The Cranberry Hole Road bridge in Amagansett, closed since July 2023, will remain closed for the foreseeable future, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority confirmed earlier this month.
The bridge passes over the Long Island Rail Road tracks and provides the easiest access to the Lazy Point and Promised Land areas from points west.
At the Jan. 21 East Hampton Town Board work session, Supervisor Kathee Burke-Gonzalez shared a letter she wrote to State Senator Anthony Palumbo and Assemblyman Tommy John Schiavoni asking for their assistance to secure funding for the bridge.
“Despite assurances from the Long Island Rail Road earlier this year that reconstruction design and engineering plans would be completed by summer, delays have plagued the project,” she wrote. “This prolonged closure has disrupted local traffic patterns, impacted residents’ daily commutes, and hindered access for emergency services.”
Indeed, Cranberry Hole Road provides the most direct route from Amagansett to an area inside the Napeague State Park that has been devastated by the southern pine beetle. Should a brush fire break out in the area, fire departments would be forced to take a longer route to access the scene.
“There’s two options for state funding,” Ms. Burke-Gonzalez told the board: inclusion in the M.T.A. capital plan, which she said might benefit from newly enacted congestion pricing legislation in New York City, or as part of the state budget. “We stressed to them that the bridge is a vital piece of infrastructure in our community.”
“The M.T.A. recently met with town officials to discuss the current status of the bridge project,” said Lucas Bejarano, a media relations analyst with the M.T.A. “The M.T.A. is in the process of developing preliminary engineering work, design drawings, and specifications for the bridge replacement, and anticipates completing this phase by the end of the year. The M.T.A. remains committed to providing safe, reliable transportation, and will continue striving to improve its operations.”
However, at last week’s meeting Councilman Tom Flight confirmed with the supervisor that the design work is already complete. So, it’s unclear, he noted, why the M.T.A. is claiming to continue to work on the engineering and design of the bridge.
“I believe they have complete engineering plans,” Ms. Burke-Gonzalez said. The delay was caused because the Cranberry Hole Bridge was grouped with five other bridge projects being conducted by the M.T.A. One of those bridges needed to be approved by the State Historic Preservation Office. “You could call that a slowdown, but at the same time the funding isn’t there. It’s running on parallel tracks. No pun intended.”
