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Sag Harbor Advocated As Offshore Oil Base A proposal to utilize Sag Harbor's Long Wharf as a base for some of the vessels which will soon shuttle men and supplies to Atlantic offshore oil drilling rigs was presented in some detail to the Village Trustees at an informal meeting March 8. The proposal, which is sure to generate controversy if seriously con sidered by the Village Board, was presented by a delegation of four from the Round Table Club of Sag Harbor, self-described as a group “interested in bringing jobs and money into the Village.” “This is the sort of thing Long Wharf was made for,” said Preston L. Sut- phen, chief spokesman for the delega tion. The Wharf was “perfect” for docking large boats, he said, and the support operation would generate an estimated $2 million in local business. Mr. Sutphen said that Jack Mather, a local advertising and marketing specialist, had volunteered to prepare a brochure touting the Harbor’s assets, and that the Club was anxious to contact the companies that would be providing the offshore oil support services. It would not proceed, how ever, without the blessing of both the Village Trustees and the residents of Sag Harbor, he said. Caution The Trustees gave little indication of whether their blessing would be forth coming. They approached the idea with caution, and made no promises to the Round Table group except to say they would discuss the proposal fur ther. All agreed that a public hearing would have to be held if the Board decided the proposal warranted serious attention, and Trustee Patrick Kern added, “The Trustees won’t approve it if the people don’t.” Such a hearing would no doubt prove lively, considering the heated and divisive debate which ensued three years ago in the Village when Long Wharf was proposed as a landing site for a ferry service between Connecti cut and the East End, an idea eventually laid to rest. Mr. Sutphen explained that the type of vessel the Club had its eye on was between 75 and 150 feet long. Each had a crew of 12 men who were split up for three shifts. The boats ran 24 hours a day, he said, carrying mail, men, food, and supplies such as “mud” to the rigs. Mud, he said, is a chemical compound which looks like cement and is used to lubricate the drills. Labor Pool Mr. Sutphen said the Village should try and attract three such vessels. The crews mostly would be formed from the local labor pool, he added, thus providing job opportunities for “the guys that’ll be graduating from Pierson High School.” Others would come from the outside to work on the boats and would buy houses in the Village and shop in local stores, he said, and the owners of the support vessels would spend a great deal of money locally for food, fuel, and workmen to repair their equipment. “It would be like having the benefits of a factory without the factory in our backyard,” Mr. Sutphen said. The Trustees, however, asked sev eral questions which indicated they did not think the companies which run the support vessels would be interested in Long Wharf as a base. Jane Van Kovics, for instance, pointed out that Sag Harbor did not have a railroad for bringing the “mud\ and other supplies to the vessels. “Not Ready” The Wharf, moreover, was in need of repair, Trustee Kern said, and the harbor needed to be dredged, a project that could take as much as two years to get started because of the paper work and hearings needed for dredging permits. “We’re not ready for them,” he said. The other Trustees agreed that it was perhaps too late for Sag Harbor to get involved with the support services. The first exploratory drilling in the Atlantic is expected to begin at a site 95 miles east of Atlantic City on March 20 when Exxon’s Glomar Pacific drill ship arrives from Galveston, Tex. Glomar Pacific and the rigs from other companies which have leased tracts of ocean bottom in a 529,466-acre section of the Baltimore Canyon from the Federal government will be supplied from Davisville, R.I., where facilities are already in place. Ferry Operation According to an article in the New York Times last week, tons of food and drilling pipe and millions of gallons of Continued on Page 6 Beach Loss Is Studied The barricade of revetments and bulkheads that wealthy property own ers have erected along East Hampton Village’s oceanfront are what is causing the beach there to disappear, according to an engineer who on his own initiative has been studying the shore’s erosion trends with the help of aerial photographs spanning 30 years and a computer. The engineer, Beecher Greenman, whose firm has been employed by East Hampton Village and Town for a variety of other projects, explained his observations on erosion to an audience of Village officials on Feb. 24. The officials did not invite the press, but Mr. Greenman enthusiastically repeat ed his lecture in an interview Friday. Meanwhile, another