East Hampton Town Z.B.A. Nixes Revetment

The East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals, by a vote of 4 to 1, rejected a request from four homeowners to build a revetment on Gardiner’s Bay toward the end of Louse Point Road. The application had stirred considerable interest and been the subject of two public hearings.

The applicants, who own adjacent lots on the bluffs, wanted to construct a 560-foot-long revetment, using two and four-ton stones, to protect their properties from erosion. The plan called for a triangular stack of stones to be connected to an old revetment in front of two properties immediately to the north. It was designed to start at three feet below sea level and stretch to the top of the bluffs, some 13 feet above sea level.

The town code bans erosion-control structures in that area, but the applicants’ representatives had told the board over the course of the hearings and almost eight hours of testimony that the proposed revetment was the only solution that could effectively protect their clients’ properties.

At their work session on April 14, board members enunciated the multiple problems they found with the application. First and foremost, members insisted that the applicants had never really tried an alternative, at least not one that was documented for the board.

“The code requires that the applicant must prove that coastal restoration projects won’t work,” Cate Rogers, the board’s vice chairwoman, said. She went on to point out that the town trustees, who own the beaches in that area, opposed the project, as did Kevin McAllister, the former Peconic baykeeper.

In the first of several skirmishes that night between board members and Don Cirillo, the member of the panel who voted for the revetment, Mr. Cirillo cited a presentation by Charles Voorhis of Nelson, Pope and Voorhis, a coastal planning company. “They are telling us that soft solutions won’t work,” he said. The other board members sided with Ms. Rogers.

David Lys said the only previous effort that had been made as an alternative to a revetment did not come close to qualifying as a true restoration project. It was not done by engineers, he said. Rather, “sand was placed on the beach by a mining company.”

Board members said the applicants had not proven their contention that the erosion they were fighting  was chronic. Ms. Rogers said that before each of the public hearings on the matter, first in August of 2014, then in March of this year, she had photographed the site and concluded that there appeared to be no visible change. She quoted a statement by one of the applicants with regard to Hurricanes Irene and Sandy. “If it wasn’t for those two storms, I probably wouldn’t be here,” he had said.

Mr. Lys pointed out that the waters of the bay in the area are shallow. “There is a lot of sand out there,” he said. “You can go out 150 yards at low tide, and the water is only waist high.”

John Whelan, chairman, cited the availability of 12,500 cubic yards of sand that potentially could be dredged from Accabonac Harbor and used for coastal restoration there. “They have not addressed the issue of scouring,” he said, adding that the revetment was likely to eliminate public access to the beach at high tide.

Mr. Cirillo, on the other hand, said denying the application could result in the high water mark being at the applicants’ back doors. He challenged other board members several times, saying they weren’t properly balancing the negative and positive sides of the proposal.

“I don’t think you’re a proxy for the applicant,” Ms. Rogers said to Mr. Cirillo, during one sharp exchange.

Another 4-to-1 vote turning down an application took place that night. TJX Corporation, the owner of HomeGoods, the home furnishings company moving into the 15,000-square-foot store recently constructed on Montauk Highway in Wainscott, had applied to put up a sign on the back as well as the front of the building, exceeding the total square footage allowed. With the exception of Mr. Cirillo, members did not see the need for a sign in back, since the massive store is the only business being served by the parking lot.

“It would just open the door for every business,” Lee White warned. “It can change the character of a neighborhood,” Ms. Rogers said, before the vote was taken.