A New York State Supreme Court judge has denied the East Hampton Town Trustees’ motion seeking clarification of a May 2023 order that both the trustees and the town must pay $389,060 of the plaintiffs’ attorneys’ fees as defendants in lawsuits brought in 2009 over ownership of a stretch of Napeague ocean beach popularly known as Truck Beach.
The trustees had argued that the 2023 order to reimburse the attorneys’ fees was enforceable only against the town; in the alternative they had asked for a stay of enforcement pending resolution of their appeal of the court’s 2022 contempt order. Justice Thomas F. Whelan rejected those arguments in a Jan. 24 ruling.
In the 2022 contempt ruling, Justice Paul J. Baisley Jr. ordered that more than 6,000 East Hampton beach-driving permits be revoked and held the town and trustees in contempt, levying a nearly $240,000 fine for violating a 2021 court decision that the 4,000-foot stretch of Napeague shoreline was privately owned.
The trustees argued that “there is no specific reference to ‘the trustees’ alleged contempt” nor mention of the trustees being in violation of the court’s judgment. The plaintiffs countered that “nearly a year after this court’s contempt decision and more than three years after the Second Department’s decision decreeing that the subject property belongs to the homeowners . . . the trustees still hold themselves out as the owners of the property and have refused to amend” the town code to reflect differently. They also argued that the trustees’ motion to clarify has no basis in law.
The trustees, however, do not enact laws in the town code, nor do they have enforcement powers. Nonetheless, Justice Whelan ruled, despite their insistence that the town and trustees are different entities, that “the trustees have committed independent contumacious conduct with respect to” the section of town code regarding beaches, which states that the trustees and the town board each have ownership and authority over certain beaches in the town. The code, he wrote, does not specifically exclude the stretch known as Truck Beach from the definition of trustee beaches.
“The trustees have acknowledged that the town board required their approval to change the language of” the code governing beaches, he wrote, “but the town code has not been revised because a majority of the trustees declined to adopt a resolution regarding same. Moreover, the trustees’ website still maintains that they ‘claim ownership of the ocean beaches from mean low water to the grass lines at the base of the dunes,’ a clear derogation of the Second Department’s decision which held that plaintiffs owned the subject property to the mean high-water mark.”
The tangled case, which dates to 2009, is now in Justice Whelan’s hands following the August 2023 retirement of Justice Baisley, who consistently ruled against the town and trustees in the matter.
The Jan. 24 order is the latest in the tussle between the town and trustees, who have jurisdiction over many of the town’s common lands including beaches and waterways, and private property owners who successfully argued in court that the deeds to their property extend to the mean high-water mark of the ocean beach. The trustees conveyed around 1,000 acres of land on Napeague to Arthur Benson in 1882, but that deed “reserved to the inhabitants of the Town of East Hampton the right to land fish boats and netts [sic] to spread the netts [sic] on the adjacent sands and care for the fish and material as has been customary heretofore on the South Shore of the Town lying westerly of these conveyed premises.”
A 2016 trial was determined in favor of the town and trustees, but that decision was reversed in February 2021 by the Appellate Division, which found that the property owners’ deeds do in fact extend to the mean high-water mark and that the town and trustees were prohibited from issuing beach driving permits. In a June 2021 injunction, Justice Baisley reiterated the Appellate Division panel’s decision and further held that all vehicles are prohibited from that beach.
In response to the 2021 reversal of the 2016 ruling, several residents — commercial fishermen and their supporters — staged two civil disobedience actions that year, driving a caravan of trucks and a dory across the stretch of beach before turning around and returning. In the second action, Marine Patrol officers issued citations for trespassing to 14 of the participants.
All of their cases were dismissed a year later in Southampton Town Justice Court in Hampton Bays, after the plaintiffs who had sued the town and trustees tried, unsuccessfully, to have the case removed from East Hampton Justice Court and referred to Justice Baisley. None of them filed a complaint, the fishermen’s attorney, Daniel Rodgers, pointed out. (As East Hampton Town Justices Lisa R. Rana and Steven Tekulsky had recused themselves without disclosing a reason for recusal, the cases were transferred to the nearest adjoining jurisdiction.) The Jan. 24 ruling does not pertain to the 14 fishermen or Mr. Rodgers.
Francis Bock, the trustees’ presiding officer, would not comment on the Jan. 24 ruling except to say that it “was not unexpected.”
Mr. Rodgers called the ruling “just more bullying by these plaintiff homeowners.”
