The clerk and a deputy clerk of the East Hampton Town Trustees vented their continued frustration with the town board to their colleagues recently, exasperated over being found in civil and criminal contempt for failing to prevent vehicles from using a 4,000-foot stretch of Napeague beach that a State Supreme Court judge had ruled was privately owned.
Negotiations with the town over potential liability for significant legal expenses have been fruitless, they said, with the trustees standing to lose as much as half their assets.
The governing entities are at loggerheads stemming from parallel lawsuits brought in 2009, with property owners along the stretch of ocean beach popularly known as Truck Beach contending that their deeds included the beach, citing an 1882 deed in which the trustees conveyed some 1,000 acres on Napeague to a developer, Arthur Benson. Although a 2016 decision ruled that the 1882 deed “clearly reserved some rights ‘to the inhabitants of East Hampton’ and, arguably, the allowances for some public use,” in 2021 a panel of State Appellate Division judges reversed much of that decision, ruling that property owners do, in fact, own the beach.
A June 2021 injunction threatened the five members of the town board and the nine trustees with civil contempt should they violate the decision that the homeowners associations’ chains of title to their respective properties extend to the mean high-water mark of the ocean. Town officials posted signs stating that vehicular access to the beach was for fishing and fishing-related purposes only, but the court granted the property owners a temporary restraining order demanding that the town “prohibit and prevent any and all driving and/or parking on the beaches owned by the Plaintiff Homeowners Associations” or face being held in contempt of court.
The town and trustees were held in criminal and civil contempt in June 2022, a State Supreme Court justice levying a $239,000 fine for violating the court’s 2021 decision. The following year, the court ordered the town and trustees to pay a total of $389,000 in plaintiffs’ attorneys’ fees.
In a January 2024 decision, Justice Thomas F. Whelan denied the trustees’ motion that the order to reimburse the plaintiffs’ attorneys’ fees was enforceable only against the town, or in the alternative, a stay of enforcement of the court’s 2023 order pending resolution of their appeal of the court’s 2022 contempt order.
In April 2024, Justice Whelan froze the trustees’ bank accounts. Full access to the accounts was restored only after the trustees posted a bond to cover 120 percent of what the plaintiffs say they are owed, or $777,000.
Unlike a taxpayer-funded municipality, the trustees were ruled to lack governmental legal protections. “That’s why we’re on the hook and the town isn’t,” Christopher Carillo, the trustees’ attorney, told the trustees at their May 29 meeting, “because we’re not considered a municipality in the eyes of the court.”
“We got wrapped into this because we were partnered with [the town] on the original lawsuit,” Mr. Bock told his colleagues at the meeting. While the town and the trustees have appealed the decision, “with that comes a 9-percent-per-year interest charge on the cost on the fines. We feel that we should be indemnified,” he said, “because we were not consulted on these actions. We were not participants in these actions.”
Mr. Bock said that he and Jim Grimes, a deputy clerk of the trustees, “have been having discussions with the town board on this, and honestly, I don’t think they’ve been negotiating in good faith. I think they’ve just been dragging us along.” Were the trustees to accept what he said was the town’s final offer, “it’s going to cost us our attorney’s fees,” which he put at just over $400,000, as well as a maintenance fee on two bonds, about $20,000 per year. “They refuse to cover any of those costs,” he said of the town.
Moreover, he said, “we have the bond for $777,000. If the town loses their appeal, that money is immediately going to be taken away. The bank is going to make the bondsman whole for the total amount, which will be easily a million dollars or more at that point.”
Negotiations with the town began in November 2024, Mr. Bock said. “This could sit and fester for another two, three years, for all we know,” he added, “at 9 percent per year.”
Should the town and trustees lose their respective appeals, “at that point, we will be facing real and significant damages,” Mr. Grimes said, “and we will have to pursue this along every avenue,” suggesting a lawsuit against the town or individual members of the town board, “because this is real and demonstrable damage to this board, but more to the public.” The trustees manage many of the town’s beaches, waterways, and bottomlands on behalf of residents.
“This board has approximately $2 million,” Mr. Bock said of the trustees. “We’re talking about half our funds going away. Right now, we can’t access them because they’re backing the bond.”
This spring, two days after the trustees’ meeting, Mr. Bock and Mr. Grimes stood with East Hampton Village Mayor Jerry Larsen as Councilman Tom Flight announced his endorsement of Mr. Larsen’s bid for the Democratic Party’s nomination in the June 23 primary election. He lost to Supervisor Kathee Burke-Gonzalez.
In an email last month, Deputy Supervisor David Lys told The Star that while the contempt proceedings were ongoing, “unlike the town, the clerk and deputy clerk of the trustees made a tactical decision not to defend themselves, as they did not meaningfully participate in any of the hearings.” Despite that, he said, “the town has consistently engaged with the trustees with respect to compromising their liability” for the judgements “and it will continue to do so in the future.” He said there had been multiple instances in which the trustees were not responsive to the town with respect to the settlement process, which he said has hindered the parties in finalizing any formal agreement.
Ultimately, Mr. Lys said, “any full settlement of the judgements requires the approval of the homeowners’ association plaintiffs, and so reaching a resolution with the trustees without sorting out all the potential material business terms for a settlement that would be acceptable to the H.O.A. would be putting ‘the carting’ before the horse.”
At least one trustee was unhappy with Mr. Bock and Mr. Grimes’s airing of their views at a public meeting. “Everyone on the board including our legal counsel were caught off guard by this being brought up in public,” Tim Garneau said in an email last month. Legal matters, he said, are typically addressed in an executive session, and “we were all surprised this was just brought up with no discussion or warning.”
“Unfortunately,” Mr. Garneau said, “our 350-year-old board is now being used as a political weapon which came into clear view by the press conference” at which Mr. Bock and Mr. Flight spoke in favor of Mr. Larsen’s candidacy. He called Mr. Bock and Mr. Grimes’s remarks to their colleagues a “political power play using our board meeting as a playing field instead of a place to do honest governing.”
