Legislation was passed by the New York State Legislature last week placing a 2-percent cap on real property tax increases or limiting them to the rate of inflation, whichever is smaller. Intended to relieve taxpayers’ burdens, the law will affect municipal and school, fire, and special district budgets.    

    Between state and local taxes, the Legislature found, property owners in New York pay the second-highest property taxes in the country. Local property tax levies in the state grew by 73 percent from 1998 to 2008, more than twice the rate of inflation.

    The law, which goes into effect next year, does, however, allow taxing districts to override the cap with the approval of three-fifths of their board members. In addition, the limit could be adjusted upward if the overall tax base increases, according to the formula calculated by the state commissioner of tax and finance.

     The cap is to be imposed on that portion of a budget to be raised by taxes. In East Hampton Town, $46.3 million of this year’s almost $70 million budget came from property taxes rather than other revenue sources. Because of the 2-percent cap, the increase next year could be no more than $927,042 unless the town board voted to override the cap or was able to take advantage of certain exemptions from it.

     One of those exemptions is an increase in the cost of employee pensions. In addition, money added to a municipal or district budget to settle a lawsuit that exceeds 5 percent of the levy would also be exempt.

    The possibility of a tax cap had been discussed at meetings of local school boards over the past six months. ­Although the legislation is designed to offer relief to taxpayers, board members feared it would tie their hands.

    Another provision in the law is apt to be considered here. It allows up to three school districts to share a superinten­dent, provided the districts have fewer than 1,000 students each.    

    This could be pertinent for all the districts in East Hampton Town — Springs, Montauk, Amagansett, Wainscott, Sagaponack, and East Hampton itself — as well as for Bridgehampton, with its approximately 160-student base.    

    The legislation addresses state regulations that can drive up costs for local governments and taxing districts, such as provisions about how services must be purchased or provided.

    For instance, the law authorizes municipalities and public authorities to exchange and share services, materials, and equipment, and it increases the competitive bidding threshold for work done using the state’s Consolidated Local Street and Highway Improvement Program (CHIPS) from $100,000 to $250,000, thereby expanding the ability of municipalities to use their own labor.

    It also establishes a “mandate relief redesign team” to make recommendations to the governor on how to provide for further savings.

    “Mandates, where the state tells localities how services should be provided, are primary reasons why New York has such high taxes,” the legislation states.

    The State Legislature passed the law by a vote of 114 to 15, in what Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. called a “truly historic session.”

    In a press release, Mr. Thiele said, “A real property tax cap is not a panacea, but can be a useful management tool.” He said he had worked for the inclusion of several elements, including mandate relief, which, he said, “begins to give schools and local governments greater flexibility, improves services, and saves taxpayers money.”

    Assemblyman Thiele also supported the law’s sunset clause, through which it will expire in five years, at which time it can be reviewed for modification. He also supported a 4-percent increase in state aid to education in the 2012 state budget.

    “In the end, the legislation is good, but far from perfect,” Mr. Thiele said in the press release. “The status quo is unacceptable. New York’s property taxes are among the highest taxes in the nation . . . 96 percent higher than the national average.”         

    “I think we’re positioned to be able to deal with the 2-percent cap,” said East Hampton Town’s budget officer, Len Bernard, yesterday. Although the town slashed its budget by $8 million this year, Mr. Bernard said that the cuts made were meant to be permanent, so that there would be no pressure to increase the tax levy beyond the amount allowed under the cap.

    “I would be worried if our cuts in 2011 were one-time gimmick cuts,” he said.

With Reporting by Bridget LeRoy

    The death on June 17 of a Montauk man who had become infected with the hantavirus has shaken the man’s next-door neighbor, who narrowly escaped death two years ago from a similarly virulent respiratory infection. 

    The neighbor, a carpenter and longtime Montauk resident who did not want his name used, lives in the Shepherd’s Neck section of Montauk next to the house of David Hartstein, the 35-year-old chiropractor who became ill about three weeks ago after cleaning out his basement and a shed, and eventually succumbed to the rare rodent-borne disease. Two neighbors coming down with such a virulent lung infection seemed more than a coincidence, the man said last week.

