Thirty-three years after joining East Hampton Town's Planning Department, JoAnne Pahwul, the department's director for the last two years, retired on Friday.
Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc recognized Ms. Pahwul at the town board's meeting last Thursday. She "served our community extremely well over all of those many years," he said, noting her rise to senior planner, assistant director, and director. "Thank you for helping keep East Hampton the beautiful place it is today."
East Hampton is "a very special place that's largely been able to retain a small-town character and protect its environmental resources, more than other towns have," Ms. Pahwul said on Monday.
She said the experience of watching the New England town in which she grew up "virtually destroyed by a lack of planning" informed her three-plus decades in the Planning Department. "I devoted myself to trying to prevent the same thing happening here." Each development, she said, "has the potential to chip away at the character of the town until one day it can be lost, gone forever."
The town, however, "has a lot of forward-thinking citizens, going back to the 1970s, that have supported strong zoning and environmental regulations, and upheld and strengthened them time after time." She called the Planning Department "the first line of defense" against overdevelopment.
She counts the downsizing of projects that were inappropriate for the town and work on affordable housing developments, including the Springs-Fireplace Apartments in East Hampton and the 37-unit Gansett Meadow complex in Amagansett, among her accomplishments. Behind the scenes, she had a hand in preservation projects including Shadmoor Park in Montauk and the South Flora Nature Preserve on Napeague. "All are rewarding," she said.
Her tenure as director was challenging, she said, owing to staff shortages and, of course, the Covid-19 pandemic. She plans to spend more time with her family, work on a number of personal projects, travel, and "enjoy my leisure time."
"I've been very fortunate in working with many remarkable, dedicated board members over the years," Ms. Pahwul said. Going forward, the town faces challenges with traffic and in the continued scarcity of affordable housing, "both of which have been affecting our economy in that we're losing our backbone work force, finding it difficult to hire and retain employees. It's affecting the Planning Department as well as everyone else."
