Oceanfront Homeowners Balked at Agreement That Would Have Extended Montauk Beach

The reconstruction of Montauk’s downtown beaches hit almost no speed bumps and was completed in just one day more than the fastest possible predicted timing. But the work was halted well short of what the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had agreed to fund, both in terms of the extent of the new beach and the amount of sand deposited into the Montauk littoral zone.

Last spring, East Hamtpon Town officials announced that after months of lobbying the Army Corps, the federal engineers had agreed to extend the scope of the Montauk beach nourishment by about an additional quarter-mile to the east, adding tens of thousands of tons of additional sand to the shoreline.

The agreed-to extension would have added more than 1,000 feet of new beach, extending to the eastern end of Surfside Avenue, where the shoreline juts out into a headland at the start of the Montauk moorlands. The additional sand would have built a broad sand beach across the front of the 16 properties along Surfside Avenue east of the Marram hotel, providing a buffer to gradually eroding bluffs and perennially destroyed beach access staircases.

But in order for the Army Corps to deposit the sand, it required the owners of the 16 homes along the shorefront to provide easements over the sand added — the beaches in Montauk are technically privately owned, unlike most of the rest of the town where the beaches are owned by the East Hampton Town Trustees — ensuring they would not block public access to it. And the federal agency demanded the agreements in short order. The plans to extend the project were announced by the town on March 29 and the Army Corps demanded all the signed easements be in hand by May 1, or the extension would be dropped from the project planning before it went out to bid.

Several homeowners balked at the easement contracts — raising questions about public access rights along the beachfront and even concerns about whether the sand would block ocean views, even though most of the homes in the area sit far above the beach itself — and the extension designs were cut from the project. The project concluded on Sunday one property east of Marram, leaving the beach to the east the same hardpan littered with rocks and the debris of splintered staircases it has been since early last fall.

“It was very disappointing, there had been a lot of negotiation with the Army Corps and they’d been willing to add that length of shoreline and that extra sand because the economies of scale just made sense,” Town Councilman David Lys said. “It’s really too bad. It would have helped the shoreline, it would have helped those homeowners and it would have acted as a feeder beach for the whole project.”

Lys said the tight timeline for getting the easements made the task difficult — any homeowners with a mortgage had to present the easement to their lender and get it approved — the unfamiliar nature of what was being proposed, what Lys said seemed like instinctive mistrust of the government, were additional hurdles.

It was not an impossible task, however.

Montauk attorney Richard Hammer got all five of the homeowners who hired him to review the leases to sign them — including one who had a mortgage — and submitted them to the Army Corps by the deadline.

“I think we had 22 days or something like that and there were a number of Zoom calls with the town and the Army Corps hashing out the issues — it was a scramble.” Hammer said. “Some of the attorneys had a more conservative or negative outlook about what was going on than I did. I thought the positives very much outweighed the potential negatives.”

Hammer said he pointed out that the beaches to the east of the Marram hotel do not draw very much foot traffic and that while they are technically private now, enforcement of any presumed need for permission to access them is already nonexistent, so the easement would be mostly a formality.

“I would think that if they came back and reapproved these property owners, now that everyone has seen what they did … it would be an easier sell,” Hammer said.

Lys said it may be possible to get the additional stretch of shoreline added to the project when the Army Corps sends contractors back in four years, but that will not be paid for solely by the federal funding as it would have been this time.

Aram Terchunian, the town’s advisor and liaison to the Army Corp for the project, said that without the extra component, the new beach will still stand on its own in terms of durability, even if it could have been improved.

“The project we got was the original design, so it will perform as it was expected to at the start,” he said. “The addition would only have made it better.”