Parking Dispute Continues

The idea of allowing cars from outside the area to park along streets in their neighborhood continues to rankle residents of the area, a small square of streets bordered by Montauk Highway and the Atlantic Ocean on Napeague,  with one charging on Tuesday that the town was making a calculated attempt to open the area up for additional public access to the ocean beaches. The tussle began last August over the removal of no-parking signs along Dolphin Drive, which ended with their replacement before the beach season this year.

With the exception of a small parking lot open to town residents at the end of Atlantic Drive, no street parking has been allowed in the neighborhood. Residents of the area have been lobbying hard against a town nature preserve committee recommendation that some parking be allowed along Dolphin Drive, at the edge of the South Flora preserve.

At a town board meeting Tuesday, Marty Ligorner called the recent removal of no-parking signs on Leeton Road, another small lane in the neighborhood, “an assault on our community by the Highway Department.” According to Town Supervisor Larry Cantwell, a resident had alerted the town to the faded condition of the signs, but before their replacement was scheduled, officials reviewed the parking regulations and found there was no law against parking on a section of that road.

Jonathan Wallace, a Dolphin Drive resident who sued the town after it found no legislative authority for a parking ban there, said, “To do this a second time on Leeton is not coincidental.” He said, “We start to hear voices now demanding parking on Marlin Drive,” another neighborhood road. In addition, he said, members of the nature preserve committee had recently raised a question about town ownership of the roadside, which Mr. Wallace described as “23 feet of our front yards.”

 “These five things all tie together in a plan to transform our neighborhood,” Mr. Wallace said, charging that the nature preserve committee, which developed the draft management plan for South Flora, had “gone far beyond” the bounds of its charge.

Speaking later in the meeting, Mr. Wallace’s wife, Mary Wallace, urged the town board to ensure the protection of the dunes at the foot of Dolphin Drive, where there is a walking path. She said foot traffic was destroying the dunes, which she said were key to protecting the area from flooding. “If there is a storm tomorrow, we are done. We are done,” she said.

Although Supervisor Cantwell said that “most of that traffic is coming from your subdivision,” Ms. Wallace disagreed, saying erosion caused by foot traffic was “not from the neighborhood people.”