A week after the East Hampton Town Board unveiled a proposed management plan for the 18-acre Amagansett Plains parcel at 555 Montauk Highway, the Amagansett Citizens Advisory Committee asked for a 90-day pause before any public hearings or votes are scheduled on the plan.
The committee is displeased with the management plan’s emphasis on potentially non-passive recreational uses and with language that leaves the door open for large-scale public events, a possible new building, and the addition of lots of new asphalt.
Addressing the town board on Tuesday, the committee’s chairwoman, Rona Klopman, asked the board to give the community time “to get an inkling for what you have planned for this property.”
The property was purchased in 2014 with $10.1 million from the town’s community preservation fund.
Councilman David Lys, who rode herd on the management plan as it worked its way through the town’s nature preserve committee over the past two years, said he had no problem with Ms. Klopman’s request, but he did push back on what he said was incorrect conjecture concerning a possible recreation center and deployment of asphalt on the property, a former potato field the fate of which has long been debated in the hamlet.
Mr. Lys noted that any asphalt additions were at the request of the Amagansett Fire Department and would take place in an area at the front of the property that had been “rutted out.”
The site, which has historically been used as a landing area for medical-evacuation helicopters, would continue to do so but without the addition of an asphalt landing pad, Mr. Lys said. As for the possibility that a new building might arise on the site, Mr. Lys said that the man-
agement plan doesn’t “say this is going to be done, [but] allows for a future town board to do so.”
Attendees at Monday’s monthly ACAC meeting were concerned that the field — which had been the launch site for the pro-veteran Soldier Ride — could be rendered a dust bowl if the town were to allow large-scale permitted events to take place there.
John Broderick, a member of the committee, highlighted what he said was a discrepancy between the first page of the management plan and the last page. The plan’s forward section says that “since the town’s purchase the property has been mowed periodically and used for occasional public or semi-public events, but has otherwise been kept in a passive state.”
Mr. Broderick said there was “explicit language to allow commercial uses” deployed later in the plan, in that the management plan would allow for
“community functions or gatherings as approved by the town board.”
While proferring a diplomatic mien as she addressed the board on Tuesday, Ms. Klopman was highly critical of Mr. Lys — and the town board generally — at Monday’s ACAC meeting, for what she said was Mr. Lys’s overemphasis on recreation.
“All David cares about is recreation — you’re looking at a person who wants to expand that,” she said. And after a 20-year battle to retain the open vistas and native grasslands that characterize the property, Ms. Klopman was frustrated that despite “whatever the C.A.C.s have to say, they do whatever they want.”
The dust-up over the management plan for Amagansett Plains coincided with a Tuesday C.P.F. status update by Scott Wilson, the town’s director of land acquisition and management.
In a brief presentation, Mr. Wilson reviewed the town’s C.P.F. purchases to date — 507, with seven in contract — as he pointed to two possible C.P.F. targets for 2023: The Brooks-Park house in Springs, and the Carl Fisher House and Annex in Montauk. There are also “other projects we may not know about,” he said.
Mr. Wilson noted that while not all C.P.F. properties warranted a full management plan, they are all in need of some sort of stewardship, adding that the town regularly keeps tabs on them to make sure they remain as they existed at the time of their acquisition. The town also “regularly monitors” its C.P.F. properties for dumping or other encroachments, said Mr. Wilson.
It is unclear how or if that monitoring applies to encroachments by the town itself: During the Monday ACAC meeting, two Amagansett residents displayed cellphone photos that showed numerous Town of East Hampton garbage bins and picnic tables stored at the Amagansett Plains site.
“That stuff is not supposed to be there,” said Mr. Wilson, who noted that he has been trying to get another town department to remove the cans and tables after fielding a call from an ACAC member. Now that a reporter is asking the town about the garbage cans and benches, Mr. Wilson said with a laugh that “it will all be gone by tomorrow.”
