A mosquito collected in East Hampton has tested positive for West Nile virus, according to James Tomarken, the commissioner of the Suffolk County Department of Health Services, who made the announcement on Friday. 

The East Hampton mosquito was the first found to be infected here this year and one of 12 taken from July 23 through 29 to test positive. So far this year 35 infected mosquitoes have been collected across the county. To date, no human cases have been reported.

West Nile virus, first detected in birds and mosquitoes in Suffolk County in 1999 and each year thereafter, is transmitted to humans by the bite of an infected mosquito. 

“The confirmation of West Nile virus in mosquito samples or birds indicates the presence of West Nile virus in the area,” Dr. Tomarken said in a statement on Friday. “While there is no cause for alarm, we advise residents to cooperate with us in our efforts to reduce the exposure to the virus, which can be debilitating to humans.” 

To keep mosquitoes from laying eggs inside and outside of residences and thereby reduce the possibility of mosquito bites, residents have been advised that at least once a week they should empty and scrub, turn over, cover, or throw out containers that hold water, such as vases, pets’ water bowls, flower pot saucers, discarded tires, buckets, pool covers, birdbaths, trash cans, and rain barrels.

To avoid the possibility of mosquito bites, residents have been advised to minimize outdoor activities between dusk and dawn; wear shoes and socks, long pants, and long-sleeve shirts when mosquitoes are active; use mosquito repellent, following label directions carefully, and make sure all windows and doors have screens in good repair. Individuals most at risk, particularly those who are 50 or older or have compromised immune systems, have been urged to take extra precautions.

Most people infected with West Nile will experience mild or no symptoms, but some can develop severe symptoms, including high fever, headache, neck stiffness, stupor, disorientation, coma, tremors, convulsions, muscle weakness, vision loss, numbness, and paralysis. The symptoms may last several weeks and have neurological effects that may be permanent. 

The county announcement warned that dead birds might indicate the presence of West Nile virus. To report dead birds, the public has been asked to call the county’s public health information line at 631-852-5999 between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., Monday through Friday. Residents also have been encouraged to take a photograph of any dead bird.

The county applies methoprene, a mosquito larvicide, and Bti, a biological agent, over marsh areas on Napeague and Beach Hampton, in Amagansett, as well as at Accabonac Harbor. Methoprene’s use is controversial, however; while county officials have long insisted it is not harmful to nontarget species, others disagree. 

In an effort to reduce methoprene’s use, the East Hampton Town Trustees and the Nature Conservancy launched a pilot program to quantify mosquito larvae at Accabonac Harbor this year. The county decides whether or not to apply methoprene based on those results. 

The program should continue despite the appearance of a West Nile-infected mosquito in East Hampton, said Nicole Maher, a senior coastal scientist with the Nature Conservancy. “It doesn’t change our program, it just makes it more important that we collect this real-time and spatially important data on mosquito breeding,” Dr. Maher said. “The collaboration between the Nature Conservancy, vector control, and the trustees has been a really positive experience so far, reducing the number of times that vector control needed to spray, reducing the number of areas they needed to spray, and increasing trust and transparency among the various stakeholders.”

Susan McGraw Keber, a trustee who participates in the weekly sampling, agreed. “My goal as a trustee and resident . . . is to eradicate all spraying of methoprene,” she said yesterday. “That’s why I got involved in this. Accabonac and water is very precious. I feel a sense of duty to stop chemicals in our waters.”

To report mosquito problems or stagnant pools of water that residents cannot remediate themselves, they have been asked to call the Department of Public Works Vector Control Division at 631-852-4270. A county informational brochure, “Get the Buzz on Mosquito Protection,” is available in English and Spanish at suffolkcountyny.gov.

Health Care Workers for Gershon

In New York’s First Congressional District, 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East has announced its endorsement of Perry Gershon.

“Our union is dedicated to the ideals that make it possible for every working person to create the life they envision for themselves and their family,” Gabby Seay, 1199SEIU’s political director, said in a statement issued last week. “We believe Perry will fight to protect family-sustaining jobs, expand access to quality health care, and serve as a true advocate for working people.”

“We must reaffirm the importance of unions to our communities by taking action on behalf of workers,” Mr. Gershon said in the same statement. “Income inequality, the lack of well-paying jobs, the lack of affordable health care, are all symptoms of a much greater problem in our country: People have forgotten that the fundamental right to assembly is the source of greatness in our country. When the American people unite, organize, and act as one collective, there is nothing that can hold us back from continuing to be the greatest nation in the world.”

