East Hampton Village's new mayor, Jerry Larsen, who ran on a platform to bring change to the village and won in a landslide in the Sept. 15 election, discussed his new proposals for parking, the renovation of Herrick Park, sidewalk repair, police reform, and more in an interview on Sunday.
As a candidate, Mr. Larsen had proposed charging for additional hours of parking in the commercial district, restriping the Reutershan and Schenck municipal lots to create more spaces, and converting the parallel parking spaces on Newtown Lane, from Pleasant Lane up to the crosswalk in front of Scoop du Jour, to nose-in parking. The latter change would allow for 47 more spaces, according to Michael King, a traffic consultant Mr. Larsen had hired.
The money earned from paid parking would be used to finance a sewage treatment system the village plans to build.
Mayor Larsen, who was sworn in on Friday, will be meeting with Drew Bennett, the village engineer, to share his vision for the Reutershan lot, and he has already requested that Mr. Bennett begin drawing up plans to reconfigure the Newtown Lane spaces, he said on Sunday.
"We'll get the parking plan in place pretty rapidly, so we can start charging for the extra hours, but what I plan on doing is, from now until the first of the year, we're going to have three-hour parking in both Reutershan and Schenck," he said.
By Monday, signs in the lots had been altered to reflect the change from two to three hours of allowed parking. "I think it's a nice gesture to get us through this fall, and hopefully it will help businesses because it will give people a little more time to shop," he said.
The two-hour parking regulations remain as village law, and Mr. Larsen said he would not propose codifying new regulations until next spring, but "I can ask the Police Department to be more relaxed," he said. "But if somebody's there three and a half hours, they're going to get a summons."
Last fall, the village board hired the engineering firm Nelson, Pope and Voorhis to develop plans for a sewage treatment system. The village has received the plan, but it hasn't been shared publicly. "The cost is much less than I had envisioned, so I think we can get this going pretty quickly," Mr. Larsen said.
The day after the election, Mr. Larsen said he arrived at Village Hall at 10 a.m. to go over the agenda for a board meeting on Friday. He removed a few resolutions to approve spending because he hadn't had a chance to examine their merits, and he added a proposal to hire more lifeguards to allow the beaches to remain open later into the fall.
Since being elected, he has reached out to the owners of restaurants in the village, including Dopo la Spiaggia, Babette's, and Fresno, to discuss how they can continue to provide outdoor dining in the colder months. "With Dopo, we're looking to erect a tent over their outdoor seating area, and I believe I can issue an executive order allowing it. As long as it doesn't violate any of the state rules, which we're going to check on, I would like to see that get done immediately."
On Saturday, he met with members of the village's dispatchers union. "Their contract expired July 31, they have a huge grievance on the table about an overtime issue," he said. "I think we're very close to resolving that. Those union guys had never even been in the mayor's office, so I've changed that already. It's open door, I want to hear from everybody." He would like to institute a mandate that requires that all police officers and dispatchers receive a mental health checkup every three years. "Even in a small village, police officers see really bad things -- suicides, bad car accidents, you're seeing children die -- and the dispatchers never get a resolution to any of it," he said. "If I mandate it like firearms training or CPR training there's no stigma involved, and it would all be confidential, nothing would get back to the department. It could help officers, their families, and it would help the public because it might de-escalate something. I got the dispatch union to agree to it, so we're going to incorporate that into their new contract."
Mr. Larsen, who served on the village's police force for 34 years, including 14 as chief, said he will serve as police commissioner but had yet to decide which board members he would appoint as liaisons to other departments. He will announce the appointments at the village board's organizational meeting on Oct. 16. He also plans to reorganize the planning board, zoning board of appeals, and design review boards. Some chairpersons and board members "are going to be asked to stay, some are not," he said.
He has asked Marcos Baladron, his campaign manager, to conduct interviews with every full-time village employee. "I want to hear how they feel about their job, how they feel about the village, and how they're treated, so we'll be doing that for the next month," he said.
To beautify the village, "I'm going to have the Department of Public Works start power washing the sidewalks, getting rid of all the weeds, and power wash the garbage cans because they're filthy and disgusting," he said. "And because there's a garbage can every three feet, we're going to remove about half of them and spread them out a little bit. I want to get it all cleaned, and then we'll start looking into adding recycling bins."
Although the previous village board had hired LaGuardia Design Group of Water Mill to develop a renovation plan for Herrick Park and subsequently approved a concept, the mayor has asked Sandra Melendez, a newly elected trustee and his NewTown Party running mate, to meet with Maziar Behrooz of MB Architecture, who had drawn up his own plan last year and offered it to the village at no charge. Mr. Behrooz's vision included a concession stand, a butterfly garden, and an area for food trucks. "Maybe we don't want a concession stand, but it's a great starting point, and it's free," Mr. Larsen said. "We'll put both plans on the table, and we'll see what we like from each."
With Halloween approaching in the midst of a pandemic, one of his most immediate concerns, he said, is dissuading people from gathering en masse in the village. "The governor is allowing trick-or-treating, but obviously he doesn't know that we block off a whole area to make it safe for the kids. We get hundreds and hundreds of people," he said. The village will not shut down streets such as Cooper Lane to traffic, he said. "It's a lot of fun, but it's just not appropriate this year."
After the village board meeting on Friday, Mr. Larsen said he had a long meeting with Arthur Graham, a trustee who had been his opponent in the mayoral election, and Rose Brown, Mr. Graham's colleague and fellow member of the Fish Hooks Party. Prior to the election, Mr. Graham, who is known as Tiger, had questioned the authenticity of 200 voter registrations, and formally challenged them with the Suffolk County Board of Elections. On Election Day, he spent several hours at the polling place, and contested five voters.
"We're going to let the election fall behind us," said Mr. Larsen, summing up his conversation with Mr. Graham and Ms. Brown. "The only thing that has come up, though, is I feel Tiger's conduct the day of the election has to be looked at to make sure there were no violations of election law because he is a public officer."
The state's election law says, "While the polls are open no person shall do any electioneering within the polling place, or in any public street, within a one-hundred-foot radial." Mr. Larsen said Mr. Graham's presence at the polls may have violated that law. "A candidate is supposed to come in, vote, and get the hell out," he said. "He was not supposed to be there, but we'll let the professionals figure that out. I told Tiger, if this turns out to be a violation, I'm going to turn it over to the public integrity bureau of the District Attorney's office because it should be dealt with by an outside agency so that it's unbiased."
The village has administered its own elections, but Mr. Larsen, who ran against two incumbents -- Mr. Graham and Barbara Borsack, a former trustee who was deputy mayor until last week -- said he plans to ask the county to manage future ones. "For candidates running against incumbents, it's a very awkward feeling knowing that the clerks work for the incumbents," he said. "It needs a better appearance."
During the campaign, Mr. Larsen had organized a voting bloc of second-home owners, and their absentee votes provided him with a sizable margin of victory. "We had agents that were handling the absentee ballots," he said. "We would bring an application to somebody who would sign it, and authorize our person to be the agent to drop it at Village Hall." On Election Day, "our whole goal was to push 100 people to the polls, that's all we were interested in doing, the rest were absentees." He won with 453 votes to Ms. Borsack's 271 and Mr. Graham's 121.
Even with such a solid base of support, Mr. Larsen said, he does not consider second-home owners as his main constituency. "I have a lot of full-time residents as well, and I hope to earn everybody's support before the next election," he said. "Once people get to know me, and they see that all the rhetoric they've heard isn't true, and that I'm really here to listen to everyone and try to help as many people as I can, I think that I'll gain their respect and their support."