No-Parking Versus Access Along Dolphin Drive

A hearing tonight before the East Hampton Town Board could pit Napeague residents advocating a parking ban along Dolphin Drive against those who see a no-parking zone there as a barrier to the public’s access to town-owned lands.

The hearing, on establishing a no-parking zone on both sides of Dolphin Drive, where East Hampton Town residents may park now, will be held in conjunction with another, to designate a 37-acre, town-owned oceanfront parcel adjoining Dolphin Drive, known as the South Flora property, as a nature preserve.

Residents of the neighborhood near Dolphin Drive have asked the town board to extend a no-parking zone on surrounding streets to that road as well. The town’s nature preserve committee and the East Hampton Town Trustees, however, have come out in support of providing parking to allow people to get onto the South Flora acreage and the ocean beach, saying that prohibiting parking could, in effect, privatize that stretch of beach.

The nature preserve committee, in a Sept. 16 letter to the town board signed by its chairman, Zachary Cohen, said that “there has always been an assumption . . . that the public has the right to access preserves.”

The committee wrote that “all neighboring streets have no daytime parking allowed, at least from May 15 to Oct. 1.” Off-road parking along Dolphin Drive would provide access to a truck path to the ocean along that side of the South Flora property, the committee says.

In his own statement on the issue, Mr. Cohen concluded that “the only possibility of guaranteed reasonable access to the beach at South Flora is to provide parking along Dolphin Drive near the existing access points. ‘No parking’ on Dolphin Drive would set a new precedent of denying access to trails and waterfront on publicly owned land at a time when the town and trustees are fighting in court over whether private persons can own and control access to the beaches.”

The hearings begin at 6:30 p.m. at East Hampton Town Hall.