wanted the space back.

One On The Fence

Ed Gilliam of Old Sag Harbor Road, who seemed to be the only neutral member of the standing-room-only audience to speak, warned about the area's extremely high, basement-flooding groundwater, as well as the traffic.

"I don't have any problem with the school going here," he said. "But it's a big danger on Route 114," and "once you get in trouble with that water, it will never stop."

To Ms. Zenger, he said, "If it goes through, it goes through. If it doesn't, don't feel bad."

The board left the hearing open for written comments until Feb. 25. After the close of the hearing, it will have 60 days to make a decision.