“I’m very proud of the breadth and the importance of the various endeavors and accomplishments during my tenure,” East Hampton Town Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said last Thursday during the town board’s final meeting of 2023, “and I want to be very clear that there are few meaningful goals that can be achieved without the help and contributions of others.”
He paid tribute to his colleagues on the board, town staff, and residents, who had elected him twice as councilman and three times as supervisor. Mr. Van Scoyoc is retiring from government; Councilwoman Kathee Burke-Gonzalez is set to succeed him next week.
His predecessor, Larry Cantwell, had likened the job to riding a roller coaster, he said at the meeting, but “to me, it’s been more like riding bareback on a buffalo trying to juggle a dozen eggs.” A supervisor must expect the unexpected: Along with an emergency declaration in his first week on the job after a heavy snowfall, an emerging water contamination event required creation of a water supply district for more than 500 residential properties in Wainscott. And, in 2020, came a public-health emergency that few would have predicted in the form of a pandemic. “That was particularly challenging,” he said in an interview after last Thursday’s meeting.
But his tenure also saw the advance of both the town and New York State’s renewable energy goals, manifested in the Accabonac Solar Farm and the South Fork Wind farm, which began delivering electricity to a Long Island Power Authority substation this month and for which the developers will pay the town and town trustees around $29 million in a community benefits package. “It was nice to see that project come to fruition and the first power actually generated before my term was over,” he said.
“I spent the entirety of my 12 years on the board working toward getting FIMP [the Fire Island to Montauk Point Reformulation Study] for the town,” he said, which, during the winter or early spring, will have the federal Army Corps of Engineers bolster downtown Montauk ocean beaches with 450,000 cubic yards of sand dredged and pumped from an offshore site.
The coastline will remain a challenge that, he said, will require community participation in charting a course forward. “We obviously can’t respond in the way that we have in the past and just fortify private properties where they come into conflict with our coastal areas. We will lose the most precious aspect of our town, our beaches.”
East Hampton Town Airport, where a temporary restraining order has to date prevented the town from implementing restrictions on flight activity in response to residents’ complaints about noise and quality of life, remains a vexing issue, but “I feel like we’re leaving the airport in a really good position,” Mr. Van Scoyoc said. “I think it’s just going to take several more years to get it to the point where the fruits of our labor and the course of action that we’ve taken bears fruit.” But opponents of the plan “will continually misinform the public, saying that we’re wasting taxpayer dollars. . . . They can’t win the argument based on its merits, so they’ve taken to personal attacks.”
And to litigation, with which the town is often targeted. “I don’t think the town should roll over,” he said. “I think we have to hold the line, and we have to defend ourselves from litigants.” He called it “somewhat disturbing” to see the erosion of “a sense of working to benefit the broader community. There are still plenty of people in town who believe that, but there are many also who don’t.”
Improving a sense of community and residents’ sense of connection to one other is “an area we need to continue to work on,” he said. “That happens through shared experiences and events. To some degree, having parades is an opportunity for the community to come together and celebrate together and see each other.” Polar bear plunges and musical events are others, he said. “I guess my point is that places like a new senior center, the [Montauk] Playhouse, those have all become hubs of community.” Construction of the town’s new senior citizens center is slated to begin in mid2024, and the Playhouse community center will soon see the addition of an aquatic center. “When you bring people together, you have shared experience and you have a sense of communal being and working toward a benefit of those other than yourself. To the extent that we’ve been able to try to build that within the community, that’s been important to me.”
It has been an improbable path for the onetime owner of a construction company, he said. “It’s not something I had any ambition to do,” he said of public service, “and yet circumstances arose, and I felt compelled and called to serve, and have for 12 years, and now I feel like it’s time for me to step back and let others continue the effort.” He served on the zoning board of appeals and the planning board, and was elected to the town board, along with Councilwoman Sylvia Overby, who is also retiring this year, in 2011, a tumultuous period marked by financial crisis and a majority on the board that he and Ms. Overby described as hostile.
The tone improved with the 2013 election of Mr. Cantwell, he said, and he believes that the town will be in good hands upon his departure. “I know from working with them,” he said of his remaining colleagues on the board, “that they have the best interests of the people of the town at heart.”
He has met presidents, governors, and senators while on the job, as well as billionaires, famous artists and writers, Montauketts, colonial descendants, “and everybody in between,” he said. “It’s a wonderful town to live in.
“In all,” he said as last Thursday’s meeting concluded, “I’m just really so blessed to be here, to be part of this community, and to have had this opportunity to serve. . . . I am the richer for it, and I will always cherish this time.”