    The disease is carried by white-footed mice and is contracted through exposure to the animals’ feces and urine. Houses at Shepherd’s Neck date from the 1920s.

    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed on June 22 that hantavirus was the cause of Dr. Hartstein’s sickness. It was the third confirmed case on Long Island, all of which were fatal, and the fourth case in New York State.

    “Believe me, things have crossed my mind,” Dr. Hartstein’s neighbor said on Friday. He was on life support during his seven-week hospital stay in 2009. Biopsies were taken, but “they didn’t find the hantavirus,” he said, although he acknowledged he was not sure if the tests had searched for the bug.

    “We were not alerted,” Peter Constantakes of the New York Department of Health said, when asked whether the neighbor’s 2009 illness had put up a hantavirus flag.

    The Health Department spokesman said that because the department has had experience with hantavirus, the disease would have crossed the minds of health officials, but he also stressed its rarity. The last confirmed case in the state was in 1998, the last on Long Island in 1995. All three of the Long Island cases were on the East End; one in Bridgehampton, the other on Shelter Island. The virus first surfaced in the Southwest in 1993.

    Mr. Constantakes said one reason the disease proved fatal in most cases was the difficulty in finding the virus in otherwise healthy people. “It’s undetectable until a person gets sick.”

    Hantavirus has cropped up all around the country and yet the Centers for Disease Control still know little about it, Mr. Constantakes said. Do infections show up in rainy weather? “More food, more droppings” makes sense, he said, but the jury was still out.

    Early symptoms are flu-like, with fever and aching muscles, but the disease progresses quickly. Once in the lungs, no effective treatment has been found for full-blown hantavirus pulmonary syndrome.

    A number of cases involved people who had been camping outdoors. The assumption is that contact with mouse droppings occurred when bedding was placed on or close to the ground. More cases have involved people who were cleaning out basements and sheds, as Dr. Hartstein had been doing. The infection is not spread by human-to-human contact.

    Mr. Constantakes said his department advised performing such cleanups when the basement or shed was damp, “so dust is not flying around.” There should be as much ventilation as possible. Masks and gloves are recommended, and it is very important to wash up afterward, he said.

    The State Health Department was scheduled to visit the Hartstein house this week to survey the premises. Mr. Constantakes said there would be no effort to trap mice in the area, as the source of hantavirus was already known.

    Dr. Hartstein’s neighbor said he wants to speak to Health Department officials when they visit. “Being that close, such a similar thing. It’s got me concerned.”

    Donations to help Heather Hartstein, Dr. Hartstein’s widow, and their three children, Devon, 5, Logan, 3, and Shane, 1,  can be made to the East End Foundation, P.O. Box 1746, Montauk 11954.

   To reiterate an observation made on this page last week, East Hampton Town is sorely in need of more beach parking. This is no secret; residents know all too well how crowded it gets. You can forget about finding a parking space at any of the ocean lots if you arrive later than noon on a sunny Saturday or Sunday. On the busiest days, police have set up traffic barricades at Ditch Plain in Montauk and turned vehicles away at Atlantic Avenue, Amagansett. Chaos is the result and understandable frustration the lingering sentiment among residents and visitors.

    On Independence Day this year at Napeague Lane, some drivers dropped their passengers near the beach and then circled back to park along Montauk Highway. Parking along this stretch of road, where the speed limit rises to 55 miles per hour and people step on the gas to get east to Montauk, is an unacceptable risk for those who park there, as well as for passing motorists. Obviously, much more parking is needed.

    One short-term possibility would be to allow parking along certain side streets where there is adequate width for a row of cars. Town officials, who have looked the other way for decades, might be loath to annoy homeowners on lanes near the beaches, but those who live north of the highway have a right to get to the ocean, too. A recent proposal informally discussed at Town Hall to allow for cars along one side of Indian Wells Highway in Amagansett was basically laughed off. Perhaps it should not have been so hastily dismissed.

    Tacitly encouraging beachgoers to park along Montauk Highway as on Napeague — or to just give up and go home — is no answer. East Hampton Town Board members and Highway Superintendent Scott King should sit down together in a spirit of cooperation as soon as possible to at least come up with a temporary solution.

    East Hampton Town has been paying for health insurance for ex-employees who are not entitled to it, according to an in-house audit by the town’s budget office.

