Opponents Head to Court to Block Montauk Sandbags
An Army Corps of Engineers plan to build a sandbag-reinforced artificial dune along the downtown Montauk ocean beach will be challenged in court. Defend H2O, an environmental advocacy organization, along with four individual petitioners, announced that it had filed notice on Friday in State Supreme Court.
The group intends to file an Article 78 lawsuit next month against the East Hampton Town Board, Suffolk County, and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, along with the Army Corps, and seeks to overturn the approvals that have been granted.
East Hampton Town Supervisor Larry Cantwell said yesterday that the town had not received formal notice of the lawsuit, but, he said, the town will vigorously defend itself.
The specifications for the $8.4 million project, which would be paid for with federal money, call for installation of a 3,100-foot-long and 50-foot-wide revetment from the Atlantic Terrace motel to Emery Street made of 14,560 geotextile sandbags. These would be covered with three feet of sand, some stockpiled from an excavation of the beach and the rest trucked in from an off-site sand mine. The Army Corps formally awarded the job to H&L Contracting of Bay Shore on Friday.
The project has been cast as a temporary solution that would be removed when the Army Corps undertakes a more extensive project as part of its Fire Island to Montauk Point reformulation study. However, when that project might happen has been questioned.
According to a Defend H2O press release, the structure "will span the narrow beach creating an unnatural 'bump-out,' " and will result in "the inevitable loss of a coveted recreational beach" by inducing scouring and erosion. Risks of flooding will be increased, the group also says, because of the destruction of natural erosion-protective features.
The project, the court filing claims, will also "create a physical obstruction to public beach access, insufficiently contain and dispose of stormwater runoff," and destroy recreational opportunities and the commerce related to them.
The plan, called the Downtown Montauk Stabilization Project, the lawsuit says, conflicts with shoreline policies in the town's Local Waterfront Revitalization Plan that outlaw hard structures on the ocean beach.
"Sand-filled geotextile bags and tubes are hard structures," according to the press release. By authorizing permits and providing the federal funding for the project, the county, Army Corps, and state D.E.C. are complicit in "not adhering to town coastal policy," the release says.
The additional plaintiffs in the lawsuit are Rav Friedel and Jay Levine, both Montauk residents, Michael Bottini, and Thomas Muse, also of Montauk. Mr. Bottini, Mr. Muse, and Mr. Levine are affiliated with the Eastern Long Island Chapter of the Surfrider Foundation, which has spoken out vigorously against the project; Mr. Bottini is the group's volunteer chairman.
Also in the press release, Kevin McAllister, the founder of Defend H20, charged that officials "made a conscious decision to sacrifice a public beach in favor of private property interests."
The assertion, he said, that the sandbag installation "is not shoreline hardening, will have no adverse impacts to the beach," and can be seen as temporary, "is scientifically indefensible and fundamentally wrong," he said.
"If implemented, this project sets a terrible precedent for the Town of East Hampton, whose economy is largely driven by it natural beaches," Mr. Bottini said in the press release.
"Let it be known that nobody, not the Town of East Hampton, the Army Corps, Suffolk County or the DEC are going to ruin the Montauk beaches! Not without a knock-down, drag-out fight" said Mr. Freidel, a plaintiff in the action.