Heartfelt Thanks East Hampton November 24, 2014 Dear David, On Nov. 15, the Ladies Village Improvement Society conducted its semi-annual Keep East Hampton Village Beautiful cleanup. There are so many people to whom we owe the success of this effort. The L.V.I.S. Tree Committee would like to thank Rebecca Molinario, the village administrator, for her support and leadership in making this happen and Barbara Borsack and Rick Lawler of the village board for participating in the cleanup. The Village Department of Public Works was on hand to distribute garbage bags, litter pickup tools, and a truck to haul away the refuse we collected. Last but not least, a heartfelt thanks to the students and East Hampton Middle School and the members of the Surfrider junior group for their willingness to come out on a very cold day to assist the L.V.I.S. with the cleanup. We are grateful we have students who care about their community! Sincerely yours, LARRILEE JEMIOLA Cleanup at the Point Barnes Landing December 1, 2014 Dear David, Many thanks to all who helped with last Saturday’s beach cleanup on the north side of Montauk Point, especially the Montauk Park manager, Tom Dess, Jessy Nees and the crew at Lululemon who helped organize the event, Tom Muse, Claudia Tarlow, and Stephen Mahoney, who let us “trash” their trucks, and Claire Pertalion, who painted the big plywood sign to help get the word out. Three truckloads of trash, mostly old fishing gear, were hauled off the beach. It was a perfect morning to walk one of the most beautiful beaches in the world. Please help keep our beaches trash-free. Sincerely, MIKE BOTTINI Surfrider Foundation To All in Need East Hampton December 1, 2014 Dear Mr. Rattray, On Thanksgiving Day, the East Hampton Presbyterian Church once again made available delicious Thanksgiving dinners for clients of East Hampton Meals on Wheels, as well as their family members or caregivers, who were unable to attend the dinner at the church itself. In fact, Meals on Wheels received more than 70 dinners for delivery this year! This is more than we ever received, yet the church was most generous and gracious, giving to all in need. This service, which has been diligently performed by this church for many years, filled a tremendous need in our community, because the clients who received these meals were homebound and unable to cook a Thanksgiving meal for themselves or for their guests. We heartily thank the faithful ladies, gentlemen, and children who gave enormously of their time and energy to make Thanksgiving Day pleasurable for many lonely individuals. We are indeed fortunate to live in a community in which so many individuals and groups take such loving care of their neighbors. Very truly yours, EDWARD M. McLAUGHLIN President Meals on Wheels A Very Sad Task Amagansett November 22, 2014 Dear David, I would like to publicly thank Officer Jaime Trumbino, and his colleagues of the East Hampton Town Police Department, who responded to my call and promptly found Ralph M., who chose to end his life, on an Amagansett beach, Sunday, Nov. 16. Ralph was a caring medical professional who took care of his disabled brother and his mom. He recently became overwhelmed by physical issues of his own. Ralph adored Amagansett, its beaches, and the people he chose to befriend. He tried to be a gentleman in every aspect of this life. Officer Trumbino and his colleagues are law enforcement professionals, but they faced a very sad task, early that Monday morning, with sensitivity and dispatch. All good things, DIANA WALKER Emergency Service East Hampton December 1, 2014 Dear David, How is it possible that the acting mayor of a community with the extraordinary wealth of East Hampton Village can say that there might be a tax problem providing its residents with round-the-clock professional health emergency service? How can it be possible to cite taxes as an obstacle immediately after a good man has died, possibly because the correct personnel were not available in a timely manner? How much more can it cost the village? Another $100,000 a year? Another $150,000 at most? RICHARD ROSENTHAL Fire District Election Montauk December 1, 2014 Dear David, One does not have to be a Montauk Fire Department member to vote in the fire district commissioner election on Tuesday. You must be a resident of Montauk. Our fire commissioners are elected by the public to serve the community, not by the Fire Department to serve the department. Commissioners do, however, assist the Fire Department by providing the necessary funding for services and equipment to protect the residents of the fire district. I am running for Montauk fire commissioner, and this year there is a lot at stake. On Dec. 9, Montauk’s registered voters can support round-the-clock advanced life