—

C.S.E.A. Backs Thiele

The Civil Service Employees Association has endorsed State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. in his 2018 re-election bid. Mr. Thiele is a member of the Independence Party. 

Mr. Thiele expressed appreciation for the endorsement in a statement last Thursday and praised unions as “the backbone of this country. They established a foundation for job security and economic stability for all working people. I support, and will continue to fight for, the right of every person to have access to good jobs, good benefits, and fair wages, as they are fundamental to achieving a sustainable standard of living.”

Mr. Thiele will not face a primary challenger. Election Day is Nov. 6.

Mr. Thiele also picked up an endorsement from the New York State United Teachers, a federation of more than 1,200 local unions representing people who work in, or are retired from, New York’s schools, colleges, and health care facilities. It is affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, as well as the AFL-CIO and Education International, with more than 20 million members worldwide.

Candidates who earned NYSUT’s endorsement “showed through their advocacy, their accessibility, and their strong pro-education, pro-labor voting records that they are true friends of public education, organized labor, and working people,” Andy Pallota, NYSUT’s president, said in a statement. “They have demonstrated a willingness to stand shoulder to shoulder with educators to fight for better public schools, colleges and hospitals. We are proud to support them.”

The East Hampton Town Board announced yesterday that the town has maintained its top-tier AAA credit rating, as affirmed by Moody’s Investors Service. 

In preparation for yesterday’s sale of $16.5 million in general obligation bonds for the town, Moody’s affirmed that the town’s financial status continues to warrant the AAA rating it was awarded last year. 

The rating reflects confidence not only in the town’s present financial condition but also in its practices, according to a statement issued by the town. Moody’s cited East Hampton’s “conservative budgeting and proactive financial management practices” as well as its “modest debt burden” and “sizable tax base” as factors in the triple-A rating and positive outlook. The town has built reserves while lowering overall indebtedness, according to Moody’s. 

Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said in yesterday’s statement that “it is very satisfying to have Moody’s acknowledge through our AAA rating the town’s strong financial position as well as the work we have been doing to maintain that strength. Our substantial financial reserves and surplus were particularly noted by Moody’s as factors that have allowed us to maintain the highest rating possible.” The town will strive to maintain those reserves at levels expected for a triple-A credit, he said. 

The bonds being sold are to finance projects including a townwide upgrade to its emergency communications system, a new records management system, a new fuel facility at East Hampton Airport, and structural improvements to the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter.

Responding to concerns from parents of children who swim at a small beach inside the mouth of Three Mile Harbor at Maidstone Park in Springs, the East Hampton Town Trustees erected sections of split-rail fencing last month to discourage trucks from backing down to the water’s edge. 

“Several moms were concerned about all the trucks backing up on the south side of ‘Baby Beach’ where the little ones wade in the shallow water,” said Brian Byrnes, a trustee. “Since we’ve done that, people are really pleased.” 

Mr. Byrnes acknowledged some opposition to the move from those considering it an encroachment on the public’s right to drive on the beach. “We were more concerned about the moms,” he said. 

Sections of fence are spaced apart, so vehicle access to the water’s edge remains. “It’s a small thing,” Mr. Byrnes said, “but it gets a little crazy there on nice weekends.”

The East Hampton Town Board collectively denounced the increase in takeoffs and landings at East Hampton Airport in a press release issued last Thursday, calling a 29-percent increase in helicopter flights between 2016 and last year a direct consequence of a federal Court of Appeals’ November 2016 ruling that the town could not independently enact the curfews and limits it had set the previous year. 

A mandatory curfew from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., and one from 8 p.m. to 9 a.m. directed at aircraft, including helicopters, deemed noisy, were in effect from July 2015 until the court’s ruling. Complaints by East Hampton and Southampton Town residents living under flight paths to and from the airport have soared since then. 

According to statistics in an Aug. 8 report on last year’s airport operations by Councilwoman Sylvia Overby and Councilman Jeff Bragman, the board’s co-liaisons to the airport, the volume of takeoffs and landings was relatively stable from 2014 through 2016. But 2017 saw a 7-percent increase in operations over the previous year, or 27,546 operations versus 25,836. Operations are calculated by doubling the number of reported landings. 

In enacting its curfews, according to last Thursday’s release, the board had relied on written statements from the Federal Aviation Administration to then-Representative Tim Bishop stating that once federal grant assurances expired in 2014 the town, as the airport’s proprietor, was authorized to adopt noise restrictions. But due to the appeals court’s decision, East Hampton Town  must complete an analysis known as a Part 161 study in order to propose and enact noise or operational restrictions on aircraft. That process is ongoing. 

