East Hampton Town to Evaluate Moldy Records

When staff and elected officials abandoned the old East Hampton Town Hall building on Pantigo Road in about 2011, they took what they needed and moved across the lawn to the new Robert A.M. Stern-designed complex. What they left behind for another day was much of the town’s paper records.

Now, these records, which have been exposed to moisture in the leaky building’s basement, are contaminated with mold and will have to be retrieved by a firm experienced in handling potentially hazardous material.

“There is no question there’s mold down there,” Ed Michels, the town’s senior harbormaster and top safety officer, told the town board at a meeting on Nov. 14. The town has hired a private company to wrap all the boxes of paperwork in plastic and move them to rented trailers parked near Town Hall. Mr. Michels said the process of encasing and moving the hundreds of boxes would take several days.

“It’s a long time coming. We’ve been talking about getting down there for years,” Mr. Michels said.

East Hampton Town Clerk Carole Brennan and her staff will check each box against a state document-retention list and determine which to save and which can be disposed.

“The boxes are very well organized. The building just rotted around them too quickly,” Ms. Brennan said.

According to East Hampton Town Councilman Fred Overton, himself a former town clerk, there are assessors’ records dating to the 1800s among the material to be removed from the basement. “There’s some really old stuff down there,” he said.

Some material has already been removed and secured elsewhere, Town Councilman Peter Van Scoyoc said. Largely what are left, he said, are day-to-day records, many of which have no further value.

Radiac, the company hired to do the initial removal, will bill the town about $19,400. Cleaning the records that have to be saved will cost more, Mr. Michels said.

“The good news is that we are dealing with records that have been neglected for years,” Mr. Van Scoyoc said. “We get very cautious about it. We don’t like to take any chances with employee health.”