At a special meeting on Monday, the East Hampton Town Trustees gave themselves an Aug. 15 deadline to complete an inventory of docks and other structures in waterways under their jurisdiction.
The deadline is three months ahead of the expiration of a trustee-imposed moratorium on the construction of docks, catwalks, floating docks, floating structures, and floating platforms in trustee waters in order to allow them time to conduct the inventory. A one-year moratorium was set in November 2021, following the trustees’ split vote to approve construction of an 80-foot floating dock at a bulkheaded residential property on Three Mile Harbor, the first such approval in more than three decades. That vote spurred Francis Bock, the trustees’ clerk, to instruct his colleagues to form a committee to study the matter and issue a recommendation.
In November of last year, as the moratorium neared expiration with the review still to be completed, the trustees voted to extend it for a second year.
The moratorium applies to bottomlands including but not limited to Wainscott Pond, Georgica Pond, Napeague Harbor, Fresh Pond, Hook Pond, Accabonac Creek and Harbor, Pussy’s Pond, Hog Creek, Three Mile Harbor, Duck Creek, Hand’s Creek, Alewife Brook, Northwest Creek, and Little Northwest Creek. It applies to residential property and not to commercial properties or to existing or future duck blinds or floating upweller systems, known as flupsys, which are used to grow shellfish in open water while protecting them from predation.
Once the trustees have completed the inventory, it will be compared and reconciled with drone and other aerial footage. They will search for structures constructed without proper permitting as well as any that may have been expanded since their initial construction without proper permitting.
When the inventory is completed, “we will have to come up with a cohesive policy” regarding future applications for structures in trustee waters, Jim Grimes told his colleagues.
