Gansett: Still No Place to Go
Monday night’s meeting of the Amagansett Citizens Advisory Committee was short, just 45 minutes, and reasonably sweet. Members received in resigned silence the news that the public bathrooms the hamlet has awaited for the last 20 years or so will almost certainly not be built in time to accommodate this summer’s importunate visitors, thanks to the Suffolk Health Department’s continuing refusal to grant the required permits.
East Hampton Town Supervisor Larry Cantwell, the town board’s liaison to the committee, called the situation a “quagmire.” The bathrooms are slated to be built in the town parking lot behind Main Street, but adjacent property owners have yet to file the necessary easements with the county, which will not grant a construction permit until they do. Worse yet, work on the parking lot — restriping, repaving, trenching for electrical lines — cannot begin until the facility is place. Even when it is, the county will not allow it to be used until one neighboring house is connected to public water. Asked when the bathrooms might ever be ready, Mr. Cantwell silently shook his head.
Work on another Amagansett headache, the unsightly PSEG Long Island electrical substation on Old Stone Highway near the train station, was to have been completed months ago, but the “nuclear power plant” is still under construction, the supervisor said, and will be until sometime in June. “This is what happens when we have no local control,” he said.
The town had issued a stop-work order soon after construction began, arguing that PSEG had not submitted a site plan or other filings in compliance with town code, but a State Supreme Court justice disagreed, ruling that as a public utility it was exempt from local zoning. PSEG has promised that “the overhead stuff will come down and the lighting will be night-sky compatible,” Mr. Cantwell told the group. Meanwhile, he said resignedly, “It is what it is.”
The ugliness will be relieved to some extent when PSEG, which is working with the Planning Department, begins landscaping the site, hiding its chain-link fence (“a fence only Putin could love,” someone has said) with 8 to 10-foot trees and other shrubbery. Councilwoman Sylvia Overby, the town board’s liaison to the planners, said on Tuesday that the utility had submitted a preliminary drawing with “everything you wouldn’t want,” mostly pointy arborvitae, but after some gentle prodding has now proposed a new plan with more indigenous plantings. The tall trees include American holly, Japanese cedar, keteleeri juniper, white pine, cypress, and more. “Stepping down” from the trees — “like in the woods,” Ms. Overby explained, “not lined up like little soldiers” — will be shadbush, inkberry, winterberry, bayberry, and arrowwood (viburnum) bushes, some 173 plants in all.
PSEG has made a verbal agreement to pay for the landscaping and for irrigation, the councilwoman said. It has also promised to cut back the protruding point of the fence between Old Stone Highway and the railroad tracks by 10 feet, and cant it to make it less prominent.
Back at the advisory committee meeting, Mr. Cantwell gave an update on East Hampton’s new rental registry law, saying that 1,200 applications have been processed to date, with “40 to 50 a day being received, and there will be many more.” He called it “a good beginning” for the law, which is to take effect on May 1.
The rest of the brief meeting was devoted to a discussion of speed limits in the hamlet, with several people wondering why speeds could not be lowered from 30 miles an hour to 25, at least on the lanes and in Beach Hampton. Mr. Cantwell explained that the legal minimum in New York State is 30 m.p.h., to which someone asked why, then, East Hampton Village has a number of 25 m.p.h. streets. “The village has more authority under state law than the town, believe it or not,” said the supervisor, who was the village administrator at the time the 25 m.p.h. signs went up. “[Assemblyman] Fred Thiele tried it [for the town] last year and was turned down.”
“I do think we’re looking at a four-way stop sign at the intersection of Atlantic Avenue and Bluff Road,” he said. That intersection has been a trouble spot, particularly in the summer when north-south cars hurry to and from the Atlantic Avenue beach and east-west drivers use Bluff Road to bypass the Main Street crowds.
What about speed bumps, someone suggested. No, Mr. Cantwell said, “the town has a longstanding policy of not putting speed bumps on public roads.” Suffolk County “was talking about speed cameras in front of schools,” he added, but it came to nothing.
“Hollywood lights at the Main Street crosswalks, like in East Hampton?” was another suggestion. “Every crosswalk on Montauk Highway should have lights,” Mr. Cantwell agreed. “They’re really effective at night. But, it’s a state road.” In the case of the village, he explained, “the state said, if we paid for the cost of designing it, they’d put it in. And that took five years.”