Trustees Seek Clarity on Lot Boundaries
While residents of the Driftwood Shores development in Springs who have crowded recent meetings of the East Hampton Town Trustees did not attend Monday’s meeting, Rick Whalen, the trustees’ attorney, described an attempt to find out, once and for all, if the trustees have a valid ownership claim to the beach there and with it public access rights above the mean high-water mark.
Driftwood Shores residents have complained that their traditional use of the beach there has been questioned by new owners of a bayfront house who insist the public does not have legal access to the beach above mean high water. The results of the research Mr. Whalen described could have far-reaching consequences.
The trustees do not dispute that current deeds to certain bayfront properties state that private ownership extends to the high-water mark, but Mr. Whalen suspects that demarcation was not in the original conveyances and may therefore be invalid. Fidelity National Title will search the title chain prior to 1958 or ’59 when the Driftwood Shores subdivision map was filed.
“They’re looking for the pre-file map, describing the property fronting on waters of Gardiner’s Bay, for the exact language of the boundary,” Mr. Whalen said. “Does it say to the high water mark, to the water, to the bank, to the cliff?” The chain and a map abstract go back to 1884, he said. “We want to find out, if you go back far enough, do you find that the early conveyances did not go to mean high water?”
The title search will cost $1,800 and take approximately two weeks, Mr. Whalen told the trustees, who voted unanimously for it to proceed. They also voted to allocate an additional $2,000 for a title search to determine if the public has access rights to Wainscott Pond. “Based on what I’m seeing, I’m not as optimistic it will give us an access over that road,” Mr. Whalen said of an unnamed road leading to the pond from the south end of Beach Lane.
“From everything I’ve ever heard, there is no access to the pond,” Francis Bock, the trustees’ clerk, said. “Why don’t we just find out once and for all?”
Otherwise, an update on the effort to combat harmful algal blooms in Georgica Pond was the focus of the unusually quiet meeting. Sara Davison, executive director of the Friends of Georgica Pond Foundation, a group of property owners, told the trustees that the aquatic weed harvester the group launched in May had removed four pickup-truck loads of macroalgae, blooms that have preceded outbreaks of the cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, which deplete dissolved oxygen and threaten human and animal health. The project is meant to determine if removing macroalgae is effective in combatting cyanobacteria, which has forced the trustees to close the pond to marine harvesting for three consecutive years.
Compared to the last two years, macroalgae growth in the pond has been very slow, Ms. Davison said. “This is a combination of different conditions,” she said, among them “the pond being much fuller, and cooler,” due to a cool spring. Another factor may be a bloom of dinoflagellate, a marine plankton, which has shaded the water, inhibiting photosynthesis, she said.
Landowners on the east and west sides of the pond have provided sites to offload the macroalgae, which is brought to the town’s recycling center for use as compost.
Brian Byrnes asked Ms. Davison if she could predict the project’s efficacy. Not yet, was the answer. “Is this effective in removing nitrogen and phosphorous from the pond? We’ll know at the end of the season” when Christopher Gobler, who the trustees and the Friends of Georgica Pond have engaged to monitor water quality, has completed an analysis. “We’ll report that to you right away,” she said.
Discussion turned to the trustees’ traditional biannual opening of the pond to the Atlantic Ocean, which serves to flush its waters and restore salinity, dissolving cyanobacteria blooms in the process. Jim Grimes said he was troubled that “every time we don’t let this pond, we’re doing an incredible disservice to this environment. I think we should be focusing on making every effort to breach this pond with as much frequency as we can.”
That effort, however, is complicated by federally protected piping plovers and least terns, which nest on nearby beaches, with several plover chicks now in protected areas. “We want to open it as soon as possible,” Bill Taylor said, “and we want to make sure it’s open in March, before the plover establish themselves.”
The trustees’ task, Mr. Grimes said, is to balance protection of the plovers and terns with the urgent effort to restore the pond to health. To that end, an application to the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation for a permit to dredge the pond is under way.