Trustees May Relocate
The Trustees of the Freeholders and Commonalty of East Hampton, the nine-member board having authority over common lands under the Dongan Patent given them by the king of England in 1686, may be on the move.
At the body’s final meeting of 2014, held on Dec. 9 in its offices at the Donald Lamb Building on Bluff Road in Amagansett, Diane McNally, the trustees’ clerk, told her colleagues that they might be relocated to an as-yet-unspecified building on the Town Hall campus in East Hampton.
Consideration of a move resulted from a space-needs study led by Drew Bennett, a consulting engineer, and Marguerite Wolffsohn, the town’s planning director. Supervisor Larry Cantwell alerted Ms. McNally to the possibility at a meeting last summer.
The purpose, Mr. Cantwell said, would be to consolidate all staff and boards in one location. “For ease of access for the public,” he said, “I think it would be more efficient.”
The room in which the trustees hold their twice-monthly meetings is small. The meetings usually include standing-room-only crowds, be they contractors or shoreline property owners seeking to rebuild a bulkhead or otherwise alter property under trustee jurisdiction, commercial fishermen or sportsmen, or concerned citizens who want to listen to the group’s deliberations. Recently, some observers have implored the trustees to televise their meetings, which would be technically challenging in their present quarters.
“It would be nice to have more space,” Ms. McNally said of a potential move. “The upside would be that we would be closer to all the other town agencies — like planning, zoning, the town board — that we interact with a lot. It could be an improvement. A downside, she said, “is finding a place appropriate for our records. We do have records that we want to lock up and keep secure ourselves.” Several tall, fireproof filing cabinets line one room of the Lamb Building.
There is also symbolic importance, Ms. McNally said, to the trustees’ physical separation from the town board and the agencies she referred to. The trustees often disagree with other local governing bodies: They were harshly critical of the East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals’ determination to grant permission to a West End Road property owner to construct a rock revetment on the beach in 2013, and opposed a ban on alcoholic beverages at Indian Wells Beach that the town board authorized and was in effect last summer.
“I’m trying to be cooperative and within the loop of the town, yet still maintain that independence,” Ms. McNally said. “It is very hard to reconcile the two.” The trustees also own two boats. “I don’t want them left here while we’re somewhere else,” she said. “I do like this building because I’m told it’s an old Coast Guard building. It has a cement floor and is a secure little spot,” she said of the brick building. “Maybe we could just reconfigure our space here.”
Stuart Vorpahl, a trustee in the 1970sand ’80s who still attends some of the group’s meetings, felt that a move to the Town Hall campus might be acceptable if trustee records were kept secure, but expressed irritation with other town agencies. “This non-recognition of the town trustees is ridiculous,” he said. The trustees’ contract, he said, “is with the King of England. That has been upheld by the Supreme Court many times.”
But Stephanie Forsberg, the trustees’ assistant clerk, was supportive of a move, provided the new space met their needs. “It would need to be larger than our current footprint regarding space and utilities, while also providing room for our growing clerical staff and of course an office space for the full-time clerk,” she wrote in an email. “It would be even better if there was room to accommodate the public for our meetings. . . . I think if any space could provide that, then the move would be just fine.”