Wainscott Group To Hold 'Independence Day' Petition Drive To Form New Village, Halt Wind Farm And Affordable Housing Plans

A group of Wainscott residents has drafted an outline of a potential new Village of Wainscott and will begin collecting signatures this weekend on a petition calling for a vote on incorporation — which the organizers see as an avenue to heading off the South Fork Wind Farm power cable landing and other perceived threats to the hamlet’s character.

Members of the Citizens for the Preservation of Wainscott — a residents group that formed last year in opposition to the wind farm’s proposed use of Beach Lane as the landing site for its electrical transmission cable — will hold a two-day petition-signing drive over the July Fourth weekend at the Wainscott Chapel, to begin inking support for a vote by hamlet residents on whether Wainscott should become a village and form its own government.

Because of concerns about social distancing protocols, the petition signing will be by appointment only. Appointments for signing the petition are being arranged through the group’s website, Wainscott.org.

“We thought Independence Day was a great symbolic way to launch the signing of the petition,” said Gouri Edlich, a founder and the chairwoman of the CPW, noting that most of the signing appointments on both Saturday and Sunday have been filled. “There is a lot of enthusiasm. By word of mouth alone, we should have the number of signatures we need, or close to it. We feel very confident we’re on track to get this process going.”

The group says there are about 650 people currently registered to vote in Wainscott, of which they will need to get at least 20 percent to sign the incorporation petition for it to be considered, or 130 people.

Only those registered to vote in Wainscott may sign the petition and vote in the ultimate referendum, if one is held. The group has instructions on how to register to vote or how to change one’s voting registration address on its website, Wainscott.org.

The proposed village would follow the boundaries of the Wainscott School District, which totals a little more than 6 square miles, about the same size as Southampton Village.

Ms. Edlich said the organizers envision a very bare-bones village, similar to neighboring Sagaponack, with only the minimum number of employees required to perform state mandated duties and an elected, un-paid, Village Board. The village would not be forming its own police or highway departments like the villages of East Hampton, Westhampton Beach, Southampton and Sag Harbor all have done, and would therefore have to contract for those services with the town or another municipality.

In addition to the objections to the wind farm proposal, the incorporation group is trying to pull in support from other corners of the hamlet by spotlighting concerns about the town’s plans to build an affordable housing development on Route 114, redevelopment plans for the 70-acre former Wainscott Sand & Gravel pit and the future of East Hampton Airport as matters which an incorporated Village of Wainscott could exert more control over than its residents can without the power of their own government body.

“It seems to us that the East Hampton Town government is constantly dumping things on us like the wind farm, like the low-income housing, like noise from the airport,” said Rosemarie Arnold, who owns a home near the intersection of Beach Lane and Wainscott Main Street, and is one of the members of the incorporation committee.

“[Incorporation] is an option that needs to be explored because the residents of Wainscott need to have more say about what happens in Wainscott than we presently do,” she said. “We’re a very tiny little hamlet in the scheme of East Hampton, and we seem to get forgotten.”

East Hampton Town Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said that he sees the incorporation effort as a cynical push by wealthy residents of Beach Lane and other roads that would be disturbed while the new power cables are buried, to put their own temporary inconveniences over the long-term interests of other East Hampton residents.

“It’s an attempt by a limited few to basically form a gated community,” Mr. Van Scoyoc said, pointing to the fact that the group has called out the town’s affordable housing plans. “It’s about maintaining a certain privilege and exclusivity to separate themselves from the rest of the town’s people.”

Mr. Van Scoyoc raised the specter of access restrictions, saying that an incorporated village could choose to block access by those from outside its borders to the Beach Lane beach.

The supervisor also said that he thinks support for the village incorporation will flag when details about what it would cost the new residents on their tax bills to run a village are made clear. If the incorporation effort is successful, the new village’s residents may even have to repay the town millions of dollars spent on the installation of Suffolk County Water Authority mains to more than 400 homes because of contamination of groundwater by chemicals in fire-suppressant foams used at East Hampton Airport, Mr. Van Scoyoc surmised.

