Earlier this year, the Citizens for the Preservation of Wainscott garnered a great deal of publicity by obtaining signatures on a petition, the purpose of which was to incorporate the hamlet of Wainscott into a village. However, C.P.W.’s petition violated the requirement of New York State Village Law 2-200.1 that “a territory may be incorporated as a village under this chapter provided such territory does not include a part of a city or village.”

C.P.W.’s proposal to follow the boundary of the Wainscott School District, ostensibly pursuant to village Law 2-200.1.b., failed to take into consideration that the Wainscott School District extends into both Sagaponack village and East Hampton village, thus dooming the petition from the start.

Having bolloxed its earlier effort to present a legally viable village, C.P.W. unveiled its new village boundary at a Zoom meeting of the Wainscott Citizens Advisory Committee this past Saturday. This time, C.P.W. presented a boundary which “do[es] not contain more than five square miles,” in purported compliance with New York State Village Law 2-200.1.a.

This new boundary would cut out from the proposed village all the Commercial-Industrial-zoned property on Goodfriend Drive and Plank Road, as well as portions of the land around the airport and every residential parcel on the south side of South Breeze Drive and on Cobber Lane. By my count, this means that approximately 30 houses would not be within the boundary of the proposed village.

C.P.W. proposes to raise revenue by charging non-village residents a fee to park at the village beach. This means that those 30 homeowners on the south side of South Breeze Drive and on Cobber Lane would be deprived of the free and unfettered access to the ocean via Beach Lane, the beach closest to their homes, which would be enjoyed by residents of the village.

When presented with this reality, one of C.P.W.’s representatives used words along the lines of: “We had to draw a line somewhere.” Really?

So, in order to realize their grandiose dreams of incorporation, the would-be Masons and Dixons at C.P.W. decided that the rights of those measly 30 homeowners had to be sacrificed. One of C.P.W.’s representatives later said something about one day annexing those 30 parcels, but that slapdash proposal is hardly a certainty and, particularly in view of C.P.W.’s apparent failure to know the law before bringing its prior petition, not terribly persuasive.

Leaving aside the startling arrogance of unilaterally denying beach access to their neighbors, C.P.W.’s representatives — despite yet another slick PowerPoint presentation — failed to answer one fundamental question: Other than possibly preventing the landing of an electrical cable at Beach Lane (an issue about which I have no opinion one way or another), of what genuine, long-term value is incorporation?

I will leave it to others to parse C.P.W.’s rosy financial projections. But at the W.C.A.C. meeting, C.P.W.’s representatives stated that although the village would have an unpaid planning board and zoning board of appeals (but, alas, no architectural review board), it would subcontract the essential and expensive staff support of a planning department to its neighboring municipalities. This means that the hard work required to “preserve the unique, bucolic characteristics through more responsive zoning,” to quote C.P.W.’s website, would be left for others to actually administer. It seems clear to me that once C.P.W.’s goal of stopping the electrical cable is, or is not, achieved, the single most essential reason to incorporate, namely to “preserve the unique, bucolic characteristics” of Wainscott, which is a goal I share, will be little more than an afterthought.

Very truly yours,

SAMUEL KRAMER
Wainscott, NY

I write this in my private capacity, and not as a representative of the town or the town planning board, which I chair.

A letter to the editor of The East Hampton Star…