After weeks or months of quietly gathering signatures on a second petition to incorporate the hamlet of Wainscott into a village, the Citizens for the Preservation of Wainscott announced its new village boundary at a Zoom meeting of the Wainscott Citizens Advisory Committee two Saturdays ago. Since this was the first time that the new boundary had been publicly announced, its full impact did not become clear until it was examined more closely. My quick analysis that approximately 30 houses on the south side of South Breeze Drive and on Cobber Lane would be cut out of the village was an underestimate.

In fact, C.P.W.’s new boundary would also deprive the 20 or so homeowners on Georgica Woods Lane and the east side of Hedges Lane, as well as about 30 homeowners north of Merchants Path, free access to the Wainscott Beach. Thanks to C.P.W.’s new boundary, a total of approximately 80 homeowners in Wainscott, not to mention hundreds of families in Northwest Woods, would have to pay for the privilege of attempting to park at the beach nearest to their homes.

C.P.W.’s paid consultants claim that the proposed village will earn $66,000 annually from parking fees. Presently, the Village of East Hampton charges $400 to park at its beaches (where there are large parking lots). Assuming a similar fee is charged by a village of Wainscott, that would amount to 165 parking passes. That’s a lot of Oldsmobiles crammed into the already-limited parking on poor little Beach Lane.

But the aspect of the new boundary which would make Sykes and Picot most proud is how nimbly and conveniently it slices out of Wainscott the modest amount of affordable housing that the town has slated to be built on Route 114, on the site once owned by Triune Church. While your editorial (Wainscott Village: A Terrible Idea, Dec. 10) is quite correct that the motivation for incorporation by a small group of south-of-the-highway Wainscott property owners is their dismay at the plan for an underground electric cable at Beach Lane, surely their dreams of incorporation are enhanced if their exclusive village does not include affordable housing.

The time has come to say that incorporation is a ruse. In February, when C.P.W. first presented the idea of incorporation, its representatives claimed that a village could operate on a budget of $250,000 to $300,000. Then, earlier this month, C.P.W. estimated this cost to be closer to $900,000. In my view, this new figure continues to be based on, among other things, absurdly low calculations of the expense of subcontracting the hard work of planning and zoning, and assumptions about the litigiousness of property owners on the East End, which have no relationship to reality.

Having lured Wainscott into a yearlong conversation with their now admittedly incorrect predictions of the real costs of operating a village, C.P.W. is now striving wildly to find some valid, legitimate reason for incorporation. There is none. The plain fact is that incorporation serves only the purposes of those south of the highway, who oppose the electrical cable, and wish to impose on their neighbors the enormous legal costs of that fight, whether their neighbors support the cable or not or have no opinion one way or another.

Very truly yours,

SAMUEL KRAMER
Wainscott

December 14, 2020

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 to The East Hampton Star…