The Citizens for the Preservation of Wainscott was formed in early 2019 by Ms. Edlich and her husband, Alexander, shortly after the federal and state applications for the South Fork Wind Farm began their formal review stage. Backed by a small collection of residents, the group hired a platoon of lawyers, engineers and politically connected public relations experts to push back against the Beach Lane “alternative” for the landing site.

Those plans call for the cable to run along the sea floor for some 50 miles from where the 15 wind turbines are to be built southeast of Block Island, before diving into an offshore conduit bored dozens of feet beneath the near-shore surf zone and ocean beach.

The cable would emerge into a school bus-sized underground vault buried beneath the Beach Lane parking area and then snake 2 miles under Wainscott roads and another two miles along the LIRR train tracks on its way to the PSEG power substation near East Hampton Village.

Once completed, the equipment will be largely invisible beneath the restored roadways and beach parking lot, but the installation of all the components will require months of drilling, sometimes around-the-clock, and the closure of Beach Lane and other roads at times during two consecutive off-seasons.

Currently, the East Hampton Town Board would have to agree to a lease of Beach Lane and the roadways under which the cable would be laid — something a narrow majority of the current board has expressed preliminary support for, nodding to the Wainscott landing site and underground route being the least disruptive to major roadways.

But an incorporated village would take ownership of those roads and could withhold permission for them to be used — although, wind farm advocates have suggested that as a public utility project contracted by the Long Island Power Authority, the power cable installation could be ruled exempt from any local authority.

“Ørsted has been a terrible community partner,” Ms. Edlich said “This is not how Ørsted behaves in its own country. They don’t land these cables in residential areas. I don’t live on Beach Lane, but I use that beach multiple times a day. We are going to fight to protect our quality of life.”

Last summer, two of the other members of CPW, Ms. Edlich’s husband, Alexander, and John Finley, announced at a Wainscott Citizens Advisory Committee meeting that Ørsted CEO Thomas Brostrom had written to the group saying that the company was putting off planned soil borings at Beach Lane and along roads through Wainscott as a sign of good faith that it was exploring other alternatives, in hopes that the group would not voice opposition to the project as a whole at public hearings before the state Public Service Commission. Mr. Brostrom said the company would be taking a closer look at its alternative landing site in Montauk.

But after months of hearings and cloistered discussions between stakeholders and those registered as interested parties in the application, the company earlier this year returned to its physical analysis of the Wainscott landing site, which it maintains is still its preferred location.

Crews working for the company conducted two days of drilling last week, taking soil borings from beneath the Beach Lane parking area — something that critics have noted has never been proposed at the Montauk landing location: a parking lot at Hither Hills State Park.

The incorporation advocates will have to submit the petition and their full proposal for the new village to Mr. Van Scoyoc and the town attorneys to review for compliance with state requirements. It would then be the subject of public hearings hosted by the town and, if the supervisor determines the petition and other requirements for creating a village are in order, scheduled for a referendum. At referendum, a simple majority of residents would have to vote in favor of incorporation.

There have been a smattering of incorporation drives on the South Fork in the last 20 years. In 2003, an incorporation petition for a bizarrely shaped village carving out just the oceanfront homes of Sagaponack, Bridgehampton and Water Mill, to have been known as Dunehampton, was rejected by the Southampton Town supervisor as failing to meet the minimum requirement of 500 “regular inhabitants” under state guidelines.

Later that year, a new petition to incorporate the hamlet of Sagaponack, and block a second effort at creating Dunehampton, was submitted and relatively quickly affirmed. Sagaponack Village incorporated in 2005.

Last year, an attempt to incorporate East Quogue was brought to a referendum, but failed at the polls in a vote that split over support for a proposed golf course and housing development.

Debates over incorporation in other hamlets over the decades, like Montauk, Hampton Bays and Noyac, have swirled around impacts on tax bills, police protection and what services the new village would take on itself and which it would pay the larger town governments to continue providing.

The CPW has hired the same law firm that helped organize the East Quogue incorporation proposal to muster the technical aspects of the incorporation drive.

Ms. Edlich said she hopes a referendum could be put to Wainscott residents by early 2021.

“The question is: Will the town fight this,” she said. “We’re optimistic that they will use the Southampton model and support our vote. But we won’t be shocked if the Town Board and the supervisor decide to fight us.”