A practical move to consolidate the East Hampton Town Shellfish Hatchery, or an ill-advised and unseemly rush to do the wrong thing? The town board debated the question anew last Thursday, much of its four-hour meeting devoted to a heated debate pitting the board’s majority against one member and two residents.
Last year, the town purchased 36 Gann Road in Springs, a parcel at the corner of Babe’s Lane contiguous to the hatchery’s nursery grow-out site in Three Mile Harbor, for $2.1 million, with the intention of constructing new headquarters for the hatchery as well as an environmental education center, the latter to be situated in an existing building. The hatchery’s present site, on Fort Pond Bay in Montauk, is problematic for several reasons, its director has said, not least the distance from nursery sites and the high mortality that results from transporting the juvenile shellfish that are spawned there.
The town was awarded a $400,000 Empire State Development grant, which the board agreed would be allocated toward design, permitting, and preliminary construction costs for the new facility, which is estimated to cost $2.65 million. The town would be responsible for 10 percent of the total.
At a July 9 meeting, Councilman Jeff Bragman raised objections, saying that the board was rushing into an expensive project, including a large new structure that would be “out of character” in the residential neighborhood. Ira Barocas, a resident of Babe’s Lane, told the board that he and his neighbors were “seriously concerned about our little world.”
At the board’s July 16 meeting, however, 10 residents, several of them oyster farmers, spoke in support of the project. Last Thursday, the board was set to commit to fund the project, retain survey, architectural, and engineering services, and apply for an additional $2 million in grants. That application was submitted yesterday ahead of a deadline
tomorrow.
Before the debate, Mr. Barocas renewed his plea for more thoughtful and lengthy deliberation, given the long-term impact on the neighborhood. He likened the project to “a runaway train because of this funding deadline” and said that proceeding “without understanding the impact on the neighborhood completely and intimately . . . seems like we’re creating a sense of
urgency that is unseemly in a project
this size.”
Kyle Ballou, a grandson of the late bayman Stuart Vorpahl Jr., said he was concerned that the new hatchery site would encroach on the adjacent commercial dock, “one of the last places left in East Hampton for commercial fishermen” who are “already overburdened and over-regulated.”
Much of last Thursday’s debate centered on a clause in the resolution the board was to vote on, stating that “the preliminary environmental assessment of the project by the Planning Department supports and recommends a negative declaration for the proposed improvements” to the site — an assessment that any environmental impacts would be insignificant.
Mr. Bragman emphatically and repeatedly said that committing to fund the project prior to a full review under the State Environmental Quality Review Act was, at minimum, improper. “I have to say, there are a number of significant gaps in information about which we know nothing,” he said, pointing out that the new building’s footprint, elevation, septic system, and parking have not yet been determined.
“We have a grant for engineering to develop plans,” Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said. “We have to have a well-thought-out and fully developed plan in order to submit any application to the planning board, just like any applicant would. . . . You can’t get there without completing the engineering, which is being paid for by the $400,000 grant. We’re into the construction grant cycle to cover the funding for construction. It doesn’t commit us to . . . paying for the hatchery once it’s gone through that whole process that you describe. The funding cycle starts now for that, and it’s not a commitment to the project.”
But, Mr. Bragman said, “more important than the grant funding is getting the project right for the Town of East Hampton.”
Everyone agrees, the supervisor said, “and I think the way to do that is to continue with the engineering and design plans so that we can have an application that can be fully vetted by the community and by the planning board.”
Mr. Bragman persisted. “The public is somewhat anxious about the speed with which this is moving forward and the fact that grant funding seems to be driving it forward,” he said. Further, he said, a document prepared by a member of the Planning Department that concluded no significant environmental impacts to the site was an utterly inadequate assessment of a parcel that is situated in a harbor protection overlay district, and as such, warrants review. “When I see a document that someone has tasked a member of the planning department to prepare for us and it checks off every box that says there’s no impact, I get nervous.”
“It says ‘no’ or ‘insignificant,’ “Mr. Van Scoyoc said.
“ ‘No’ or ‘small’ means ‘no’!” Mr. Bragman responded. “When I see a document — we haven’t even finished a concept plan — that’s prepared by a member of the Planning Department and has checked every impact ‘no’ or ‘small,’ yeah, I get pretty nervous.”
If the town is committing money to the project, it has to have conducted a review under the State Environmental Quality Review Act, he maintained. “If we have a doubt on this, let’s wait and talk it over with the town attorneys tomorrow.” Accepting an environmental assessment recommending a declaration of no significant environmental impacts “is completely improper,” Mr. Bragman said. “They cannot support and recommend a concept plan that doesn’t have a septic system, doesn’t know the clearing, doesn’t recite setbacks, I can go on and on. . . . What’s the hurry here?”
It is a preliminary environmental assessment “because we’ve only got concept plans,” Councilwoman Kathee Burke-Gonzalez said, noting that it will be referred to the planning board next month, “and as this process evolves, we could find out that there are more environmental impacts than we thought. So then we can go back and do a new, deeper dive into the environmental assessment and change it.”
The Planning Department, Mr. Bragman repeated, should not assert “no environmental impacts.”
“It’s a recommendation,” Mr. Van Scoyoc said. “I understand your point. I don’t agree with it.”
“You can’t evaluate environmental impacts when you don’t have a complete project,” Mr. Bragman said again.
Mr. Bragman voted with his colleagues to retain L.K. McLean Associates, which had responded to a request for proposals for engineering services for the new hatchery building, at a cost not to exceed $175,000, but abstained from a vote to commit to funding the project, which the town would have to do if the grant application proves unsuccessful. “I understood that this was going to be a memorializing resolution, and here in the last paragraph it contains an absolute commitment to the funding of this project,” he said.
Councilman David Lys, who has largely shepherded the project to this point, confirmed yesterday morning that the town had submitted a State Consolidated Funding Application for money to construct the new hatchery facility. “We feel confident,” he said, referring to inclusion of more than 50 letters of support and justification.