study of erosion at the Village’s oceanfront is being written by a Columbia University geologist whom the Village Board hired in November for $2,000, John Sanders, at the suggestion of several local opponents of erosion control devices who predicted it would “demonstrate that the only possible way to save the beach is to remove the jetties.” Unequal Distribution The jetties, especially the two gigan tic ones built under the auspices of the Army Corps of Engineers west of Georgica Beach in the mid ’60s, are often accused of hastening erosion downstream from them while retard ing it on the other side. During the past several years, when the “littoral drift” of offshore sand has sometimes been reversed from westward to eastward, Georgica Beach has vanished. Mr. Greenman, while agreeing the big jetties were responsible for an unequal distribution of sand, maintain ed that removing them wouldn’t be worth the effort; without them the Village’s oceanfront as a whole would still erode away at approximately the same average rate. It would merely be “smoother.” The problem, in his view, was not the sand trapped on one side or another of the jetties, but the sand locked up by the new revetments and other man made structures along the dune line. Origins? That, according to Mr. Greenman, was where the beach in the long run had \come from;” the five or ten per cent of beach sand lost offshore each year in storms had been replaced by sand washed forward from the dunes, which had “retreated” about one foot per year in the process. As the dunes were “armored” by the owners of the mansions behind them, they stopped retreating, but the beach didn’t; on the contrary, the “scouring\ effect of storm waves breaking against the revet ments made it erode faster. Sooner or later, Mr. Greenman predicted, the sea would undermine the revetments and the mansions would be back in danger: “I’ll be very surprised if any of these stone walls are still there in four or five years.” From the point of view of an elderly millionaire, he suggested, the cost of building a stone wall might still be worth it; it might preserve his mansion for the rest of his life. But the public beach, meanwhile, would not exist. The “answer” for both the mil lionaires and the public, in Mr. Green- man’s opinion, would be a program of “beach nourishment’’—transporting sand from offshore or from a sand mine to restore the beach to a desirable width, perhaps 200 feet, and maintain it annually, as a substitute for what the dunes had done before they were armored. Nourishing “You could probably nourish that beach forever on an annual basis for about the interest on the money it cost to build those stone walls,” the engi neer maintained. “Those people up on Continued on Page 3 Tent Theater P roposed The East Hampton Town Board, at a “brown bag” session last Thursday, heard a proposal for a summer tent theater at “Maidstone Village” at Three Mile Harbor, and discussed for the second week, sometimes heatedly, Councilman Larry Cantwell’s proposed local “sunshine” law. The Board also discussed: a revised contract with the Town’s engineering firm, Greenman-Pedersen Associates, which Supervisor Ronald P. Rioux thought would save the Town some money, street light maintenance costs, and alleged zoning ordinance violators. Richard Sage, owner of the Light house restaurant and Maidstone Boat Yard in a new complex he calls Maidstone Village, made the summer tent theater proposal in behalf of himself and William and Karen Sturges. Mr. Sage said he would supply the tent and off-street parking, while the Sturgeses, who have long been active in theater projects on the South Fork, would provide a summer of about 30 musical shows, some as benefits for local organizations, as well as acting classes for youngsters. The couple’s latest collaboration was in the well-received Maidstone Re gional Theatre Company’s production of “Oliver.” Carnival Ordinance Board members seemed to react favorably, but asked the three to submit an application under the “car nival ordinance” so that the Town attorney could determine where the proposed use, apparently a first here, would fit, or whether a variance would be required. Mr. Sage asserted that there would be no parking or noise problems. Later, Mr. Sturges said that he and Mrs. Sturges, who has published a children’s musical and has written several others, stood ready to begin auditions for a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's “H.M.S. Pinafore” on Memorial Day weekend, should the Board grant the non-profit enterprise, tentatively known as “The Lighthouse Company,” approval. A Show Place Mrs. Sturges would be the musical director and he would handle other directorial responsibilities, production, and teaching, Mr. Sturges said. Among the shows the Sturgeses plan are: “You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown” (with a young people’s cast); “Paint