support with our ambulance service. We provide this service to summer residents, and I believe it is equally important year round. A.L.S. can be a determining factor in survival during critical medical emergencies (e.g., cardiac, respiratory, diabetic comas, strokes, etc.), and more often has a positive impact on the patient’s future quality of life. After members of our community organizations (AARP, M.C.A.C., and C.C.O.M.) were made aware of this important issue, more than 75 residents attended the commissioners’ meeting on Nov. 11. The support expressed in favor of this medic program hopefully influenced the commissioners to reconsider their positions. However, there is another important issue prevailing — transparency. During my recent efforts to persuade the commissioners to provide this service to our community, I was surprised to find how little our residents knew about the workings of the Montauk Fire District and the issues commissioners decide that affect our residents’ well-being. Yes, the commissioners’ district meetings (twice a month) are public, but this fact, and the results of such meetings, are not adequately made known to our residents. While my first objective is to have the A..L.S. medic program fully operational immediately, my other priority is making our meeting agendas and decisions better known to the public. If you believe the A.L.S. program is needed 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and you want to know what transpires in the commissioners’ meetings, then your vote on Tuesday, Dec. 9, at the Montauk Fire Department, from 2 to 9 p.m., is important — not only to me, but to your community. Please vote for me! DICK MONAHAN Crossing Route 27 East Hampton November 25, 2014 Dear Editor, Here is a premise: There are no safe ways to cross Route 27 to or from the East Hampton Post Office. True or false? Here are some facts: There are no crosswalks from Egypt Lane to Accabonac at the traffic light on Route 27; there are no other crosswalks across Route 27 from Newtown Lane to Amagansett; there are no sidewalks on the south side of Route 27 to separate pedestrians from traffic; a child trying to cross Route 27 was run over by an automobile and killed. Add to your deliberations one more fact: The once-in-a-decade repaving of Route 27 by the State of New York has just taken place. The one opportunity to fix this situation with appropriate changes to the traffic light is about to be missed. The responsible parties for fixing this situation are the East Hampton Village trustees and your state representative. Do you think they have some responsibility here? Are you still voting for your representatives as if an election is some high school popularity contest? PAUL FIONDELLA Roundabouts Montauk November 20, 2014 Dear Sir, In response to those who pan roundabouts, one should be apprised of the following: Roundabouts eliminate the speeding yellow-light-beater, save costs for electric, save costs for signal maintenance, speed up traffic movement, eliminate much of the ugliness of wires, poles, etc., are not affected by power outages, influence everyone to be cautious, and are successful in Europe. It would seem, therefore, that critics of said roundabouts are very insecure behind the wheel and should either leave Bessy in the garage or get driving instructions. PHIL HADLAND Oversized Building East Hampton December 1, 2014 Dear David, Your editorials are always good and 8 out of 10 times you hit the mark, right on. I just read your editorial “Home Goods Problem,” and while it was right on the money, sadly it is about three years too late. If you can recall, there was a sign up there advertising a “17,500-square-foot commercial building” to be erected on this site. I feel no pain for Wainscott, because the writing was on the wall, or sign as in this case. To have a former town board member sum it up as a “disaster” is too little way too late. What really bugs me is the fact that when we owned and operated Plitt Ford on that site, we were told that if we wanted to do any improvements to the building we would have to move the operation back from the highway. In 2004-5 we needed more office space. This was the message we got from the powers that be. As you can see, this building is closer to Montauk Highway than the old structure. What happened to all the boards, architecture review, citizens’ advisory, and the like? Were they asleep or just didn’t give a damn? Or perhaps we had one of our past-present officials “shepherd” the plan through the process. You failed to mention the second “looks like Centereach” building that took the place of a one-story building. If I remember correctly, you had an editorial or story about that construction, because there was some type of land-use swap that