Everybody wants a raise, including members of the East Hampton Village Board.
“I don’t think a seasonal lifeguard should make more than the board of trustees and mayor,” Marcos Baladron, the village administrator, said at the board’s Dec. 17 meeting. Mayor Jerry Larsen, he said, is “severely” underpaid, and “I don’t think that’s fair.”
Board members’ compensations are “among the lowest” locally, Mr. Baladron suggested, and he said it was time to address their pay.
The mayor makes $26,000 annually. Christopher Minardi, the deputy mayor, makes $16,500 a year, and each of the trustees makes $14,000. Mr. Baladron has a base salary of $195,036. Board members also receive full health insurance benefits, including eye and dental care. They can be part of, and contribute to, the village’s retirement system, though the village does not match their contributions.
“I’d like to look around locally, and also kind of think outside the box. I don’t want to get pegged by what another municipality is doing,” said Mr. Baladron.
The subject of compensation “has come up at some of our East End mayors’ meetings,” Mr. Larsen said. “There are 10 mayors on the East End of Long Island. Everyone is very disappointed in the compensation from their municipalities except for Westhampton Dunes, who makes as much as the town supervisor. I think that’s a little over the top, but for the amount of hours we put in — it used to be very part-time, and now it’s become, I wouldn’t say a full-time job, but it’s definitely a lot of hours that go into our little village.”
“We’re a $30 million organization,” said Mr. Baladron. “We’re the third-largest employer in the township. Every single village expense, the board acts as auditors. Every single purchase, you all review. That is a lot of work.”
The board agreed to continue the discussion at a future meeting after reviewing the compensation packages for neighboring villages.
Easier for the board was to accept the donation of two carpets to the Home Sweet Home Museum. One is a stair runner, the other a hall runner; both depict scenes of East Hampton Town and Village history. They are gifts from Mary Ella Moeller, woven by her mother 70 years ago. The stair runner was created from 1951 to 1953; the hall runner from 1955-1957. They will be framed and displayed.
On the stair carpet, Ms. Moeller told the board, each riser depicts a different East Hampton landmark, and between them, a whale or a duck. “On the treads, when you’re coming down and look from the upstairs down, you see a flower on each step.” The hall runner is a 13-foot long, two-foot-wide map of Long Island. “I think it’s magnificent,” she said.
In a Dec. 3 memo, Hugh King, the village historian and director of Home Sweet Home, reported that the museum had 845 visitors in 2024, “which does not include those who just visit the gardens.” Hook Mill had 503 visitors.
In other village business last month, a public hearing to rescind a moratorium on the building of pickleball courts — that is, the conversion of tennis courts to pickleball — once again received no comment. New courts must now comply with zoning legislation passed by the board last spring, which says in part that a parcel must be a minimum of 1.37 acres to contain a pickleball court, which must be sunk four feet below grade and surrounded on three sides by a six-foot noise attenuation wall. The moratorium had been in place since April 21, 2023, and was extended twice while the board studied solutions.
Pickleball is “a noisier game than tennis. This was all in an effort to be respectful to neighbors,” said Mayor Larsen. “I think we have a good handle on it. Our regulations are sort of in line with what other municipalities in the area have adopted.”
