Weeks after she led a public discussion about an effort to apply “rational restraint” to residential and commercial development in East Hampton Town, Jaine Mehring, an Amagansett resident, has launched a petition to the town board.
“Critical Actions Necessary To Save Our Town,” which asks for signatures supporting a request that the town commence a formal process of code revision and implement a moratorium on “oversized new building,” was launched on April 18. It can be seen at the website of Ms. Mehring’s Build.In.Kind/East Hampton initiative, at buildinkind.com/general-9.
The petition, in the form of an open letter to the board, calls for a reduction in allowable house size and clearing, review and amendment of the zoning code, and a moratorium on large construction. As of Wednesday morning, 300 people had signed it. In addition to the town board, it will be sent to Jeremy Samuelson, director of the Planning Department, and John Jilnicki, the town attorney.
More than the town’s rural character is at stake, the letter asserts. “Overdevelopment is a problem in and of itself for quality of life and ecological reasons,” it begins, “but it is also a root cause of a number of other major problems we grapple with in East Hampton.” It goes on to cite an inventory of interconnected crises, including an acute shortage of affordable housing with a concomitant shortfall of employees in almost every sector; water quality degradation, overconsumption of energy and overreliance on fossil fuels, overuse of pesticides, gridlocked roadways, “maddening and deafening commercial overuse” at the airport, encroachment on public access to the town’s beaches, litter, “and an incessant string of lawsuits against the town.”
“One could make the case that the time was right two years ago,” Ms. Mehring said this week of her petition, “but there’s no time like the present.”
The letter describes “the pace, scope, and scale of new building and redevelopment,” which, she writes, has “accelerated aggressively and expanded excessively” in the past decade. “House size — whether new builds, expansions, or redevelopment — continues to balloon.” Modest houses “daily meet the wrecking ball” and are replaced by “structures of epic proportions” and “7,500-15,000 square feet quickly becoming a ‘new normal,’ “ with some new houses larger still.
The current code cannot stop the new trend of “gigantism,” she writes. Consequently, lots are “stuffed corner to corner and bottom to top with a proliferation of structures, impermeable ‘hardscape,’ and a slew of so-called ‘amenities’ “ such as swimming pools, pool houses, and other accessory structures.
Ms. Mehring told The Star last month that globally, wealth concentration has reached an unprecedented level, “and where we live is one of the ‘parking grounds’ for that.” No “normal” construction bubble, the current building boom “is a malignant, speculator-driven, corporate-interest-only assault that is consuming each hamlet and undoing almost every beloved neighborhood,” she writes. Those forces aim “to extract as much value as possible for themselves in the shortest amount of time by building the biggest structures that the town code allows,” overtaking the interests of the community and its government.
The letter asserts an incongruity between the pace and scope of construction with the town’s 2021 declaration of a climate emergency. Oversize structures “have a massive carbon footprint — it’s not just about emissions, but it’s their profligate overconsumption of resources and materials that is anathema to climate, sustainability, and resiliency priorities,” it says. Acres of mature woodlands, dune lands, native vegetation, soil biomes, and wildlife habitat are being lost to development, “and no small amount of this development impinges upon wetlands, displaces and fouls our groundwaters and surface waters, and threatens our aquifer.”
The town’s adopted climate-emergency declaration, Coastal Assessment and Resilience Plan, and Community Housing Fund Project Plan are of little benefit when “what is being permitted each and every day by town-issued ‘as-of-right’ building permits as well as the granting of hundreds of variances and special permits” continues, the letter states. This, it says, is because current allowances in the code “are far too generous.” Applicants “see no reason to abide by the regulations as they exist today.”
While the town will presumably see financial gain from increased property tax revenues, Ms. Mehring’s letter predicts am opposite outcome — property tax increases — “as we will be forced to upsize our entire town infrastructure” with personnel, facilities, and services “to meet the demands of and address all the pressures caused by massive new development, and to defend perpetual litigation.”
The town, she said on Monday, is “now undersized, relative to how the community is being built out.” Her letter notes that the 2005 comprehensive plan states that “ ‘most residential development burdens the community with more expenses than the taxes it generates.’ This appears to have come true.”
“I don’t think she’s wrong in her assessment,” Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said on Monday. “We’ve been hearing this for a while, and experiencing it ourselves.” He said that he and Mr. Samuelson have talked about “getting to work on what revisions the Planning Department would recommend that we make.”
About seven years ago, a review of dimensional regulations for residential properties generated “a fair amount of pushback from both residents and the business community” regarding potential adverse impact on property values, particularly on smaller parcels, Mr. Van Scoyoc recalled. “I’m not sure we’re going to get the same pushback from the same folks at this point,” he said, but added that “I’ve now seen a half-acre of vacant land in Springs go for over $780,000. There seems to be no end in sight. So, the time is now . . . and perhaps there’ll be even more support for some reasonable restrictions now.”