The board’s statement followed a communication from the Eastern Region Helicopter Council to its members stating that the southern route to the

airport was unavailable due to overcrowding of different aircraft types. That statement, which was inaccurate, nonetheless upset what had been a balance between southern and northern flight paths. But those paths are voluntary, Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said last week, because the town has no authority to mandate them. 

At the board’s meeting at the Montauk Firehouse on Tuesday, Ms. Overby told her colleagues that “We’re looking for noise abatement maps to continue to be used so our constituents here, and those on the North Fork, get some relief during summer,” when airport operations are at a peak. 

Mr. Bragman suggested that the board summon Jeff Smith, chairman of the Eastern Region Helicopter Council, to speak to residents at a meeting of the board so that they are informed as to the council’s directives to its members with respect to the airport.

Insisting that the Town of East Hampton, not to mention civilization itself, faces imminent climate chaos, four residents urged the town trustees on Monday night to look positively on the proposed South Fork Wind Farm as a means of curtailing the use of fossil fuels, but also to “consider the bigger picture and the larger cost to all of us” of climate change.

Cate Rogers, a representative of the Climate Reality Project, told the trustees that the daily emission of 110 million tons of heat-trapping fossil-fuel gases, which she likened to treating the atmosphere “like an open sewer,” was the primary cause of rising global temperatures. The trustees, who have jurisdiction over many of the town’s beaches, bottomlands, and waterways, may have a say in whether or not Deepwater Wind can run its proposed wind farm’s transmission cable beneath an ocean beach in Wainscott.

Sea level rise is an inevitable result of melting glaciers, but another consequence, warmer ocean temperatures, will cause both stronger and more frequent storms, along with dramatic changes to marine habitat. “That impacts our fishing industry,” said Ms. Rogers, who is also the chairwoman of the East Hampton Town Democratic Committee. 

The commercial fishing industry opposes the wind farm, and Ms. Rogers noted that some critics have called it an industrialization of the oceans. “I think that ship has sailed,” she said. “The offshore oil industry is thriving — another industrialized use of the ocean.” 

But, she said, the costs of solar, wind, and other renewable sources are falling and clean energy is becoming more accessible, providing the means to “create a safe, sustainable and prosperous future.” She supports the South Fork Wind Farm, “but my goal tonight is to bring climate change to the forefront,” Ms. Rogers said. “I’m asking you to please consider the bigger picture and the larger cost to all of us.”

Gordian Raacke, the executive director of Renewable Energy Long Island, spoke in starker terms. “We’ve heard about the impacts of climate change on sea level rise and the extreme weather events that we’re starting to witness,” he said, “and we hear about the impacts on oceans, whether it’s warming or acidification.” Now, he said, scientists have observed a slowing of the Gulf Stream. “If that is in fact happening, we are in pretty deep trouble.”

A 2017 study published in the journal Nature stated that the Gulf Stream is flowing at its slowest rate in at least 1,600 years, probably due to climate change. A shutdown in its circulation, the study’s authors wrote, would bring rapid sea level rise along the East Coast, among other impacts.

The year 2020 is crucial, according to another 2017 study published in Nature, this one co-authored by Christiana Figueres, the former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which helped shape the 2015 Paris Agreement in which 195 countries set the goal of holding an increase in global average temperatures to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. Should emissions continue to rise or even remain stable beyond that year, the goal would be almost unattainable, the authors wrote. 

“We have very little time left and we face a humongous, giant threat,” Mr. Raacke said, “and our solutions to this problem have to be commensurate in scale to the threat we’re facing. There is now a real sense of urgency, because we have waited far too long to act. We could have started this when scientists first told us that we need to begin to ramp down our carbon emissions, but we have done nothing, nothing that was able to bring that curve of annual emissions down.”

“We now have about a decade, some say just a few years left, to begin to bend this emissions curve down so that by mid-century we’ll . . . essentially decarbonize our entire economy,” he said.

Mr. Raacke suggested solar panels should be deployed “on every house that’s suitable for it, parking lots, everywhere else,” as well as improve energy efficiency in houses and lower peak energy demand. “But we also will need offshore wind,” he said. “If we fail to take dramatic action, tipping points and feedback loops will accelerate the melting of glaciers and ice sheets to a point of no return, to a point where all hope would be lost.” 

The trustees, he said, “bear an even greater burden on your shoulders, because we elected you to act on our behalf.” 