Your Wagon;” “Trial By Jury;” “Down In The Valley,” and Mrs. Sturges’s “The Pied Piper.” “We’d love eventually to make it into a Gilbert and Sullivan show place if it works,” said Mr. Sturges. “It's a dream Karen and I have had for a long time.” The arguments on Mr. Cantwell’s proposed local “sunshine” (open meet ings) law were basically the same as reported in the Star last week. At the discussion’s end, it appeared that Mr. Cantwell, a Democrat, would not be able to get a second from among the four Republicans in order that a public hearing could be held on the proposal. The State has had an open meetings law since January, 1977, though since 1974 East Hampton Town Boards and Committees have generally held their deliberation in public. There is, however, in the State law phrasing that could be called ambiva lent: while in the “legislative declara tion\ it maintains that the law’s intent is to have the public “attend and listen to the deliberations and decisions that go into the making of public policy,” un- der“definitions,”the term, “meeting,” is said to be “the formal convening of a public body for the purpose of officially transacting public business.\ Local officials have sometimes argued that “transact” means to bring something to a conclusion and, there fore, that the convening of a public body for discussion purposes only falls outside the “meeting” definition and thus can be called “informal” and held privately. Other View It has been argued, however, that, given the intent of the law, the word “transact” should be understood in its more general sense of “to carry on or conduct” business or affairs. For the most part, the Town Board’s informal meetings, such as its weekly “brown bag\ or “working” sessions, have been open to the public. They have taken the place, since the law went into effect, of regularly-scheduled \executive ses sions,”, which the law narrowly re stricts to such matters- as contract Continued on Page 6 OL. XCIH, NO. 28 EAST HAMPTON, N.Y. THURSDAY, MARCH 16, 1978 SINGLE COPY 25 a:'\ Off Montauk John Blair Mitchell The L egislature’s W ild Night ' The first night meeting of the Suffolk Legislature started off with a legal bang Tuesday evening. William Baird, the birth control crusader, greeted the members of the Legislature, who voted recently to bar the use of public funds for abortions here, with legal papers suing each personally for $100,000. Mr. Baird said his “unique” suit, totalling $1.4 million, was designed to make the Legislators “reach into their own pockets and pay for the damage.” That was 7:30 p.m. By 2 in the morning the Legislature was still going—not strong—but still going. Eyes were being rubbed continually. Yawns were everywhere. Still, the original anti-abortion majority muster ed enough energy to pass a resolution sponsored by Legislator Denis Hurley of Wading River calling on the State to stop using public funds for abortions. “Does this mean we get sued twice?\ asked Legislator Michael Grant of Brentwood. In between, a bit of bedlam reigned as some 75 builders, some hollering, held a “survival” rally at the meeting demanding better conditions for con struction; Joseph Caputo, the Legisla ture’s chairman received a rebuff on his plan to “terminate” a safety analysis of the nuclear plant being constructed at Shoreham (see accompanying story); the County’s veteran Social Services Commissioner, James Kirby, received a reappointment for a five-year term (at 1:30 a.m.) despite protests on his abortion stand, and the post-midnight hour was dominated by debate over a program to assist released mental patients. “Madness” One wag called the whole session “midnight madness.” And many Legis lators, although' pleased by the strong public turn-out the first evening meet ing seemed to draw—as heated as some of it was—were dubious, to put it mildly, about the conducting of govern ment business in the very wee hours, and considerably exhausted. The lawsuits Mr. Baird served on the anti-abortion Legislators as they ar rived at their desks calls for an injunction to be issued by Suffolk Supreme Court “to compel the Suffolk County Legislature to obey the laws of the State of New York and an action for declaratory judgment.” Later, addressing the body, Mr. Baird told of the “great pleasure” he received in distributing the legal papers and blasted the Legislature for “arrogance of power” and “flagrantly violating your oath of office . . . all of you are servants of the people, not rulers.” Then he took from a large black bag a display board of coat hangers, knitting needles and other objects he said were used before abortion became legal. Chaos But the builders far out-boomed Mr. Baird. “If they don’t get a sergeant at arms they’ll be sorry,” commented Fran Romer of the Suffolk League of Women Voters as the chaos began. “Don’t come on to me like a white knight,” declared Legislator John Wehrenberg of Holbrook