An Insider’s View and a Call For Vigilance

It was a dark night in the late 1970s, when Debra Foster first saw the human bone embedded with a stone arrowhead. The man who had brought it to her house in Springs told her that he had found it in a spot in Montauk where a new subdivision was proposed. Called Massacre Valley, the area was known for its role in a long-ago Indian battle. 

Ms. Foster was a new member of the East Hampton Town Planning Board at the time who had learned too late that the site was considered a sacred burial ground.

The bone, a vertebra, her visitor said, could have been from a young Narragansett warrior cut down as he raced uphill to attack Montauketts during a 17th-century dispute. Now, he was showing it publically in the hope of saving an important historical site.

The long night of the Montaukett bone is just one of dozens of episodes in Ms. Foster’s long public service career, which she sat down to get onto paper about two years ago. The product of that effort is a self-published book, “A Story That Must Be Told: Saving East Hampton’s Soul 1978-2017,” which she has been selling one at a time from the trunk of her car and which is now in its second printing.

Ms. Foster started out here at the Springs School teaching health and physical education. In 1978, she was appointed for a year to fill a term on the East Hampton Town Planning Board but was not reappointed when a new Republican town supervisor took over the following year. She got back on the board in the mid-’80s, when the political winds shifted again, and has been involved in public life in one way or another ever since.

Ms. Foster helped found a citizens group that put pressure on officials to revise the town’s comprehensive plan, as progress languished under then-supervisor Jay Schneiderman.

She won a seat on the East Hampton Town Board in 2003, campaigning with a strong preservationist message, and served a single four-year term. 

Her book is constructed as a series of short stories, arranged more or less in chronological order. “I wrote them that way so that any one of them can stand on its own,” Ms. Foster said in an interview earlier this month. “I wanted to tell a very important near-history of how Ms. Foster said in an interview earlier this month. “I wanted to tell a very important near-history of how our community has tried to save itself,” she said.

In part, she said, she wrote the book for young people who might not know the struggles that she and others like her went through to keep as much of the old East Hampton Town as possible. “I wanted future generations to be vigilant and to understand that they could make a difference,” she said.

Vigilance is a central theme of the episodes in Ms. Foster’s book and in a conversation with her. A town board majority comes down to just three people, Ms. Foster said, and time and again she saw how harmful changes can happen in a relative instant.

“It scares the hell out of me when people say that they want to improve things,” she said.

Keeping overdevelopment at bay requires constant attention, as in an episode early in the book in which the planning board approved carving up an archaeological site well after midnight, over Ms. Foster’s ultimately futile protests.

In the 1970s, developers had the upper hand. Town regulations were lax and a sympathetic board was in office, she said. Under zoning rules that dated to a decade earlier, Ms. Foster said, 1,000 motels could have been built on Napeague and 12,000 houses in Hither Woods in Montauk. “It all came at once, a tsunami of overdevelopment,” she said. Neither came to pass.

Ms. Foster considers a 1980s effort to save the Grace Estate in Northwest Woods a crowning glory among the key preservation efforts. “I was in shock when I saw the development that could have been on that beautiful piece of historic land.” The roughly 600 acres that reached to Northwest Harbor was where East Hampton began. More than 200 condominium units could have been built along the waterfront. “Local people started to get upset,” she said. “Bonackers and old families felt that they were losing control and a part of their lives.”

For Ms. Foster, arriving in East Hampton as a young woman, it was love at first sight. “I always thought, even the first week I came out here and took a left at Buell Lane from the Sag Harbor road, ‘This is where I want to live.’ ”

Her early battles included an effort to stop a multi-lane highway bypass and opposing a call for a casino in Montauk. Saving farmland from being converted to house lots was another cause. 

Thinking about the future, Ms. Foster said that, despite all the preserved land, current zoning could create unwanted population saturation. She fears that there will be a push to create thousands more house lots on the premise that they would be affordable, a premise she said was unlikely. 

The next fight, she said, was to put a hard population limit in place for the entire town. Her to-do list for current officials includes adequate infrastructure based on realistic population estimates. She supports septic waste upgrades, but not large-scale sewage treatment plants, which she sees as encouraging development. 

New projects billed as “smart” growth get her hackles up, too, she said, particularly if they include calls to relax the town’s building height restrictions. Height, to her, brings to mind Atlantic City or Miami, and not in a good way.

She sees truly long-term plans, those looking out 50 or 100 years, as essential as well. On big changes of the scale necessary, large spans of time are a must. “You’ve got to get them interested, but make it so that they don’t panic,” she said.

“A healthy — and that’s the key word — environment means a healthy economy out here,” she said. Fishing, farming, second-home owners who pay 70 percent of town taxes, she said, was a good balance.