    The review of bills for health benefits revealed that the town has also paid for some ex-employees who opted to pay for town insurance themselves through the COBRA program, but who didn’t pay the bills, and even for some deceased retirees, or spouses who had died, in some cases for several years.

    Because the New York State Health Insurance Program will only reimburse payments made in error going back six months, the town will lose about $55,000 in unwarranted payments.

    In addition, because the budget office found 194 retired employees receiving benefits this year, rather than the 169 who were actually budgeted for, the town board will have to spend another $340,000 on health benefits in 2011. The extra money will need to be transferred from contingency or surplus funds from other budget lines.

    Charlene Kagel, an accountant for the town, and Len Bernard, the budget officer, presented their findings at a town board meeting on Tuesday, and the board is expected to approve a budget modification at its meeting tonight.

    The cost of health insurance for the town’s employees, current and retired, and their families, is a big-ticket item, totaling about $6.6 million a year, more than one-tenth of the town’s $64 million budget for this year. 

    Reports provided by the town’s Department of Human Resources on “inactive” employees receiving benefits last fall, when this year’s budget was being prepared, showed 169 people in that all-inclusive category. However, Ms. Kagel said, a “census” submitted by the department later in the year indicated that there were 134 inactive employees on the benefits list.

    “It became clear to us that there was really no internal database for tracking this benefit,” Ms. Kagel said.

    A review of the state insurance bill from May of this year, she said, showed the town was being billed for coverage for 206 inactive employees.

    Further investigation showed a number of problems with the records, leading to inaccurate billing and payments, she said. Some employees who had left were still on the tab, including one who has not worked for the town since 2008, leading to some $30,000 in mistaken payments for that person alone.

    Some retired employees were still listed as “active” in the Human Resources Department records. And, Ms. Kagel said, “There were a lot of people on [the list], who we were paying for coverage for, who are deceased.” Those numbered about half a dozen, she said.

    Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson expressed his frustration at the meeting on Tuesday about the failure to accurately monitor retirees and their benefits.

    “There will be follow-up action on all of this,” he said.  Following the work session the board met in executive session to discuss a personnel matter, but did not indicate whether the subject was Pat Breen, the Human Resources Department head, or other employees. Ms. Breen did not return a call for comment.

    “Some of this just doesn’t pass the sniff test,” Mr. Wilkinson said Tuesday. Town Councilwoman Theresa Quigley noted, however, that part of the problem stems from the town’s system of disparate departments, each with its own person in charge.

    “While each individual person is well-intentioned and does a good job,” she said, “there’s a lack of cohesion within the town.”

    Ms. Kagel said that though the town’s integrated software program has been used to catalog information on current employees, data about retirees had not been entered into it.

    Under previous administrations, she said, the cost of employee benefits as a whole was included in its own part of the town budget. Now, she said, each paycheck and benefits expenditure is broken down, per employee, and included in the appropriate department’s budget.

    While previously, the percentage of annual NYSHIP insurance cost hikes was simply added to the lump sum budgeted for benefits, Mr. Wilkinson said he had instituted a zero-based budgeting procedure, through which each expenditure is assessed before it goes into the budget. “Had we not gone into zero-based budgeting — this is what happens,” he said.

    “We would have continued to overpay, without any accountability,” said Councilman Dominick Stanzione, thanking Ms. Kagel and Mr. Bernard for their work.

    “What it sounds like is there was no system, until we came in,” Ms. Quigley said.

Riders Catch Break

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year because of the cost. He said the increase is only for full-fare riders, not those who receive a discount, like students or senior citizens. The 10A bus, which runs from Bridgehampton to East Hampton, is not yet slated for Sunday runs, but that could be in the cards.

    According to Kathleen Cunningham Faraone of East Hampton, a Five Town Rural Transit board member, it is not a social issue. “I think there’s an impression that only poor people ride the bus,” she said. “That is simply not true.” She mentioned another board member, Vince Taldone of Riverhead, who has problems with peripheral vision and therefore cannot drive.

    “Think of how frustrating it would be if you were transit-dependent and you couldn’t get to your family’s on a holiday, or to work on Sunday,” she said.

