It’s Past Time To Tamp Down
We found ourselves stewing last week about a worsening situation on the Napeague stretch of Montauk Highway as three of four restaurants there, the Lobster Roll, the Clam Bar, and Cyril’s Fish House, grow ever more popular. During Memorial Day weekend, parked vehicles narrowed the roadway, creating unsafe passage for motorists and dangers for pedestrians.
As usual, the tie-ups were the worst at Cyril’s. The stop-and-go traffic extended about a half-mile to the east after staff there illegally cordoned off the road shoulder with more than 100 feet of orange cones to make room for taxicabs. Stuck waiting to get through the chaos, we wondered, if not this, just what would it take for officials to impose some semblance of control?
But it’s not just about what happens on Napeague. Successive generations of East Hampton Town officials have proven unable to tamp down the mayhem from Montauk Point to Wainscott as the summertime crowds descend. As one letter-writer put it last week, over Memorial Day weekend “. . . you may have witnessed a town out of control.” All this raises the question of whether our local government, as configured today, can meet the real-world demands of a 21st-century resort community. As Ken Walles, the author of the aforementioned letter, said, “Town officials need to be strictly held accountable and should not allow the continued misuse of our cherished resource.” And that is being polite.
So the issue is to decide just what effective government for the Town of East Hampton would be. Elements would obviously include more police on the streets as well as ordinance enforcement officers, but it would also have to include a shift in attitude among officials away from what appears to be too much deference to money-making ventures. Those who sit in Town Hall must remember just whom they were elected to represent — and whom they were not.
Such a change in control would come with a cost, of course, but we believe that public support for shifting budget priorities — and perhaps even higher taxes — could be attained if a quieter, saner community was the guaranteed reward.
East Hampton was at one time derisively called the Land of No. It is well past time for some of that get-tough spirit to return