East Hampton Village Z.B.A. Loses Leader
Frank Newbold, the chairman of the East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals, who has said his 15 years on the board provided him with a front-row seat to East Hampton’s evolution, announced his resignation at a Z.B.A. meeting on Friday.
Appointed as an alternate member in 2003 and named chairman in 2013, Mr. Newbold offered a farewell address during the meeting, citing some fallacious reports in this newspaper in years gone by. “The early reports in The East Hampton Star in the 1880s that the railroad’s arrival had doomed us have proved premature,” he said as he extolled the village’s ability to adapt to change.
Over the years, he said the zoning board had grown increasingly concerned with the effect that construction and septic systems have on water quality and had tried to be consistent in a quest to protect empty parcels from being overdeveloped. “I think we’ve got a pretty clear track record that when it’s a clean slate, and you’ve bought it under the current zoning, then you need to abide by that zoning.”
“Houses I remember being built are now being torn down and bigger houses taking their place,” he said, with homeowners now far more exacting about the size of their parcels.
“When I first started, it was much more casual,” he said. “People would say, ‘Oh the property line goes from the apple tree to the garage,’ and now property has become so expensive that people are conscious of every square inch.”
As a result, he said the zoning board had grown in importance. Prior to meetings, board members pore over stacks of paperwork, he said, and applicants are more likely to have attorneys plead their cases. Even the general public is more tuned in to the board, Mr. Newbold said. “It’s amazing how many people watch it on LTV and come up to me with a jabbing finger and say, ‘You tell that lawyer blah blah blah,’ and I’m, like, ‘Thank you for caring.’ ”
Mr. Newbold credited the village board with tightening the zoning code, but said people often tried to find ways around it. “They’ll say, ‘Oh there’s a loophole, let’s drive a truck through that.’ ”
He also described basements being transformed into massive spaces featuring everything from wine cellars to a dog-washing station, calling it a recent trend.
“People wanted to make the basement bigger than the house — take it out to the actual property line, so the village had to pass a rule limiting it to the footprint of the house,” he said.
Then there was an applicant who wanted to dig two stories deep in order to build a squash court under a garage. “There was nothing in the code, so the village had to play a little catch-up,” he said.
Mr. Newbold, who is also a manager with Sotheby’s International Realty, said he planned to scale back his professional life, spend more time visiting family in Southern California, stay at his house in Palm Springs, and do more traveling.
Weighing in this week on Mr. Newbold’s departure, Mayor Paul F. Rickenbach Jr. said, “We could not have asked for someone more knowledgeable, who has compassion and delivered the right product.”