Christopher Carillo, the trustees’ attorney, asked that the speakers return in a few weeks to explain to the trustees how the South Fork Wind Farm can reverse the adverse impacts of climate change. Linda James, chairwoman of the town’s energy sustainability advisory committee, distributed a depiction of the committee’s recommended energy portfolio, which includes the aforementioned renewables as well as battery storage, green building practices, and community choice aggregation, and promised Mr. Carillo “a complete presentation of what this portfolio . . . can mean to our community, and how we, the trustees, and the town-appointed committees can work collaboratively to accomplish this.” 

Another speaker, Joan McGivern, took issue with assertions made by a member of the town board and a candidate for the board with respect to Deepwater Wind’s insistence that the town and trustees grant easements allowing it to land the wind farm’s transmission cable and route it to the Long Island Power Authority substation in East Hampton, before it submits its applications to federal and state agencies. 

Councilman Jeff Bragman has said that Deepwater Wind need not secure an easement before submitting applications, that in fact it would be unusual, according to the State Public Service Commission’s general counsel. In a letter in last week’s Star, David Gruber, a candidate for town board, agreed. 

“It is true that it’s rare to receive easement rights when you’re a public utility or a publicly regulated entity and you already have a right to use a public utility right of way,” Ms. McGivern, who is an attorney, said. “It is not rare when talking about a private applicant, like a non-utility applicant or a non-municipal applicant” [such as Deepwater Wind], “that doesn’t have access to public utility rights of way.”

Quoting from a legal analysis, “Siting Transmission Lines for New York Offshore Wind Projects,” from “Environmental Law in New York,” published one year ago, she said that “a private applicant must secure those rights from the pertinent municipality if it will require crossing or occupying municipal property.” It would be pointless, she said, for Deepwater Wind to undergo a years-long review process only to learn that it could not secure the rights to the transmission cable’s preferred route.

As long as it is determined not to have adverse environmental impacts, “Resolve to negotiate a deal so we can get on with getting the South Fork Wind Farm built,” she told the trustees. 

Also at the meeting, Rod Richardson, who was arrested last month for trespassing on Cartwright Shoal, a sand spit off Gardiner’s Island, urged the trustees to investigate the Goelet family trust’s claim of ownership, which he doubts. The purported owners’ security forces, he charged, wrongly intimidate and threaten anyone anchoring on the foreshore, and even harass paddleboarders on the water. Colonial-era documents, he said, prove that the spit, which is often submerged, is public property, and “marine patrol enforcement on this spit of land is a waste of public resources.” A letter from Mr. Richardson is in this issue of The Star. 

Several others in attendance at the meeting spoke in defense of Mr. Richardson.

East Hampton Town announced on Monday that 32 unrelated people were found to be occupying a single-family house at 38 Railroad Avenue in East Hampton, off Abraham's Path, after a search warrant was executed there on Sunday morning.

The East Hampton Town Police Department, along with the town's Ordinance Enforcement Department, building inspectors, and fire marshals, executed the warrant shortly after 6 a.m., according to a release issued by the town. Eighteen of the people at the house were sleeping on mattresses on the basement floor. 

The town code prohibits multifamily occupancy in single-family residences, as well as rental or occupancy of less than the entire residence. Language in the code also addresses overcrowding and excessive turnover.

Additional code violations included a gasoline generator and storage tank in the basement where the 18 occupants were sleeping, according to the release. Use of the generator could have created lethal levels of carbon monoxide, police said, and the basement was equipped with neither smoke nor carbon monoxide detectors. 

The town said the property's owner was Evan Davis of Jamaica, Queens. Mr. Davis, who was not at the property at the time the search warrant was executed, will be given an appearance ticket once he has been located, according to the statement from Town Hall. Braham Elorda was identified as the house's manager. He was issued an appearance ticket to appear in East Hampton Town's Justice Court. 

The majority of the occupants are not from East Hampton, according to the release, but are employed by local businesses. They told investigators that they pay Mr. Elorda between $100 and $150 per week in cash to live in the house. Some had just arrived to stay there, and others had been in residence for longer.

The multiple code violations could result in fines totaling tens of thousands of dollars, according to the release. 

"Overcrowded housing such as this not only places residents in dangerous conditions but poses a risk to public safety and the environment when septic systems are overtaxed, and diminishes the quality of life for others in neighborhoods designed for single-family residences," Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said in the statement. "The town will continue to actively enforce our codes to ensure the safety of all our residents."

