The Hard Year Ahead
For East Hampton Town officials, these are the easy days, but January and February’s quiet pace will soon yield to frenetic spring preparations for the season to come. Then it will be summer 2016, which, if last year’s experience is any guide, will be busier and crazier than before. Despite a public uprising in July in which hundreds of people at an overflowing meeting at the Montauk Firehouse begged the town board to do something, anything, there is much work left to do.
An unfortunate truth about East Hampton Town policy is that for three busy months, officials have to hustle to keep up with the demands, but then, once September comes around, the pressure dissipates and doing something to head off the next season’s troubles loses urgency.
On the plus side, the town board added additional enforcement power to the coming year’s budget. It banned parking near the Surf Lodge, which has been a perennial source of public frustration in Montauk. And it created a new registration process for property rentals with a goal of improving landlords’ compliance with existing limits. All in all, these are worthwhile measures, but, unfortunately, they do not go far enough toward shifting us back toward the way most residents would like it to be — and we dare say most folks would like it to be clean, quiet, and easy to get around, hardly the way anyone would describe the peak season last year.
East Hampton should not be Party Town U.S.A.; none of the current town board members would say that it is. Still, we cannot escape the notion that a hands-off approach still holds sway. Think for a moment if any of the commercial excesses that draw hundreds of partyers each weekend night between Memorial Day and Labor Day popped up in East Hampton Village; they would be shut down in a second. So what, one might ask, is different about the town? Town officials seem to spend almost as much time making excuses about what they cannot do for one reason or another than about what they actually can accomplish.
After the July outcry, the town tried to get serious, dispatching additional police officers to Montauk for late-night crowd control, for example. And Supervisor Larry Cantwell at the time even mused out loud about phasing out some nightclubs. That was an intriguing idea, but nothing has been heard of it since. It should be resurrected.
Yes, the East Hampton Town Board has a lot to deal with. But no, its members should not get a free pass when it comes to protecting and improving residents’ quality of life. Those who live here, pay taxes here, and love it here must always come first. Controlling the forces that are turning the town into a place few of us find attractive should not be an afterthought, even in the year’s coldest, dimmest months. The time to get busy is now.