The East Hampton Town Building Department will be moving to a new suite at 300 Pantigo Place in the coming months. “The current space is too tight, and this will allow for scalability if more staffing is potentially requested,” Councilman David Lys said Tuesday.
This comes as the department works to solve ongoing staffing issues and process a backlog of hundreds of permit applications that is frustrating building professionals.
“We believe it will be more efficient, offer more privacy, and allow for the public to have an even better interface,” Mr. Lys said.
The town board says there is progress. Councilman Tom Flight said 313 “new records” were created in the department via the OpenGov system in January and 558 permits were issued.
He said he is “confident” that many of the permits were from “new housing applications that we saw in that rush in June. We’re coming to the end of that and that’s going to be a significant breaking the back of that backlog we have going on.”
However, beyond that, he didn’t specify what sorts of permits were issued. A Freedom of Information Law request to the Building Department asking for details on either the number of pending applications or new applications has gone unanswered.
On Monday, the department was threatened with a lawsuit. Rob Connelly, a former town attorney who now works for the law firm of Romer Debbas, sent a letter to Richard Normoyle, the principal building inspector, promising legal action if the department didn’t issue a building permit to his client, Stars and Strings L.L.C., by tomorrow.
Stars and Strings applied for a permit to build a single-family residence on Feb. 27, 2025, nearly a year ago.
Finally, there was a mysterious walkon resolution at Tuesday’s town board work session, read by Supervisor Kathee Burke-Gonzalez, which authorized “an employee suspension” with no further information provided to the public. It was unanimously approved without question.
A FOIL request yielded the name of the employee late Wednesday afternoon: Brandon Gabbard, a building inspector who had been suspended from the department a couple of weeks ago.
He is the fourth who has either resigned or been suspended in under a year.
Taking Mr. Flight’s numbers at face value, the department is still many months behind on issuing permits. The potential lawsuit from Stars and Strings shows there are others who have been waiting even longer.
Multiple conversations with building industry professionals this week painted a dire picture of the department and clarified root causes for its malaise.
Many cite the departure of Joseph Palermo last spring, then principal building inspector, as hastening the department’s decline. Around the time he left for a job with East Hampton Village, Evelyn Calderon, a principal office assistant with years of experience, was suspended.
She remains suspended and her position has yet to be refilled.
Also, last spring, rumors of an investigation by the Suffolk County District Attorney began to surface. No formal charges or indictments have been made, and the D.A.’s office and the town have steadfastly refused to comment.
Still, the rumors persist, adding to the sense that the department is dealing with more than just piles of permits.
Only weeks after Mr. Palermo and Ms. Calderon left the department, the office began to implement an entirely new way of processing applications through the OpenGov portal. Many believe this will ultimately help the department, but it was introduced at a difficult time.
On July 1, new zoning legislation went into effect. That created both a flood of new home applications to take advantage of the old code that allowed for larger residences, and an influx of new C.O.s that needed updating, just when the department was struggling with leadership, staffing, and software issues.
At the end of July, Justin Winter, a building inspector, submitted his resignation.
Two months later, Mr. Normoyle began as the new principal building inspector, but he entered a department in distress with a growing backlog of applications.
Whereas in the past the department would rely on the signatures of architects and engineers for certain details, one expediter complained this week that their building permit was recently kicked back just because “a gable vent wasn’t on the plans.”
Amidst all of this, the Building Department shortened its hours dedicated to serving the public in person, at the window. This has led to an increase in phone calls, but there are fewer people to answer the calls. An account clerk that was hired just in September was dismissed in December.
At the Jan. 20 town board meeting, as part of an effort to address the backlogs, Spaces Architecture, a Lindenhurst firm, was hired to help review building plans. The board agreed to pay the firm up to $30,000. Two days later, the board re-upped the contract of H2M Architects and Engineers (first hired to assist the department last summer) for a similar service, paying anywhere from $225 to $340 an hour. All told, the town has contracted to pay H2M $75,000.
Town-hired building inspectors make closer to $40 an hour.
The department is important not only for those in the building industry, but for anyone buying or selling a house in the town. If there’s one thing that makes the Hamptons hum, it’s the buying and selling of real estate.
Two themes recurred when speaking with building industry professionals: More staff is needed at the department. And, in their business, time is money.
“Things started going downhill about three or four years ago. Every month it’s gotten progressively worse. In the last couple of months, I think it’s gone from dysfunctional to not functional,” said Larry Kane, a builder who has worked in the town for the 45 years.
While some refused to talk on the record, due to widespread fear of being “blacklisted” by the department, most spoke highly of the personnel and blamed a broken system.
“When the town board decides they’re going to ask the Building Department to update a C. of O. when a house sells, they should have staffed the Building Department to take on that task before they were asked to do it,” said Mr. Kane.
“I can live with the code changes,” said Jeffrey Schneider, co-owner of Abstract Builders, “but to not get permits issued in a timely fashion is a real problem.”
“The Building Department is too small for the surrounding towns and all the volume,” he continued. “That’s the first problem. I don’t think the town has the ability to attract someone [to the department] who understands how to build a house. Those people can make more money working for a builder. That’s another problem.”
He complained that a buyer of one of his houses has been holding $50,000 in escrow for months because a generator was not on the C.O. and needs to be inspected by the town to be legalized.
Complaints like that are commonplace. “Simple inspections” that take months.
Cindy Allentuck, who with her husband has built eight houses since 2014 when she’s not working at her day job in the East Hampton School District, said “It takes at least double the amount of time now to get a permit.” The consequence? More fees to renew permits and losing subcontractors, who move onto other jobs, creating even longer construction delays.
“These issues cost us both time and money,” said Neal Kurzner, who owns IQ Realty Management, and builds houses that sell in the $4 million to $6 million range. Re-upping his short-term builders’ insurance policy can cost “a few thousand” each time.
Then there are carrying costs.
“We’ve had one home under contract since July, but because we still haven’t been able to close, we’ve had to pay for whatever it costs to run a home: utilities, landscaping, the pool. I don’t expect people to feel sorry for us, but it’s not fair.”
