“It’s all in line with what Sag Harbor wants to do on paper, and now it’s something we have to do in reality,” Drew Harvey said at the Sag Harbor Village Board meeting Tuesday night. Mr. Harvey, a member of the village’s parks and open space advisory committee, was speaking of a plan to preserve water access points at seven locations in the village, which, he warned, “are at risk of being lost to adjacent homeowners.”
He showed the board members a map of two sites which, he said, “have been lost in my lifetime.” One was on Notre Dame Road, the other on Cove Road in Redwood. The seven places now considered at risk by the parks committee “are actually public rights of way,” he said, “and we’re proposing to survey them and to mark them appropriately.”
They are located on Dartmouth Road, Amherst Road, Notre Dame Road, Yale Road, Green Street, John Street, and at Waterfront Park on Cove Road. Deputy Mayor Ed Haye, who sits on the parks committee, commented that there may be more such sites in the village. “As we keep going through the process, we keep finding more,” he said.
The committee is eager to hear the village board’s feedback on the effort, particularly on proposed signage. “The bare minimum is to mark it, and to maintain the access so that somebody can physically walk down to the water,” Mr. Harvey said. The village will need to hire a surveyor to check out each of the seven sites.
The presentation drew unanimous support from the trustees. “Once we get more information around the surveying, we can start the process,” said Mayor Tom Gardella. And Aidan Corish noted the importance of finding funding. “Let me talk to a grant writer,” he said, “to see if money might be available.”
Mr. Harvey laid out the importance of this work, and how it would protect village property from being absorbed by private homeowners. “This is the thing,” he said, “it’s always in the interest of the adjacent homeowner to block access, tell people that nobody is using it, and then they actually start to maintain part of it and they can claim that the village doesn’t want — the village doesn’t use — it, and that’s what we’re trying to avoid.”