involved the second-story approval and the parking area. Another project “shepherded” through by a past official. When and where does it all end? It doesn’t. That oversized building with its back to the street has opened the floodgates. Not until we have home goods buildings all the way from Wainscott to Montauk or we get people in office who are willing to keep East Hampton the way it was. Me, I’m dug in at Breeze Hill Road waiting to see if we’re going to have swimming pools in the wetlands of Three Mile Harbor. Yours to command, JEFFREY PLITT Public Notification Montauk November 24, 2014 Dear Editor: It is my understanding that under town law there must be a proper notice to the public (published notice in The East Hampton Star) of a hearing before the passing of legislation. After the notice, this proposed legislation could be passed at any time, maybe on a Thursday evening. For example, there is proposed legislation regarding trucks that puts conditions and prohibitions on the parking of trucks and stored items. Since a public hearing has been heard, this legislation could pass at any time. Perhaps it might be a good idea if there was a time limit, say 90 days, and if the legislation has not been passed, then there would be a new public notification of a hearing. This would aid the public so that they wouldn’t have to constantly watch the town board for movement on controversial legislation and the public would know that there is closure. Sincerely, PAT FLYNN Recognizing Racism East Hampton November 28, 2014 To the Editor: For a country that has experienced racism from the day the first Pilgrim set foot on its land, we have difficulty understanding and recognizing the depth and reality of our racism. Four hundred years is a really long time to have lived something and remain clueless. In its two essential forms, institutional and personal, racism is as genuinely American as apple pie. We need only to partially open either of our eyelids to see it staring us in the face. Our colorblindness is simply stupidity or something much, much worse. The solution to Ferguson was not rocket science. Logic, political expedience, conscience all said to sacrifice the cop. Let the grand jury indict him and then let a jury find him innocent. Calm the populace. Elevate the police and judicial systems to a higher level and let it drift away. A small gesture to say that we are not completely racist, even if it’s not true. But the institution of racism wouldn’t budge an inch. Incapable of throwing the people of Ferguson a bone. Give the blacks and Latinos an inch and they’ll soon want a foot. No bloody way. In Ferguson white people make these decisions, and they are the same decisions that we’ve been making for 400 years. So the prosecutor screwed the prosecution and the cop went free. President Obama has experienced a different kind of racism. His is of a very personal nature. Being half black didn’t matter. He was a foreigner, an Islamist, a socialist. His politics and his ideas were traditionally mainstream. The foreigner and Islamist accusations were pure racism, while the socialist riff was retarded racism. Obama accepted this personal racism as business as usual, but he didn’t step up and speak the truth to the Ferguson prosecutor. For the people in Ferguson, and all over the country, there is little hope that institutions won’t continue to kill our children and not take responsibility. Officer Wilson was doing what the system told him to do. And even with a black man in the White House the situation was not about to change. The country moves on to another drama, another crisis of conscience. We shake our heads in disbelief and go back to life as usual. NEIL HAUSIG Decision in Ferguson Wainscott November 26, 2014 Dear David, After last week’s grand jury decision in Ferguson, Mo., to not proceed with criminal charges against the police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown, I’ve listened to a number of conversations about the event among local people here. A sample: “Of course. It happened down there, where white people are racist.” “Have you seen the convenience store video [in which Brown first robs and then pushes the store owner]? The kid was obviously a thug.” “Now that the riots have started, the media will make it about that and not about the real problem, race.” “It’s about guns, period.” Whatever your beliefs about this tragic event, there is really only one thing we know for sure about what happened. A white police officer in a racially divided town had an altercation with a young, unarmed African-American man, resulting in that young man’s death. That’s it. The rest is shaky and contradictory firsthand accounts, outrage fueled by powerful images in the media, and opinion filtered through our own bias — liberal or otherwise. And I can’t help feeling that our need to talk about it is partly motivated by a frustration at not being able to do anything about it. Especially here on the East End, where this kind of thing could never happen. Right? Among all the noise, there was one comment from a piece in Time magazine that stuck with me. It came from an unlikely source, a former basketball player and one of my personal sports heroes, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Jabbar argues (convincingly) that Ferguson isn’t about race. It’s about class: “This fist-shaking of everyone’s racial agenda distracts America from the larger issue, that the targets of police overreaction are based less on skin color and more on an even worse Ebola-level affliction: being poor.” Okay. This shit just got local. You may have heard about the systematic harassment of Ferguson’s poor, in which people are fined for the smallest infractions and then subsequently jailed because they can’t afford to pay as these fines accumulate and increase, which leads them down a rabbit hole of lost jobs, lost hopes, and loss of dignity, a modern-day version of debtor’s prison or worse (Michael Brown was stopped for jaywalking immediately prior to being shot). Now when I say this “got local,” I’m not claiming that our local police and courts are anywhere near as prejudicial to the poor as Ferguson. What I am saying is maybe we should take a look at current town and village practices, not only as a means of keeping the peace and funding the government, but also in terms of how they affect the poor, our local poor. How fair are these practices to those among the least fortunate? In an area in which the 1 percent are so heavily overrepresented, are we also making sure to look out for those who are just getting by when it comes to setting rules relating to housing and traffic violations, and the enforcement of those laws and related fines? Have there been cases in which those high-minded laws and fines have put at-risk individuals at even greater risk? And, if so, do we have structures in place that can recognize the considerable burden this puts on a certain class of people when it occurs and provide strategies for correcting it? Or do we just say to those people, “If you want to play in our rarefied sandbox and you did the crime, you do the time.” As the Christmas season approaches and we are encouraged to pray for peace on earth and good will toward men (and women), maybe we should also consider ways in which we can ensure that peace will be brought to all who wish for it. DAVID KOZATCH What Was Hidden East Hampton November 26, 2014 To the Editor, Senator Chuck Schumer strongly backed Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act) in 2008 when he knew the details were hidden from us, the public. Now he is backpedaling because we are learning what was hidden. We should remember and vote against him in 2016. Sincerely, JOHN W McGRATH On Climatology East Hampton November 27, 2014 Dear David, Well, here we go again, the mistaken belief that somehow with the release of carbon dioxide humanity is causing some climate modification. The idea is factually false. Water vapor accounts for 95 percent of the earth’s warm-energy retention, called the greenhouse effect, without which humanity could not exist. Carbon dioxide accounts for about 3.618 percent, again without which humanity could not exist, because plants and blue-green algae require it to perform photosynthesis and release the CO2 back into the atmosphere for us to breathe. That works well for all life, doesn’t it? Factually, CO2’s effect is logarithmic, meaning as the amount in the atmosphere increases, the amount of warming it adds decreases, to the point that no matter how much we add, no additional warming occurs. Earth’s atmosphere is very near that point now. You might ask, what portion of the total atmospheric CO2 does humanity generate and what is from all other sources? Humanity: 3.225 percent, all other sources 96.775 percent. Not all that much, is it? Do the math. It works out to an effect of 0.28 percent on the earth’s climate. Not much, is it? In the geological past, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has been more than 10 times as high as it is today, with no difficulty for life. Were we to burn all remaining fossil fuels as fast as we possibly could, the first 600 feet of the oceans have enough calcium to bind all of it without affecting the oceans in a negative way. The oceans are alkaline, with a pH of about 8.1. They are not acid, nor is there any chance of making them acid even if all humanity dedicated itself to the task. The question that logically arises is, why the hysteria and name-calling, and that’s a good question. Motives are always hard to