to one builder speaking. “I demand an apology!” screamed Mervin B. Schapiro, presi dent of the Suffolk County Builders Association standing in an aisle of a hearing room in Hauppauge packed and overflowing. “That’s an insult!” Village officials plan to meet in the next few weeks with John Collins, the planning consultant they hired last summer, to draft various ordinances or amendments to existing ones, needed to implement aspects of Mr. Collins’s recent study of the Village’s central business district. The revisions were proposed last Thursday night during the latest gathering of the special committee established by Mayor Douglas E. Dayton to aid Mr. Collins in a review of the traffic, parking, and aesthetic problems of the Village. Mr. Collins is president of the Delta Group of Philadelphia, Pa., and had been recom mended by the Group for America’s South Fork with which he is associated. No formal plan has been drawn up for the Village’s commercial district, as yet. However, Mr. Collins has put together what he calls a “recommended schematic plan” based on reaction to the various planning ideas he has posed during the past several months. Mr. Collins will expound upon that plan in a forthcoming formal report. In the “We’re in a dying industry. Either you’re totally insensitive or you don’t give a . . . , ” charged Leonard Lustig, a builder and lawyer from Deer Park. “We’re going to remember you guys. I’m telling you guys to get off your duffs... we can’t sell a house in Suffolk County for love of it. This is an urgent situation. Builders are moving to Florida, moving to Texas, soon they’ll be moving to China . . . when are you going to realize we’re not . . . ! We don’t want to rape anybody!” “You don’t know what’s happening to the County!” Mr. Lustig testified further. “You wouldn't sit here like pompous ... if you did.” “Incitement” Legislator Robert Mrazek of Center- port replied energetically (it was still early evening) that the builders were “part of the problem... you’re down to 12 closings instead of 25. Don’t get off on these statements to incite a crowd.” He suggested political “involvement” instead within party structures. meantime, Mayor Dayton said he would like to sit down with Mr. Collins, Clayton P. Morey, the Planning Board chairman, and Daniel Voorhees, Village attorney, to hammer out some zoning proposals regarding signs, land use, and a design-review board. Technical Aspects “We’ll get the technical aspects out of the way,” the Mayor said. Then “priorities” could be set for the construction / rehabilitation / acquisi tion aspects of the plan, he said. Peter Garnham, president of the East Hampton Chamber of Commerce, said a design review board was “one of the most important items” to come out of the study, and he supported the immediate formation of such a board. Mr. Collins suggested the board for administration of architectural and graphic guidelines which could be adopted “for the protection of the landscape and visual character of the Village.” Mr. Collins said it would be a means of preserving the residential scale and character of the commercial district “There's enough power in this room tonight to change Long Island if you want,” declared Louis Howard of Amityville. A main theme of the builders was that construction would be increased if property taxes were lower. However, Legislators argued that they were powerless when it came to the chief component of property taxes, school taxes. Nevertheless, a meeting be tween Legislators and builders was arranged. Culture In the middle of things, singer Harry Chapin, a Huntington resident whose parents live in Sag Harbor, appeared to speak of culture in Suffolk and press for a salary increase for the yet unfilled post of County cultural coordinator— from $13,500 to $18,500. This would attract, he said, a more capable administrator. Action, however, on two resolutions providing for an advisory council to Continued on Page 12 along Newtown Lane between the A&P supermarket and the railroad tracks. It would also be a means for maintaining an attractive industrial area along the railroad tracks, he said. “The indigenous ‘manufacturing’ buildings, the barns and sheds of the South Fork, are perhaps the area’s best architecture,” Mr. Collins said. “With this in mind, the character of the industrial area need not be at all ugly . . . ,” he said. Design Review Mayor Dayton said he thought design-review duties should be as sumed by the Planning Board, or “at least a part of it.” He also noted, in connection with design review, that “the game is over for the Village if we can’t go to wood.” Under present State laws, all new buildings in commercial districts must be made of fire-proof materials such as concrete or stone, but Mr. Collins said he was confident he could find a way for the Village to get around that provision, although he has not yet Continued on Page 9 Village P lan Coalesces
