The East Hampton Town Board has a chance at its Jan. 2 organizational meeting to either back away from its decision to remove the chairman of the town planning board, or at least offer the public a reasonable explanation. Samuel Kramer, its chairman since 2019, found out on Monday that he would not be reappointed. A successor had not been named as of Wednesday.
Supervisor Kathee Burke-Gonzalez has said nothing to explain the drastic step.
This really won’t do. Appointments to lead planning and zoning boards are matters of public interest and not equivalent to simple staffing arrangements. No one would ask to peek into the personnel file of a tax clerk hired or fired, but board chairmanships should be reviewed in the open.
Town boards in New York State choose community members to serve on planning, zoning, and the many other administrative boards. In the case of the planning board, members serve seven-year terms. This is designed to smooth out the bumps that politics can bring and insulate the planning board from undue influence. State law also provides for interviews of appointees to be held in open meetings. In a quirk, however, it is up to supervisors and council members to select each board’s leaders annually. This undermines independence and weakens public oversight.
Mr. Kramer has been a capable planning board chairman and there is no obvious reason he should not continue. In the absence of a public explanation, news readers’ thoughts will inevitably turn to the planning board’s thwarted effort to take the reins on Ms. Burke-Gonzalez’s pet project, the unpopular $28-million-plus new senior citizens center. Ms. Burke-Gonzalez and her allies may well have been irritated by the planning board’s attempt to gain control of the project, efforts that included hiring its own lawyer. But that attempt was beaten back, giving the town board the final say.
The town board’s first order of business on the senior center was to decide that it had done enough environmental review and that the 22,000-square-foot building, parking areas, and landscaping would have no adverse impact. Badda-bing. Next, three of five members of the town board voted to exempt the planned senior center from the town’s own zoning and land-use regulations. Badda-boom.
Was Mr. Kramer, as chairman, seen as an impediment to Town Hall’s senior center dreams? If that’s so, Town Hall should just say so. A blanket “no comment” serves no one well and only piques suspicion of government, and lord knows we have enough of that going around already these days.