J.P. Foster, a Republican candidate for East Hampton Town Board, faced sharp questioning and some skepticism over remarks he made to The Star regarding the Maidstone Gun Club in Wainscott when he spoke to that hamlet’s citizens advisory committee on Saturday.
With local elections on Nov. 4 and campaign season underway, the meeting was also supposed to feature the other candidates for town board, both of them incumbent Democrats. But Councilwoman Cate Rogers, who is the deputy supervisor and the town board’s liaison to the committee, was ill, and her colleague, Councilman Ian Calder-Piedmonte, also cited illness for his absence. They are to speak to the committee next month, along with the Democratic and Republican candidates for town clerk.
A lifelong resident whose roots in East Hampton and Southampton date to the 1600s, Mr. Foster is soon to retire from his position as a public safety dispatcher with East Hampton Village. “I managed the 911 system for the entire Town of East Hampton, with the exception of a small sliver of Wainscott that goes to Southampton Village,” he told the committee. “I’ve been there for 35 and a half years.” He is in his 13th year as a member of the East Hampton School Board, his 12th as its president.
A former member of the town planning board, Mr. Foster served on the town’s wireless committee and the East End Ambulance Coalition, and is a member of the board of LTV. “I’m a consensus builder,” he told the committee. “I’m a community-oriented person.”
In last week’s issue of The Star, Jacob Turner, the town attorney, responded to an inquiry to the supervisor and town board as to the status of a renewed lease for the gun club, which has been closed for almost three years and remains the subject of litigation brought by several residents who assert that bullets fired from the club have hit their houses. The board has negotiated “important provisions” in connection with a lease renewal, Mr. Turner said.
In The Star, Mr. Foster voiced support for the club’s continued existence but with restrictions on its operation. That stance contrasted with the opinion of several members of the committee, who have agitated for its permanent closure.
He told the committee that he was a member of the club “many years ago” but did not often attend. “I think the rifle range is going to have to close,” he said, echoing one of the provisions specified in Mr. Turner’s correspondence with The Star. But “there’s got to be a give and take on both sides,” he said. “I don’t want to see it close altogether, but I do support it open with restrictions that can work for everyone.” The club has “been part of our community for a long time,” he said. “I think if you purchased your house there, you knew it was there.”
He also voiced support for police officers using the club for training, as they did until its closure. “We spend a lot of money sending our police officers west to the county for their range to shoot in someone else’s backyard. So I think that it’s something that we’re obligated to do, cost-wise and responsibility-wise.”
That drew a rebuke from Roxana Pintilie, a plaintiff in the suit against the club. When she and her family moved into their house in 2004, “we never expected our house to be shot and penetrated by five bullets,” she said, one coming within inches of a bed. In the summer of 2022, “bullets were going, flying by the house,” she said. One incident was captured on video. As a public safety dispatcher, “I’m sure you took some of my calls,” she told Mr. Foster, “my desperate, crazy calls over the years about the fact that I cannot step in my backyard. . . . We want to live in our homes and feel safe.”
“That’s why I do support the rifle range to be closed,” Mr. Foster said. “If you close the rifle range, it’s solved.”
Ms. Pintilie disagreed, and also raised the issue of lead on the property, which committee members call an environmental and public-health hazard. Mr. Turner had noted that another provision in a new lease is a requirement that the club “regularly reclaim lead and also remediate lead” when required by the State Department of Environmental Conservation or federal Environmental Protection Agency. “That’s part of the restrictions,” Mr. Foster said. “It has to be remediated.”
“But nobody has followed any standards for 22 years,” Ms. Pintilie said. “I worked very hard to pay for my home, to raise my kids. And my husband came home from the Gulf War to be shot in his backyard?”
“You seem to be an incredible advocate for the gun club,” another plaintiff in the lawsuit against the club who would not identify herself told Mr. Foster. She charged that on the day a bullet flew across Ms. Pintilie’s property, “a 20-something year-old-member, who had not been a member long, shot an illegally modified AR-style gun. . . . He was not allowed to possess that gun, no more walk on the land owned by the town and shoot it in this woman’s direction.” The club and the town, she said, are prioritizing “convenience over lives. If anyone can’t take a breath and understand what they’re saying, you really need psychiatric care.”
Barry Raebeck, who recently complained to the town board about the “clear ongoing danger we face from the hazardous waste site that is the former gun club facility, that facility located on our sole source of pure water,” said that the aquifer “has already been poisoned” by perfluorinated chemicals from the adjacent East Hampton Airport. A consultant to plaintiffs in the suit against the club found lead contamination in all 30 soil samples collected at the gun club in March 2023, he noted, “and there’s lots of other contaminants that come from outdoor shooting.”
“Am I the only person who sees the absurdity of that?” Mr. Raebeck asked. “You’re having a highly toxic activity on an aquifer protection overlay. And now you’re going to say, ‘okay, let’s just start doing the same thing that poisoned it in the first place’?”
“I knew I was going to have an unpopular decision on this,” Mr. Foster said of the club. “At the end of the day, let’s work with the problem at hand and let’s remediate it the best we can and let’s work together to make it the best that we can.” He asked if members of the town board speak directly with the committee, as he was doing. “My point is, I don’t have a [public information officer]. I don’t have an attorney.” Referring to the article about the club’s lease renewal in last week’s issue of The Star, he asked, “Did a town board member comment on it? I can answer your question: no.”
Also addressed was the town board’s March vote to change the calculation by which the allowable gross floor area of residences are determined, modestly reducing their allowable size. The move followed a study by a working group and public hearings. Jaine Mehring, an Amagansett resident who served on the working group, noted that Mr. Foster’s campaign website refers to “G.F.A. overreach” that “hurts local families the most.” He answered that many people he has spoken with complain that “what they had purchased and planned and invested their life savings in, they can no longer do.” Residents, he said, address the town board and “walk out in tears because they feel like they’re not being listened to.” The old formula “certainly had its flaws and had a lot of loopholes that were closed, which I think were appropriate,” he said, but the new formula “could have been a little less restrictive.”
“I think compromise, at the end of the day, is what it’s about,” he concluded in his remarks to the committee. “When you get a newspaper response and it’s from an attorney, sometimes that has to be, and I understand that, but otherwise, let’s have a conversation about it. I might not like the conversation, but let’s have it.”