Execution of the warrant followed an investigation into the property initiated by the town's Ordinance Enforcement Department. The investigation is continuing.

Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone has endorsed Perry Gershon’s campaign to represent New York’s First Congressional District. Mr. Gershon, who lives in East Hampton, won the June 26 Democratic primary and will challenge the incumbent, Representative Lee Zeldin, in the Nov. 6 election. 

“Perry Gershon has a proven track record of success as a small-business owner and job creator,” Mr. Bellone, a Democrat, said in a statement, “and I know he’ll use that experience in Congress to bring real change to New York’s First Congressional District. He’s going to Washington to address the biggest problems facing our district, including access to quality and affordable health care and lifting the caps on our state and property tax deductions. Perry is the representative we deserve and need fighting for our best interests, and that’s why I am proud to endorse his candidacy.”

Mr. Gershon’s campaign opened a Southampton office last weekend and plans to open an office in Farmingville shortly.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Monday called on Ryan Zinke, the secretary of the interior, to support New York’s offshore wind initiative by delineating and leasing at least four new wind energy areas recommended by the State’s Offshore Wind Master Plan. The governor’s letter, issued on the heels of a report that President Trump is hostile to wind power, also enclosed the state’s comments on the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s Call for Information and Nominations, which closed on Monday. 

“New York’s commitment to offshore wind is real and unwavering,” the governor wrote to Mr. Zinke. “Our first 90 megawatts of offshore wind energy” — a reference to Deepwater Wind’s proposed South Fork Wind Farm — “are already underway, we have initiated a process to procure at least an additional 800 megawatts by 2019, and the U.S. Department of Energy recently selected the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority to head the National Offshore Wind Research and Development Consortium.”

This represents merely a beginning, the governor wrote, as the state aims to develop 2.4 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030. “The realization of that goal will create thousands of new jobs and offer New Yorkers overwhelming benefits in the form of lower energy costs, a more resilient power grid, and a cleaner environment,” he wrote.

New York’s commitment to offshore wind, he said, “is smarter, cleaner, and safer than the frightening federal proposal to allow offshore drilling. Instead of trying to revive the fossil fuel industry, I call on you to join us in our efforts to build a 21st-century clean energy economy.”

The Trump administration said at the beginning of this year that it would allow new offshore oil and gas drilling in nearly all coastal waters, including along the Eastern Seaboard. A spill, the governor wrote to Mr. Zinke, “would threaten 60 percent of our state’s population that live along our tidal coastline and put at risk the tens of billions of dollars in economic activity and hundreds of thousands of jobs created by our ocean economy. Now is not the time to trade our coastal ecosystem, our fisheries and ports, and our marine and other wildlife for greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels.”

The governor’s call for support of offshore wind development closely followed a report on the news website Axios stating that Mr. Trump has “a visceral hatred of wind turbines,” believing that they offer a poor return on investment, blight coastlines, and obstruct views. “Trump has even told officials to ‘think of all the birds’ that wind turbines are killing,” according to Axios, “though sources familiar with these comments tell us they doubt the president actually cares about endangered wildlife.”

Nonetheless, Axios’s Amy Harder and Jonathan Swan wrote, the administration’s energy policy is contradictory. For example, Mr. Zinke’s department “is working with Democratic-led state governments to lease federal waters for wind off Massachusetts and nearby states, and also working to streamline permitting to make it easier for companies to build offshore wind farms.”

Nothing less than the long-term viability of waterfront houses on Gardiner’s Bay is in the hands of the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals, according to an attorney and contractor representing a Cranberry Hole Road, Amagansett, property owner, and while the long-term solution is an erosion control district, in which a large-scale beach nourishment and dune reconstruction project would be undertaken, an existing sandbag revetment should be allowed to remain between a house and the beach for as long as five years. 

That was the message delivered to the board at its July 17 meeting by representatives of Nigel Curtiss of 393 Cranberry Hole Road.

With Gardiner’s Bay lapping ever closer to Mr. Curtiss’s house, “I don’t know if it’s going to be here next year, in 10 years, next week, or even tomorrow,” Richard A. Hammer, the attorney, told the board. “These things are very tenuous under the current situation.” 

The hearing, Mr. Hammer said, was “an opportunity for us to begin a discussion of one of the single most important issues affecting this particular stretch of coastline: the sustainability of approximately 30 houses” between the Devon Yacht Club and the defunct fish processing factory at Promised Land. 