    Mrs. Faraone complimented Mr. Schneiderman, along with County Legislator Ed Romaine of Center Moriches, for getting it done.

    “For us, it’s the first tiny step toward a rail-and-bus network for the East End,” she said. “It is so exciting.”

    Extended Suffolk Transit service on the S92 and the 10C bus lines has now become available on Sundays and holidays, offering those on the East End who are carless or unable to drive one a way to get around seven days a week.

    Neither the 10C, the bus that runs from East Hampton to Montauk, nor the S92 was previously running seven days a week, making it difficult for some of those who relied on the transit line to get to their jobs. But the additional 50-cent fare on the 10C and the S92, hiking the price for a one-way ride to $2, will help defray the cost of the added run.

    According to a release from the office of County Legislator Jay Schneiderman, the pilot program was approved by the County Legislature in March and signed by County Executive Steve Levy in early April. But it kicked off on Sunday with a “maiden voyage,” according to Mr. Schneiderman, ferrying some of the officials responsible, along with the public, from the Riverhead stop to the County Center.

    The S92 bus line runs from Orient Point to East Hampton, making stops in Riverhead, Flanders, Hampton Bays, Southampton Village, Water Mill, and Sag Harbor. Riders can switch in East Hampton to the 10C, which makes stops in Amagansett and finally Montauk.

    “Legislator Schneiderman really deserves an enormous amount of credit for this,” said Tom Ruhle, the director of housing for East Hampton Town and a board member of Five Town Rural Transit, a nonprofit group formed in 2005 to research and develop improved public transportation concepts for the East End. “This is necessary to get part of the work force out here on the weekends. Transportation is such a key element. It’s a major accomplishment.”

    Mr. Schneiderman said Tuesday that it had never been a question of need for Sunday and holiday public transit. “The main obstacle was, how on earth do you pay for it?” he said. “Fares don’t cover the cost.”

    However, Mr. Schneiderman said, the fare had not been raised at all in almost two decades, so the 50-cent price jump is, well, a fair fare.

    “It may only run from Memorial Day to Columbus Day next year,” he said, adding that the Sunday rides would be shut down sometime in September this year because of the cost. He said the increase is only for full-fare riders, not those who receive a discount, like students or senior citizens. The 10A bus, which runs from Bridgehampton to East Hampton, is not yet slated for Sunday runs, but that could be in the cards.

    According to Kathleen Cunningham Faraone of East Hampton, a Five Town Rural Transit board member, it is not a social issue. “I think there’s an impression that only poor people ride the bus,” she said. “That is simply not true.” She mentioned another board member, Vince Taldone of Riverhead, who has problems with peripheral vision and therefore cannot drive.

    “Think of how frustrating it would be if you were transit-dependent and you couldn’t get to your family’s on a holiday, or to work on Sunday,” she said.

    Mrs. Faraone complimented Mr. Schneiderman, along with County Legislator Ed Romaine of Center Moriches, for getting it done.

    “For us, it’s the first tiny step toward a rail-and-bus network for the East End,” she said. “It is so exciting.”

    A grievance against East Hampton Town filed on behalf of union members who work in the town Highway Department alleges that the highway superintendent’s hiring of two temporary workers violates a clause in the Civil Service Employees Association contract limiting the use of nonunion workers.

    “Whenever an outside contractor is hired, they need to get an approval,” and a determination that the work could not instead have gone to a union member, Sergio Diaz, a regional labor relations specialist with the C.S.E.A., said this week.

    Scott King, the highway superintendent, said yesterday that he had hired the workers on a per diem basis to assist with traffic management and safety assurance for 11 days while highway workers repaved various town roads. “I had everybody that we have,” on the project, he said. “Every single one of my people was out. If the C.S.E.A. has a list [of per diem workers] that I could pick from, I would be happy to do it,” he said.

    The union remains unsatisfied with the response to complaints last year by several workers against Mr. King alleging workplace harassment, including alleged abuses relating to his “language, physically striking an employee, and racist things that were said,” Mr. Diaz said this week.

    The complaints were lodged with Pat Breen, the town’s director of human resources. Her son, Ted Breen, was one of the two workers Mr. King hired. Dell Cullum was the other.

    Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson said this week that town officials’ response to the allegations was appropriate, and that the board had reacted within the legal constraints of its authority, as Mr. King, as highway superintendent, is an independently elected official.

    “We did an immediate investigation,” Mr. Wilkinson said. “Pat Breen and Carl Irace [a town attorney] reported back to the board. The board did take what they thought was an appropriate action.” Citing privacy policies on personnel matters, he declined to say what was done.

    “Elected officials do harbor certain rights that regular employees do not,” Mr. Wilkinson said. “I’m satisfied, with the help of outside counsel, that we did exhaust all that we could do. Am I satisfied with that? No.”

    According to Mr. King, the town board suggested he attend four management-skills seminars, which he completed. Speaking by phone on Tuesday, he said he was attending a fifth that day, voluntarily, as he found them instructive.

    “We are conducting an investigation into Mr. King and his actions,” Mr. Diaz said on Tuesday. The union plans to take the results of its own investigation into the harassment complaints to the board to press for further action, he said.

    In addition, he said he expects that the complaints against Mr. King that were lodged with the town will also be filed “very, very soon” with the New York State Public Employee Safety and Health Bureau. “The town has allowed it long enough,” he said of alleged bad behavior.

    “The town board basically said they can’t do anything, because he is an elected official, but he is still an employee of the Town of East Hampton,” said Mr. Diaz.

    “We’re gathering our facts and information so that we can make a complete ‘confrontation,’ if you would have it, because we think the Town of East Hampton needs to answer some serious questions here,” Mr. Diaz said. 

    “This is one side of a story,” Mr. King said this week. “That’s all they are — allegations. I was never given any proof of any allegations. I think they’re baseless. I think they’re petty, and meant for a reason, and it’s political,” he said. “Evidently they’re not happy unless I’m out of office. They have an agenda.”

    Mr. King was recently nominated by the Democratic Party to run for re-election in the fall. As highway superintendent, he said he has had to cope with “excessive absenteeism and tardiness,” as well as budget and staff cutbacks.

    Mr. Diaz, the union representative, said East Hampton’s union will actively support Mr. King’s Republican opponent, Stephen Lynch.

    “I invite him and Heath Liebman [the town C.S.E.A. chapter head] to come down to my office with any complaints that they have. I’d be more than happy to talk about it,” Mr. King said yesterday.

    The hiring of Ted Breen, who was taken on initially as a seasonal worker at the Parks and Recreation Department, concerned members of the town board when they saw his name on a resolution formally approving his employment, which was slated for a vote at a meeting last month.

    Mr. Breen had already begun working for the department, and the resolution was to appoint him retroactively. The measure was pulled from the agenda, which ended his Parks Department employment.

    It also prompted the board to implement a non-nepotism policy, requiring that familial relationships be disclosed, and that the board be made aware of them before new hires.

    “It’s really important that the head of that department — especially in that department — gives an appearance of non-preference,” Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson said Tuesday about Ms. Breen, as head of the personnel office.

    There is no need to have an outright ban on the hiring of town workers’ relatives, he said, “as long as they disclose.”

    (Last Thursday, the board approved a resolution naming a number of young people as town lifeguards for the season, Councilwoman Theresa Quigley’s daughter, Doris Quigley, among them. Ms. Quigley recused herself from the vote, and board members noted that the no-nepotism policy was followed.)

    Mr. King said Tuesday that in seeking to temporarily hire outside workers, a common practice when extra help is needed, such as for snowplowing in the winter, he consulted a list of independent contractors used for snow removal. Only one, Mr. Cullum, was available, he said.

    He then went to Ms. Breen, whose office at one time maintained a list of potential workers who had been used as temporary labor during the fall leaf-pick-up season, but she no longer had the list, as the town has dropped that service.

    However, Ms. Breen said yesterday, in answering a question from Mr. King about the new no-nepotism policy, which had just been distributed to town department heads, she described the situation regarding her son.

    Mr. King called him later that day to see if he could come to work. “We were under the gun. I needed people to help out,” he said. 

    “There was no collusion between her and myself to hire her son, to help in an investigation that was done a year ago, and was completed,” the highway superintendent said.

