Trustees Hear Maidstone Park Beach Plea
Memorial Day weekend had not yet arrived, but crowds and noise were already on the minds of two residents of Springs on Monday at a meeting of the East Hampton Town Trustees, who manage many of the town’s beaches and waterways on behalf of the public. Penny Helm and Susan Winkler addressed the board separately, urging new limits on the use of beaches. The trustees, some more forcefully than others, opposed additional restrictions.
Ms. Helm lamented what she called excessive vehicles on the small crescent beach at Maidstone Park, just inside Three Mile Harbor. She said up to 20 vehicles crowd the small area on summer days, and described instances in which she came out of the water to find one parked on either side of her blanket and beach chair. Saying vehicles are a safety hazard, harm the environment, and change the beach’s character for the worse, she proposed a defined area in which they would be prohibited. A fence had been removed several years ago, possibly for dredging equipment, she said, and asked that it be replaced with an opening only wide enough for pedestrian access.
Diane McNally, until the last election the longtime clerk of the trustees, said the area Ms. Helm referred to was not a designated public bathing beach. Referring to the town-owned bayfront beach on the other side of Maidstone Park Road, where vehicles are prohibited, she said, with apparent irony, “We could take it to the town and ask how much of the 3,000 linear feet of beach — where vehicles and dogs are prohibited from accessing — they’d be willing to give up.” That nearby beach, she said, “is open and available to the public year-round, and it’s lifeguarded.”
Francis Bock, the clerk, said the trustees would find out if a fence had been removed. “At that point we should continue the conversation,” he said. He did, however, question the need for two vehicle accesses at the small beach inside the harbor. Eliminating one, he said, “is not denying anybody access with a vehicle” but a matter of controlling traffic.
Tim Bock, one of the trustees, took exception to the idea that vehicles on beaches were a hazard. “Everybody keeps coming in saying it’s a safety issue, yet there’s never been a safety problem. No one has ever gotten hurt. I don’t know why we’re even entertaining this.” Vehicles have become more numerous in the last few years, Ms. Helm replied.
Ms. Winkler said that the beaches should be a respite from the town’s “huge traffic problem” and a place without “trucks and gasoline fumes and oil and exhaust blowing in my face,” nor dogs, loud radios, or catered events. “I would like no motor vehicles and no dogs on the beach at any time from Memorial Day to Labor Day — three months of peace and quiet for the taxpaying beach lovers.”
Beach ordinances, Ms. McNally said, took into consideration all user groups, and no one group “should have any more privilege than another.” Ms. Winkler responded, saying, “I just think we have gone overboard with this, and we’re ruining the beaches. . . . Somebody’s always mad at somebody, but what about all the rest of us who aren’t trying to do anything except go there?”
The trustees also heard from Sara Davison, executive director of the Friends of Georgica Pond Foundation, a group of property owners, who have a project underway intended to restore the pond to health. Ryan Ruggiero and Trevor Adams, college students who have been hired to operate an aquatic harvester that will remove macroalgae from the pond this summer, received initial training on Monday, Ms. Davison said. The project is meant to determine if the removal of macroalgae, which releases nitrogen and phosphorous as it decays, is an effective way to deter the blue-green algal blooms that caused the trustees to close the pond to crabbing and warn against exposure to its water in the summers of 2014 and ’15. The harvester is to operate Monday through Friday for up to seven hours per day.
Christopher Gobler of Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, whom the trustees and the foundation have engaged to test the pond’s water quality, has done chemical and metal analysis of the macroalgae and determined that it meets standards for use as compost. When macroalgae is offloaded from the harvester, it will be delivered to the town’s recycling center, Ms. Davison said.