For Immediate Release

Wealthy Group of Disgruntled South of the Highway Homeowners Misleadingly Attempt to Blame Town Board for The Fatal Flaws of Its Previous Incorporation Petition

Yesterday, the Citizens for the Preservation of Wainscott (“CPW”), a group of wealthy homeowners whose sole objective is to prevent the landing of a wind-farm electrical cable at Beach Lane in Wainscott, filed an Article 78 Proceeding in Suffolk County Supreme Court, in an attempt to overturn an easement which the East Hampton Town Board voted last week to grant to South Fork Wind LLC.

As part of its Court filing, under the headline “Another Reason For The Board’s Illegal Action Is To Evade A Citizens’ Movement To Incorporate Wainscott As A Village”, CPW is compelled to acknowledge that the purpose of incorporation is to “have a legal say” – in actuality, to veto – the Town’s easement. But CPW overhypes the strength of support for incorporation in Wainscott, and hyperbolically argues that the Town Board “accelerat[ed] its consideration of the Easement … ‘to take the wind out of the sails’” of and “end-run” the Wainscott incorporation movement.

CPW fails to tell the Court that, although CPW’s original petition for incorporation was “announced with great fanfare on July 4, 2020″ (CPW’s Court filing, ¶ 149), that petition failed utterly to comply with clear-cut requirements of the New York State Village Law § 2-206.1.d., that preclude incorporation of a “territory [that] is part of a city or village”. CPW, despite spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on lawyers and consultants, proposed an incorporation scheme in which the proposed village of Wainscott would include parts of the Incorporated Village of Sagaponack and the Incorporated Village of East Hampton.

As a result, CPW’s grandiose plans of incorporation were put on hold for several months, while CPW went back to the drawing board and came up with a new boundary for the village of Wainscott, under a different provision of the law, that CPW finally unveiled on December 30, 2020.

If CPW had done its homework, and if CPW had not bollixed the incorporation petition which it circulated in July, then the issue of Wainscott’s incorporation would have been presented to the Supervisor and could have been presented to the voters of Wainscott months ago. But, because CPW circulated a defective petition and thereby wasted the five months since July, 2020, CPW did not present its new incorporation petition until the very end of December, at just the same time that the Town Board was already considering the easement.

Yet, with astonishing hubris and a complete inability to take the blame for its own failures, CPW’s Article 78 court filing falsely claims that the Town Board passed the easement last week in order to undermine CPW’s odious plans, to incorporate Wainscott.

While Wainscott United’s sole interest is in opposing the proposed incorporation of Wainscott and Wainscott United takes no position with respect to the wind farm project it is clear that CPW’s misguided attempt to incorporate Wainscott is the only “end-run” here, with which CPW seeks to defeat the project, short-circuit the easement grant and preempt State and Federal regulatory processes.

CPW cannot be trusted and its attempts to incorporate, which are based on false promises and fictional financial projections, should be rejected.