The driver of a garbage truck that flipped on its side Friday afternoon on Montauk Highway on Napeague escaped with what appeared to be minor injuries. According to witnesses, the green-and-white truck owned by Mickey's Carting of Montauk, may have lost a tire before overturning and skidding to a stop partly on the shoulder of Montauk Highway near the Clam Bar restaurant.

The driver, identified as Julio, climbed out of the passenger-side window of his truck and was able to speak to a member of the Clam Bar staff, they said.

Patrons of the restaurant heard the noise of the impact as the eastbound truck slid past them and leapt from their tables.

Firefighters and ambulance personnel from the Amagansett Fire Department responded to the scene. The driver was taken to Southampton Hospital to be examined.

Police kept one lane closed as a payloader was brought in to lift the garbage truck off its side. On a busy pre-weekend afternoon, traffic was backed up in both directions, with the eastbound delays being the longest.

—

An earlier version of this story said incorrectly that East Hampton Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson and Town Police Chief Edward Ecker were among those eating at the Clam Bar at the time of the accident. They were passing by in a vehicle and stopped to check on the accident.

A Sagaponack farm owned by the Schwenk family was the scene of a fire Sunday afternoon. As firemen battled the conflagration, Route 27 near the border of Southampton and East Hampton Towns was closed for several hours just before the commencement of the end-of-weekend exodus.

The Bridgehampton, Southampton, Amagansett, Sag Harbor, and North Sea Fire Departments responded to the 12:15 call. The fire was in a storage barn housing a variety of equipment and a plume of smoke could be seen for miles across the open vista of verdant potato fields.

A hazardous materials team from Southampton's fire department was dispatched as a precautionary measure, in case fertilizer was in the barn, Sgt. Susan Ralph of the Southampton Town police said Monday morning. Fertilizer, specifically ammonium nitrate, can be a powerful explosive. It was used to devastating effect in the 1995 terrorist attack on an Oklahoma City federal office building.

No one was hurt battling the Sagaponack blaze and, as of Monday, ongoing investigations had yet to reveal its cause.

    A fire Tuesday night at a Further Lane, Amagansett, house owned by the art dealer Larry Gagosian left a kitchen, media room, and upstairs bedroom badly damaged, according to Amagansett Fire Department officials, but did not spread to the rest of the house.

    The iconic 11,000-square-foot house was designed by the late Charles Gwathmey of the architectural firm Gwathmey Siegel for Francois de Menil, an heir to the Schlumberger oil-equipment fortune.

    “The fire supposedly started with a guy soldering pipes,” said Mark Bennett, the Amagansett fire chief. According to Chief Bennett, approximately 50 firemen, including a rapid intervention team from East Hampton, and a tanker from Springs, responded to the 8:48 p.m. call. In addition, Springs firemen were on deck at the Amagansett firehouse in case more help was needed.

    Dwayne Denton, an assistant Amagansett chief in charge of the interior firefighters and Chief Bennett’s second in command, said it took 20 to 30 minutes to bring the fire under control. “Not an easy fire, not that there really is such a thing as an easy fire. There’s a long driveway and we had to remove a drop ceiling to get to the flames.”

    “The problem was finding the fire,” said Chief Bennett. “It started in a wall and made its way up to the space between the first and second floors.” Firemen had to attack the flames from both floors by cutting their way through the ceiling and floor. Chief Bennett said that access to the house was difficult because of “artwork on each side of the driveway” near Further Lane.

    The house, known as Toad Hall, was designed by Mr. Gwathmey in 1978 and completed in 1982. According to a 1988 New York Times article, it “made architectural news as a house that summarized the career of a distinguished firm, and [. . .] helped mark a turn in modernism, when its hard-edged simplicity and formalism relaxed.”

    Mr. de Menil sold the house in 1988 to Edgar Bronfman, Jr. Mr. Gagosian bought it in 1990. The residence features a three-story greenhouse.

    Mr. Gagosian represents such artists as Jeff Koons, Richard Serra, Julian Schnabel, and John Currin. A call to his New York gallery seeking comment was deferred to Mr. Gagosian’s press agent who had not responded as of late Wednesday afternoon.

    While firemen reported that the estate’s caretaker was at the house during the fire and had removed some artworks from the rooms that were affected, this information could not be confirmed by press time.

