Sue Us, Montauk Motel Owners Say
The owners of Montauk’s Royal Atlantic Motel have asked to be included as defendants in Defend H2O’s lawsuit seeking to stop the Army Corps of Engineers from building a reinforced dune along the downtown Montauk beach.
Defend H20 filed suit in March against the East Hampton Town Board, Suffolk County, and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation as well as the Army Corps to block the project, which they claim would cause further beach erosion, obstruct public access to the beach, and destroy recreational opportunities and the commerce related to them.
Earlier this month, the Royal Atlantic Corporation, Royal Atlantic East Condominium Owners Association, and a group called the Montauk Beach Preservation Association applied to the United States Eastern District Court to intervene in the lawsuit as additional defendants in order to provide information and to make a counterclaim against Defend H2O.
With 2,900 feet of oceanfront property, they say that their buildings, since Hurricane Sandy, have been “completely exposed to the elements and the ravages of storms and the Atlantic Ocean,” and that they will be adversely affected if the Army Corps project does not proceed.
Earlier this spring, the Army Corps awarded an $8.4 million contract to H&L Contracting of Bay Shore to use 14,560 sand-filled geotextile bags to create a 3,100-foot-long and 50-foot-wide artificial dune along the beach from the Atlantic Terrace motel on the west to Emery Street on the east. It would be covered with three feet of sand, some of which will be stockpiled from beach excavations and the rest trucked in from an offsite sand mine.
The work was to have begun this spring and suspended for the summer season, but due to delays that left little time before Memorial Day, it has been postponed until fall.
The petition to join the lawsuit is signed by Themistocles Kalimnios as president of both the Royal Atlantic Corporation and the Royal Atlantic East Condominium Owners Association, and by Steven Kalimnios, as president of the not-for-profit Montauk Beach Preservation Association.
They claim in the court filing that they represent “a majority of the largest hotel and motel facilities in Montauk,” which have an economic impact, based on their income, of more than $186 million a year.
“It is not the plaintiffs who bring economic sustenance to Montauk,” they wrote in the petition to the court, but rather their group.
If Defend H20’s lawsuit succeeds, they say, “in all likelihood it will cause the strangulation of Montauk as a town,” and threaten their survival.
Should the Army Corps beach project be scuttled, they said they would hold the plaintiffs personally liable for physical and monetary damages, as a result of loss of income.
Their request to the court concludes with the Biblical adage, “As you sow, so shall you reap.”
The Army Corps plan, formally called the Downtown Montauk Stabilization Project, was authorized under a post-Hurricane Sandy emergency beach repair program, and is designed as a stop-gap measure until the Army Corps undertakes a more extensive project as part of its Fire Island to Montauk Point reformulation study. That study has been under way for decades, and observers have questioned when and whether it might occur.
The reinforced dune would be built with federal money, although the town would be responsible for its maintenance.
The head of Defend H20, Kevin McAllister, and the other plaintiffs — Mike Bottini, Rav Freidel, Jay Levine, and Thomas Muse — assert in their lawsuit that the project conflicts with numerous shoreline policies in the town’s state-approved Local Waterfront Revitalization Plan, including a ban on hard structures on the ocean beach.