Faced with the daunting task of implementing the Wainscott hamlet plan adopted by the East Hampton Town Board in 2019, last week a trio of consultants advised the board to focus on the relatively easy stuff, specifically the streetscape along the 4,000 linear feet of roadway from West Gate Road to Hedges Lane. In the huge stride that would be the fully completed plan, it was the smallest of steps, but Councilwoman Cate Rogers said a beautified roadway could “lead to enticement of other improvements.”
Carolyn Logan Gluck, the chairwoman of the Wainscott Citizens Advisory Committee, who spoke during the public comment portion before the July 2 presentation, supported the strategy. She called it the “SAT approach,” likening it to scanning the test, doing all the easy questions, and then going back to spend more time on the difficult ones. “Go for the low hanging fruit,” she told the board, indicating her desire to see the streetscape plan and highway improvements, such as decreasing the speed limit, implemented soon.
“We want to make Wainscott walkable,” she said, “so we need sidewalks. If we want people to use the sidewalks, they need to be shaded. If we want the trees to flourish, they need to not be growing under powerlines.” She acknowledged however, that “the elephant in the room is the pit,” referring to the 70-plus-acre plot of land known to the East Hampton Town Planning Board as the Wainscott Commercial Center. There has been an application before that board for six years to subdivide the acreage into 50 building lots zoned commercial-industrial. “I cannot emphasize to you how important it is to continue to pursue the acquisition of the land at the pit and its cleanup.”
If the town wants to implement some of the “public purposes” recommended for the pit — including for a park, a public parking lot, affordable housing, and a train station — it can do so by purchasing the lots, David Eagan, the attorney for the Wainscott Commercial Center, said in an email on Tuesday. Further, he said that the owner had made it clear since the beginning of the subdivision application in 2018 that it was willing to sell to the town. “In fact, we have even offered to grant the town exclusive five-year options to purchase lots for those purposes. To date, we have not seen any movement by the town board toward any such purchases,” he wrote. “In the meantime, the W.C.C continues to receive unsolicited inquiries from outside parties regarding the potential purchase of all or portions of the property and we continue to move forward in good faith with its subdivision application.”
Town Supervisor Kathee Burke-Gonzalez declined to comment.
“The town board owes something to Wainscott,” said David Fink, a former chairman of the Wainscott C.A.C. He said that the town board “didn’t realize the terrible impact the development of the wind farm has had on Wainscott.”
The South Fork Wind Farm’s transmission cable makes landfall in Wainscott and the hamlet has been allotted $5.5 million dollars from a host community agreement from the wind farm’s developers, Orsted U.S. Offshore Wind and Eversource Energy, to be used specifically for projects in Wainscott (as a whole, the town is receiving $29 million, in addition to property taxes). Everyone agreed that money should go to implement portions of the Wainscott Hamlet Report, which had been influenced by the 2005 East Hampton Town Comprehensive Plan.
The hamlet plan was described by Peter Flinker of Dodson and Flinker, a landscape architecture and planning consultancy firm, as an “aspirational vision” that would reconnect roads, improve circulation for cars and pedestrians, separate pedestrians from vehicles, and provide for expanded economic activity. Mr. Flinker prepared the report for the town along with Lisa Liquori of Fine Arts and Sciences, and Vincent Corrado, an engineer with L.K. McLean Associates.
“What’s the brand of this section of Wainscott?” Mr. Flinker, one of the report’s authors, asked the board. “Who are we trying to attract? People want it to feel like it’s a local village center, not something that is for all of Long Island.” He estimated it could cost anywhere from $2.5 to $3 million to bury utility lines, which would allow for the installation of continuous sidewalks and the planting of trees and buffers. Only half of the area has sidewalks.
Mr. Corrado said one of the impediments to downtown growth in Wainscott was the lack of sewage treatment. The proximity of Georgica Pond made this a priority, but a feasibility study, which would cost at least $25,000, had yet to be commissioned.
Consolidating parking areas into shared lots, as opposed to the current setup in which each business has its own lot, could lead to more spaces, more room for existing buildings to expand, and better pedestrian connections. Ms. Liquori, a former East Hampton Town planning director, noted that most of the area is now occupied by parking. “We have to ask ourselves, is that what we want our town to be?” She advocated for incentivizing businesses to adopt a shared lot, like those in Amagansett. “You can have the best plan, but if individual lot owners don’t want to do anything to their properties, nothing happens,” she said, and suggested too that the town incentivize businesses to upgrade their signage.
At least in the short term, it seemed the consultants were saying that much of the report would remain aspirational. Highlighting the difficulty of incorporating any wide-ranging plan in the thickly developed Wainscott business district is the sand pit. The 2005 comprehensive plan called for protecting half its acreage.
“Conceptually the plan is good, but the implementation requires lots of community outreach,” said Councilman Tom Flight.
“Taking it from paper to reality is the challenge,” agreed Councilman Ian Calder-Piedmonte. “I think the beautification and streetscapes is the place to focus on, perhaps the money from the wind farm could fund most of that.”
Councilman David Lys said he supported the streetscape improvements but questioned how they would be tied in to the larger goals of the hamlet. He was skeptical that business owners would get together and agree to shared parking schemes. Further complicating the plan was that much of the land the board was talking about was in rights of way owned by the Metropolitan Transit Authority or the New York State Department of Transportation. Having those larger conversations now is a priority, he said. Addressing the implications of a roundabout called for in the hamlet report, perhaps with a feasibility study, was important in the early stages of planning, he argued.
The consultants assured the board that the report’s recommendations were consistent with the policies of the state agencies, while Mr. Corrado said considering a roundabout at the main intersection could be a “15 or 20-year process.”
“We can’t let this project get bogged down in the very complicated conversation about the roundabout,” said Ms. Logan Gluck. “That project is so far down the road; it would be a shame to delay everything to know whether there is going to be a roundabout.”
Pat Trunzo, a Wainscott business owner, said before anything, the D.O.T. needed to have the highway surveyed to determine if sidewalks were even possible. “Even State D.O.T. does not know exactly where their right of way is,” he said. “I’m someone who tries to walk in Wainscott. I don’t feel safe until I get in front of HomeGoods, which has a sidewalk.”