    Chief Denton said he was not sure whether any of Mr. Gagosian’s art collection had been damaged by the fire, although he noted that the house sustained water damage, particularly in a basement media room, as a result of his men having successfully extinguished the fire.

    Chief Bennett praised the firefighters’ work. “The guys did a really good job. The fire was contained to three rooms.” Nevertheless, the house is not habitable because the electricity has been turned off, he said.

    “We covered the electronics and a flat-screen TV with tarps. We knew there was an art collection inside. I can’t tell you exactly what happened to it — there was extensive smoke through the house. I was thinking about the fire and my men.”

    Sharks and pirates usually conjure up images of the open seas — unless you’re in the Hamptons real estate business.

    Only a few weeks ago, the high-end real estate firm Saunders and Associates, with offices in Bridgehampton and Southampton, dealt with allegations that it had pirated the Internet domain name susanbreitenbach.com and used it to drive Web-browsing house-hunters to the Saunders Web site. Ms. Breitenbach is a top-producing broker for the Corcoran Group, a competing firm.

    Now, another competing firm, Prudential Douglas Elliman, filed suit on June 14 against Saunders and Associates, along with Andrew Saunders, the founder, and Saunders Ventures, accusing them of having “illegally registered various Internet domain names associated with plaintiff so that any customers searching for such brokers online are automatically directed to defendants’ Web sites, rather than plaintiff’s Web site.”

    The complaint further states that the Saunders company “engaged in this deliberate scam in order to grow their fledgling business by deceiving the public and slyly and stealthily diverting clients away from” the competition. It accused the defendants of “at best” trying to “trade on the good will generated by the hard work and customer satisfaction” of Prudential Douglas Elliman by “manipulating unsuspecting clients and potential clients,” and said, “At worst, defendants set in motion a large-scale fraud enabled by modern technology that usurps and converts the business opportunities of others, in connection with which they have been unjustly enriched.”

    Douglas Elliman, the New York City firm that conducts business on the East End under the name of Prudential Douglas Elliman, identifies two brokers in the claim who allegedly had their names used by Saunders: Lori Barbaria, Prudential Douglas Elliman’s top salesperson for 2009 and its eighth-ranked broker nationwide, and Mi­chaela Keszler, an agent who works from the firm’s Southampton office, who, according to the complaint, was in the top 10 percent of gross commission income for the company’s eastern Long Island branch.

    When Andrew Saunders founded his company in 2008, it quickly became known for its top-drawer properties, and its offices, which its Web site describes as being an “experiential setting more reminiscent of a new luxurious hotel lobby than a typical real estate office.” Saunders recently opened a second office in Southampton, joining its flagship headquarters in Bridgehampton.

    Mr. Saunders said that his company uses a very aggressive Web strategy, which has included paying over $30,000 for the Saunders.com name and $100,000 for the jackpot — hamptons realestate. com.

    When the Breitenbach situation came to light, Mr. Saunders immediately returned the name to Ms. Breitenbach. It had been snatched up by the Saunders company when it became available, for only $12.17.

    Mr. Saunders has admitted in news stories that those involved in the technology and marketing cog of the Saunders machine have registered over 3,000 domain names, including, he claims, almost every street and town name in the Hamptons.

    “I hope this isn’t indicative of a ‘higher form of realty,’ ” Paul Brennan, the regional manager of Prudential Douglas Elliman, said Tuesday, referring to the Saunders motto “A higher form of realty.”

    When reached for comment, Mr. Saunders said in an e-mail, “It is regrettable that our competitor would resort to suing us without fully investigating the facts. We will expose those facts and prevail in this matter.”

    The complaint states that the plaintiff is seeking damages, but for now, said Stanley Arkin of Arkin Kaplan Rice, the law firm representing Prudential Doug­las Elliman, “All we hope for is a sensible reply.”

    “We’re most concerned about making sure that this kind of conduct doesn’t happen again,” he said.

    There is big money in the art of registering domain names that may end up in high demand, and this is not the first time that lawyers have been involved. During the summer of 2001, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) launched a suit against Michael Doughney, who had registered the peta.org Web address and used it to direct traffic to his fictional group, People Eating Tasty Animals. In that case, the plaintiff prevailed.