East Hampton Village will spend $61,634 to repair the ivy-covered trellis in Millstone Park on Main Street after it fell over during a storm last month.
At the village board’s special meeting last Thursday, Michele Allman of the Garden Club of East Hampton, which maintains Millstone Park as well as the Nature Trail and many other public spaces, said that Millstone Park is “a very beautiful, special oasis in the middle of the village and commercial district,” calling it “probably the most visited public garden in the Village.”
Since the trellis fell over just prior to Memorial Day weekend, it has been temporarily propped upright with wooden frames. “I guess the combination of the water and the weight pulled it over,” Ms. Allman told the board. “From what we know, it’s about 30 years of growth that was on there.” It had been obscuring the wall of the building at 61 Main Street, which houses a Compass real estate office and those of Phil Kouffman Builder. “The side of the structure is just so unattractive that we feel it really, really would just destroy that beautiful space not to make every attempt to try to repair the ivy,” she said.
Mayor Jerry Larsen had invited her to the meeting because he “wanted to make sure that it’s something the Garden Club really wants,” he said.
It does, Ms. Allman replied. “We feel like it’s a very, very important space for the community.” A team of 15 tends to the park every other week for one to two hours, she said, and an alternate team waters it weekly. “So we do put quite a lot of time into maintaining this garden as well all of the others that we take care of.”
“Would you constitute this as an emergency, that we replace this?” asked Carrie Doyle, a village board member. Yes, was the answer. “Just to contextualize it,” Ms. Doyle said, “we have this emergency fund that a couple of years ago, we had $3 million in it, and now we only have $360,000 in it.” Because it is deemed an emergency, “we’re not putting it out to bid,” she said, adding that Ben Krupinski Builder quoted $61,000. “Had it not been an emergency, we could send this out to bid, and maybe it wouldn’t cost our constituents that much money.”
The board, Ms. Doyle said, is “very sensitive because this is the first year that our administration has raised taxes. Before, we had a little more luxury with where we spent our money, but now that we’re raising taxes, I think we have to be more thoughtful.” The board issued a tentative budget last month, which includes a tax increase of a little more than 1 percent. A public hearing on the budget has been scheduled for Wednesday at 11 a.m. at the Emergency Services Building.
“We think it’s an emergency, because it’s so awful looking,” Ms. Allman said of the wall of the building at 61 Main Street.
The fund from which the money would be taken is replenished “every year when we have surpluses,” said Marcos Baladron, the village administrator. “This year will be one of them.” The project is deemed an emergency expense, he said, “so that we may act quickly to fix it.” Later in the meeting, the board voted to authorize the expenditure for the emergency repair and installation of the trellis.
Also at last Thursday’s meeting, the board held a public hearing on a code amendment that would increase the minimum fine for violation of the parking permit requirement from $150 to $250, for violation of stopping, standing, or parking within a fire zone requirement from $125 to $165, and the minimum fine for all other parking summonses from $80 to $120. With no comment, the hearing was closed, and the board later voted to amend the code.
The board also approved adoption of a home rule request stating the village’s support for pending state legislation that would authorize it to establish a demonstration program imposing fines on the owner of a vehicle for failure of its operator to comply with posted speed limits. “This is a huge piece of legislation,” the mayor said, adding that he and Mayor Bill Manger of Southampton Village had traveled to Albany to meet with Assemblyman Tommy John Schiavoni and Senator Anthony Palumbo to lobby for the bill. “We would be the first villages in the State of New York to be able to get this permission to issue tickets through the mail to the registered owner of vehicles instead of what we have to do now: We can only issue speeding tickets to the driver of vehicles. . . . This would be a huge help for us to keep speeders and big trucks off our back roads, off our side roads.”
He asked that residents contact their representatives to voice support for the legislation “and hopefully get it to the governor’s desk by December.”
