Year-round tennis in Amagansett: That’s the goal of the plan pitched by Claude Okin, who owns the Sportime facility and camp off Town Lane and Abraham’s Path, to the East Hampton Town Trustees in December.
Mr. Okin has offered to buy a vacant, three-quarter-acre piece of trustee-owned property on the dead-end Hump Path that would connect parcels he already owns with the existing club, paving the way for him to apply for a recreational overlay easement from East Hampton Town.
His consultant, Rich Warren of Inter-Science, explained that the move would position Sportime to create new, covered tennis courts, as well as convert existing courts for the growing sport of pickleball, and potentially even expand the existing swimming pool for kids who attend Sportime’s summer camp.
“I would view it as surplus land — it’s wooded and doesn’t go anywhere,” Mr. Warren told the town trustees during their Dec. 12 meeting. “It’s a remnant.”
The recreational overlay district was formally written into East Hampton’s town code in 2005 with the goal of “permitting major recreational facilities in residential zones” and providing “regulations that prevent disturbance of surrounding residential neighborhoods,” according to the code. It requires a parcel to be at least 600,000 contiguous square feet, but Mr. Okin currently has 570,000 square feet. The trustees’ Hump Path parcel is about 33,000 square feet — presenting a tidy way to correct what Mr. Okin has described as “a rounding error.”
Right now, the town’s only other recreational district is on the Wainscott-East Hampton border, and is home to East Hampton Indoor Tennis and its neighboring entertainment center, the Clubhouse.
The trustees were amenable to exploring the idea of Mr. Okin’s purchasing the property and agreed to have a more in-depth discussion during their next regular meeting on Jan. 23.
“This seems like it might provide some needed recreational areas for the town. We have a lot of questions to ask,” said Francis Bock, clerk of the trustees.
Jim Grimes, a deputy clerk, asked his colleagues “whether we as a board see value in the future for the trustees for this property — which, personally, I don’t — and if not, would we like to do what the trustee board was originally empowered to do, which is sell this piece of land at market value, take it off our balance sheet, and perhaps take those monies and put it to a better use.”
“It makes sense,” John Aldred, another trustee, added, “but personally, I’d still like to hear from the Planning Department and talk to the town about it to see how they feel.”
Mr. Okin, who has been operating Sportime in Amagansett since 1989, told the trustees that he participated “in the crafting of the overlay district — it’s just that we never got it.”
“It’s a big property and I’d like to see it stay recreational for the next 30 years,” Mr. Okin later said, noting that his business is challenging to run because it is seasonal. “I’d like this property not to be giant houses.”