By a vote of 4 to 2, the East Hampton Town Planning Board resolved at its Feb. 7 meeting to hire an attorney to advise it on whether or not to seek lead agency status on the town’s proposed new senior citizens center.
Sam Kramer, the planning board’s chairman, told his colleagues that he had interviewed Scott Middleton of the Campolo, Middleton & McCormick firm. Mr. Middleton also serves as North Haven Village’s attorney.
The vote followed a near-hourlong debate on whether the planning board should seek lead agency status. That conversation followed the board’s Jan. 24 vote, by a 5-to-1 majority, to advise the town board that it objects to the latter’s plan to designate itself the lead agency on the senior center.
The senior center has become the focus of controversy in recent months. The town board has discussed the project for a decade, having sought input from the community and acquired the land on Abraham’s Path in Amagansett on which construction is to begin later this year. After considering several proposals, in January 2023, the town announced that it had selected a plan from R2 Architecture for a 22,000-square-foot modernist building with an estimated cost of $31.6 million. Toward the end of last year, however, several residents began voicing objections to the design’s size, cost, and features.
The town board has indicated that it will vote on the use of a legal mechanism called Monroe analysis, an inquiry into whether public interest can take precedence over zoning standards and procedures.
A dispute between the town board and planning board over lead agency status would be resolved by the commissioner of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.
Mr. Kramer told his colleagues that on Jan. 25, following its last meeting, he had advised Jeremy Samuelson, director of the planning department, by letter that the planning board objected to the town board’s intention to seek lead agency status on the project. The same day, he said, Jeff Bragman, a former councilman and a persistent critic of the town board’s senior center plan, advised him that the letter did not go far enough, that it “needed to affirmatively state that the planning board wanted to be lead agency and not just that we objected to the town board being lead agency.”
Mr. Kramer then wrote to Robert Connelly, the town attorney, who, he said, replied that he cannot represent the planning board in the matter and that the planning board must retain special counsel.
“As I see it,” Mr. Kramer told his colleagues, “the planning board needs legal advice, which includes a number of issues.” Among those issues would be: whether the planning board had grounds to object to the town board’s declaration of lead agency status and whether it should assert its own status as lead agency; determining what standards the D.E.C. commissioner considers when making decisions in a lead agency dispute; how the planning board could influence a D.E.C. determination if the town is determined to be the lead agency, and how the planning board could participate in the environmental review process if the town board is not the lead agency.
Speaking for himself, he said, “I feel more comfortable answering a lot of those questions with the advice of counsel.” Mr. Kramer also said that he disagreed with the conclusions of a traffic study conducted as part of an environmental assessment, and believed that it had understated the new senior center’s potential impact. “We spend a lot of time on traffic studies,” he said of the planning board. “We’ve spent a lot of time on the Wainscott Commercial Center, to pick a prominent example, picking apart their traffic study and showing them why it’s inadequate, and why it doesn’t reflect the actual situation on the ground.”
Lou Cortese, another member of the planning board, said, “Normally, this kind of application would have come in front of the planning board,” and “we would normally call to be lead agency. . . . We want that lead agency status.”
Michael Hansen, who had cast the sole “no” vote on Jan. 24, voted against hiring an attorney, as well. This time, he was joined by Jennifer Fowkes. “I think that the town has spent 10 years developing this project, doing their due diligence, and . . . I don’t think we should be lead agency,” Ms. Fowkes said. “I think the town should be lead agency.”
Ed Krug disagreed. While he understood why the town wanted lead agency status, he said, “I do think that there’s a lot that we can add as a planning board, and I’m not sure that the process with them as lead agency would allow us to have the kind of impact on this process that we could have.” He did not want to “drag out this process,” he added, but, given the scale of the project, “it’s one that should really come to us.” The only way to resolve the question, he said, was “to get counsel and have an executive session and discuss it and then make a decision.”
