The East Hampton Town Trustees and 12 fishermen filed a class-action lawsuit last Thursday on behalf of themselves and all residents of the town, asserting that the five homeowners associations whose members’ deeds were determined to extend to the mean high water mark on a stretch of Napeague beach are unlawfully depriving them of access.
Eleven of the fishermen are among the 14 people who were issued summonses for trespassing during an October protest on what is popularly known as Truck Beach.
The class action, filed in State Supreme Court last Thursday, names the homeowners associations as defendants and seeks a judgment that the town’s residents have the right to use the 4,000-foot stretch of beach for fishing and fishing-related purposes, which they say necessarily includes the use of vehicles.
The Hodgson Russ law firm, the town trustees’ outside counsel for the long-lived dispute, and the Southampton attorney Daniel G. Rodgers are representing the fishermen, who seek to turn the tables on the property owners’ litigious posture, 13 years after the owners took legal action to prevent people from driving and parking on the beach fronting their properties.
The defendants, according to the complaint, “are wealthy homeowners who seek to deprive class plaintiffs of their right to use the beach in order to secure their serene oceanfront views and to significantly increase the value of their oceanfront property.”
“I don’t believe it has ever been about using the beach,” Mr. Rodgers said during a press conference at the Napeague Lane road end on Sunday. “This is about money.” Predicting that the case would be “historic,” the attorney said that “we are now going to be the plaintiffs,” and not “get pushed around anymore.”
The action is the latest twist in a long-running saga, which saw the town and trustees prevail in a 2016 trial, only to have that victory turn to defeat early last year, when a New York State Supreme Court Appellate Division panel overturned that decision and declared that the property owners do, in fact, own the beach to the mean high water line. That decision was later reaffirmed, and town officials blocked access to the beach, erected signs declaring it privately owned, and distributed notices to residents who got beach driving permits stipulating that the permit did not confer the right to drive or park on the 4,000-foot stretch in question.
The class action is intended to “enforce the recognized right” of fishermen and every resident of the town to use the beach to access the ocean “as they have historically done for hundreds of years,” according to the statement.
While the property owners prevailed in that their deeds are recognized as extending to the mean high water line, they were unsuccessful in extinguishing a “reservation” in an 1882 deed the pan el of judges wrote is akin to “an easement allowing the public to use the homeowners associations’ portion of the beach only for fishing and fishing-related purposes.” However, they wrote, it “does not confer upon the town and trustees lawful governmental or regulatory power to issue permits allowing members of the public to operate and park vehicles on any portion of the beach owned by the homeowners associations.”
In that 140-year-old deed, the trustees conveyed some 1,000 acres on Napeague to Arthur Benson.
The plaintiffs — the trustees and the 12 fishermen, including the former trustee Rick Drew — “are asking the court to define and determine the rights” of the fishermen and every other resident of the town, “who individually and as a group, own a reservation across the entire beach,” according to the plaintiffs’ statement.
Francis Bock, clerk of the trustees, and his deputies, Bill Taylor and Jim Grimes, attended Sunday’s press conference. “We feel that this has to be stopped, now,” Mr. Taylor said of the effective privatization of the beach, noting that there were no motorized vehicles in 1882, when the reservation was established. Rather, horses and carts were used to transport boats and fish at the time. “There’s no way to get a boat down to this ocean without pulling it down on a wagon,” he said. “The truck is just a technological advance of the wagon.”
To access the ocean, the fishermen and other residents “rely on their trucks — and their predecessors, on wheeled conveyances or vehicles — to transport their boats and fishing equipment to the water’s edge, as well as caring for and transporting their catch (fish), boats, and equipment away from the water’s edge,” according to the plaintiffs. This right, they contend, “is enshrined” in the 1882 deed.
In light of the Appellate Division panel’s February 2021 ruling and a subsequent temporary restraining order requiring the town to prohibit and prevent all driving and/or parking on the beaches owned by the homeowners associations, fishermen staged acts of civil disobedience in June and October, both times driving a caravan of trucks across the beach and back again. During the second protest, 14 were issued summonses for trespassing, an effort, Mr. Rodgers said at the time, to force a definitive understanding of their rights.
The suit is “asking the court to define exactly what the reservation means,” Mr. Rodgers said on Sunday. “We are confident the court will agree with us” that the reservation establishes the right to fish and use the appropriate means to do so.
For many residents of the town, Truck Beach has been a popular picnicking destination for several generations. Some of them testified to that during the 2016 trial, recalling driving and congregating there as far back as the 1960s.
The property owners’ complaints focused less on fishing and more on what they said were the dangerous conditions created by scores if not hundreds of vehicles driving on the beach, and their claim that beachgoers and their dogs relieved themselves on the beach and in the dunes, creating a public health hazard. Those who picnicked on the beach disputed those assertions in the 2016 trial.
Kenneth Silverman, president of one of the homeowners associations who has served as a spokesman for all five of them in their litigation against the town and trustees, said Tuesday that he was not surprised by the class action, nor did he think it would succeed.
“I think they may have forgotten that after 13 years of costly litigation, they’ve lost all these arguments,” he said. “It’s sort of like they’re repackaging the same case, like they think they can put on a Groucho Marx mask and are no longer the East Hampton Town Trustees, they’re Groucho Marx. They were participants here, and they lost. So it seems like recirculating the same arguments. I don’t know where that’s really going to go.”
After the press conference on Sunday, Mr. Grimes attributed the whole conflict to a lost “sense of community.”
“You’re seeing people who are completely disconnected from the community,” Mr. Grimes said. “Once this comes into the court and they’ve separated the reservation from the rest of this,” he added, “I think clear heads will prevail.”
