Forgotten Committee Should Be Replaced

Only an insider could get terribly excited about recent East Hampton Town Trustee tension with regard to their so-called harbor management committee. Few town residents — some trustees among them — really know anything about the group or what it does. In fact, as far as we know, the committee has scarcely met since about the beginning of 2011. 

Officially, it is the Trustee Waters Improvement and Management Task Force. It was created as a three-member panel in 2001 to make recommendations about dredging, shellfish regulations, launching ramps, and problems in need of prompt attention. What the committee was asked to do is vital, but many of its responsibilities would seem more properly handled by the trustees as a whole. 

At another level, the committee’s continued existence brings into question the role of the trustees as an elected body. Harbor committee members have in the past gone around in personal vehicles and boats to look for derelict vessels and abandoned duck blinds, for example, taking on semi-official enforcement roles better suited for the town’s professional Marine Patrol officers. The trustees, like the members of the town board, are supposed to set policy for the areas under their authority, not be the cops on the beat. Most significantly though, the harbor committee cannot be of use unless it meets, which it apparently has not done at all in 2016. 

We have long believed that the town trustees had to catch up with the rest of town government in the way they function. Finding money to pay for its own trained staff might be one solution. Another might be for the town board to hire additional personnel for Marine Patrol and the Natural Resources Department to provide the trustees with expert advice and enforce its regulations.

The harbor management committee, by failing to meet in the face of rising challenges to the town’s waterways, has shown that it is now irrelevant. It should be replaced by something more efficient and reliably professional. 

The trustees’ bays and harbors are among the town’s most treasured public assets. Confusing or halfhearted efforts to protect them are not enough.