But the house is in a coastal erosion hazard zone where erosion structures are prohibited, a prohibition based, Mr. Hammer said, on the absence of any such existing structures when the zone was established. “However,” he said, “even in the Planning Department’s own analysis, it documents a loss of 44 feet of protected dune land.” Historical aerial photographs, he said, indicate that the property has lost around 110 feet of protected dune in front of it since about 1962. 

The town’s Building Department issued an emergency permit allowing the revetment’s construction in September 2017, under a provision allowing sandbags for up to six months with the possibility of a three-month extension. 

“It was pretty much already known that we would be requesting some form of relief on this property absent some large, comprehensive solution,” Mr. Hammer said. “It just wasn’t known exactly when we would be here. I will guarantee that unless we take a more long-range view of these issues, pretty much all of the adjacent properties will be in front of you . . . for more permanent relief from the town code to protect their houses before they’re obviously consumed by the bay.” 

The applicant needs immediate protection of his house, Mr. Hammer said; the sandbag revetment is “a placeholder” to provide some protection pending a long-term solution. 

That solution, said Aram Terchunian, a coastal geologist and owner of First Coastal, a Westhampton Beach consulting and contracting company, is a beach nourishment project akin to that conducted by his firm on the ocean beach in Sagaponack, which he said had been successful. 

Hard structures in the waters at the fish factory, where oceangoing vessels once docked in deep berths, are responsible for erosion at Mr. Curtiss’s property and others nearby, Mr. Terchunian said. He referred to a “classic jetty-inlet situation, without the inlet,” in which a hard structure interrupts the natural movement of sand, building up beach in one location while eroding it in others. “This caused the entire system to be thrown out of equilibrium,” he said. 

Adding sea level rise to the equation, “An unprotected dune and doing nothing spells catastrophe for this entire stretch,” he said. “Mr. Curtiss is just one of the first in that line.” 

In his experience, the creation of an erosion control district, beach nourishment, and dune reconstruction would span five years. “We’re looking at doing an erosion control district,” he said. “But we have to survive between today and when we can implement a project like this.” 

But Brian Frank, the town’s chief environmental analyst, offered the board a different perspective. Many of the town’s regulations exist to protect the beaches. “The town code identifies beaches as the signature of the town,” he said, “and, without me using hyperbole, uses the language that they are perhaps the single most important economic assets of the town.” 

This, he said, is why erosion control structures are a concern. A revetment such as Mr. Curtiss’s “results in accelerated erosion in front of the structures, and results in flank, or scour, erosion at either end.” That, in turn, prompts adjoining property owners to install their own structures. “This domino effect proliferates and results in extensive areas of beach loss,” Mr. Frank said. Mr. Curtiss’s application, he said, does not meet the town’s standards for an erosion control structure. 

Scour erosion at either end of the revetment was evident after each of the northeasters of last winter and spring, Mr. Frank said. “You have a loss of resource. This is what the town’s regulations against coastal erosion structures are intended to prevent: the permanent and irretrievable loss of resource. And if you have this thing sitting here for the next five years, I don’t see how you’re going to mitigate those impacts over that time period.” 

The emergency permit granted Mr. Curtiss last year “was to put a Band-Aid on that problem and prevent somebody from losing their house while a more long-term solution was developed,” he said, “ideally before the end of that six or nine-month period, not coming to you at the end of it here.” 

Mr. Curtiss bought the property in 2015, Mr. Frank said. “It was already a rough situation. We’ve got to break this cycle of going back and finding culprits that are 50, 60, 70, 100 years old, to say, ‘Because of something that was done there, we have to do something that is similarly damaging to the resources now, out of necessity.’ ”

Samuel Kramer, the board’s vice chairman, presiding in the absence of the chairman, John Whelan, asked Mr. Frank if he would object to a short-term variance allowing the revetment to remain while Mr. Curtiss pursued an erosion control district. There is no assurance that such a district would be created, was the reply. Moreover, Mr. Frank said, an erosion control district’s efficacy is unknown, given the reality of climate change and sea level rise. 

“I do think you’re going to have to take a look at making alterations to the structure for long-term viability,” he said, perhaps relocating it landward, perhaps raising it on pilings. 

Mr. Terchunian said that the two sides shared “a tremendous amount of common ground,” and asked the board to be mindful that “if nothing happens, the consequences are very severe, and it’s not just this house, it’s going to be a bunch of houses, and it’s going to happen in a very short period of time.”

The hearing was closed, but Mr. Kramer said that the record would be left open so that Mr. Hammer could respond to points Mr. Frank had raised.