determine. Think of the power that the line of thinking might lead to if you blindly accept it. That might put government’s hand on your thermostat all day every day, all year long. I reject that utterly. If you are interested in learning some science on the subject of climatology and atmosphere, go to Dr. Don Easterbrook’s, Dr. Roy Spencer’s, Dr. S. Fred Singer’s, or Dr. Richard S. Lindzen’s home page and/or look up their papers. These are a few of the professionals in the subject, not politicians like Al Gore, who has pocketed millions spreading Chicken Little nonsense. Yours truly PETER C. OSBORNE Another Bombshell East Hampton November 20, 2014 Dear Editor, The election winners say climate change is a hoax, health care has to go, oil over aquifer even with oil production at an all-time high, same-sex marriage is wrong, life begins at conception, tax reduction is magic, private financial institutions had nothing to do with the financial crisis, it was all government’s fault, sacred pursuit of profits over living wage, raising the minimum wage will cost jobs (even though states that have done so have lost no jobs). And, of course, total inability to admit error. So, with monumental memory loss, and with Congressional seats each costing millions of right-wing dollars, the country squashed the positive, factual tortoise and gave the race to the negative, obstructionist hare. Then, three days after the election, the government said that employers added 214,000 jobs in October, extending the healthiest pace of hiring in eight years. Fewer people applied for unemployment benefits last week, adding to signs that the job market will continue to improve. And more people are signing up for insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act, with premiums well below previous levels and a sharp decline in overall health care spending. Now either the numbers are manipulated or the government is a mess of incapable clods who can’t do the jobs they get paid for. You can’t have it both ways. Either a genius cabal of manipulating, interested individuals is able to devise a brilliant plan to get bureau employees to fix the numbers and do so without leaks, or the government is inept and incapable of doing the job in the first place. Which is it? So what do we have? A newly elected group of officials embarking on a mysterious journey of governing the country without setting forth fostered specific plans for doing so. How long can they keep us in suspense? Okay, Obama is wrong on every count. What are you going to do to right the ship? We’ll see! P.S. Whoops, another bombshell. Senate intelligence subcommittee after two-year investigation issues its report and unequivocally, fully, and totally absolves the administration and the State Department of any wrongdoing at Benghazi. This bipartisan report follows five others that came to the same conclusion and dismisses any and all claims by Senator McCain, Senator Graham, and Daryl Issa of a cover-up by the administration and turns all prior nasty propaganda to the contrary to dust. Now we await the revealing of the emails of Lois Lerner, which, I am certain, will again make a mockery of those I.R.S. conspiracy theories. RICHARD P. HIGER Dire Consequences Plainview November 26, 2014 To the Editor: Last week’s “Touched and Honored” letter about the Nov. 27 debut of Richard Siegelman’s “Short Sports Thoughts” column in The Star (memorialized by the Nov. 30, 2039, Star’s “The Way It Was 25 Years Ago, 2014” column as “the silver anniversary of his sports-related wit and wisdom, which has now been The Star’s most popular column for these past 25 years”) could deleteriously affect the history of our entire planet if it does not appear as pre- (or post) destined, this Thursday. Having consulted with Sir Stephen Hawking, he concurred that the column’s non-appearance (after its existence was proven by the “Touched and Honored” letter) might not only cause a slight wrinkle in time, it might lead to a massive rip in the time warp, causing a waterless wave of time to spread out from East Hampton, washing over, eastward, the Montauk Lighthouse, and westward, those two interlopers (Queens and Brooklyn) on our Long Island. This would eventuate in dire consequences, according to Albert Einstein’s little-known second theory of relativity, E=MC squared (wherein E equals East Hampton, M equals Montauk, and C equals Corcoran Real Estate). Hopefully, life as we know it can be saved, and possible worldwide tragedy averted, by the mere publication of Mr. Siegelman’s cutting mini-commentaries of the wide world of pro sports beloved by so many East Hampton Star subscribers and other readers. RICHARD SIEGELMAN
Published 4 years ago
Last updated 4 years ago
Letters to the Editor: 12.04.14
December 3, 2014