Dan's Papers - May 9, 2008 - What Should've Happened At Sag Meeting

Last week, the community of Sag Harbor met with folks from the "Main Street" program of the National Historic Trust as described in the article on page 23 to discuss strategies to keep the Main Street of Sag Harbor as it is, as it was, and as one hopes it always will be - a place where local people can shop and meet up with local merchants who they know and can depend upon. Sag Harbor wants no truck whatsoever with the high fashion, chic jewelry stores and fast food chains that have really taken hold of and throttled much of the downtowns in the rest of the Hamptons.

You can read what happened in the story on that page, but I can tell you this. This meeting was absolutely backwards. It should not have been about what the locals can learn from the National Trust. It should be about what the National Trust can learn from the Sag Harbor locals.

The Sag Harbor Village government, unwittingly, has discovered the secret of keeping out the chain stores, the big developers and the chic shops. They are masters at incompetence. And more than that, they are masters of waffling.

I can think of a dozen individuals who have come to Sag Harbor with new ideas, and who have been met, on the one hand, with great enthusiasm, and then maybe four months later a whole different group, or maybe some of the same group, who think the whole idea is just awful. And then they meet other Sag Harbor groups. There's the group that is in charge of stalling. There's another group that is in charge of advanced bureaucratic paperwork loss. There's still another group that's in charge of groveling. And there's a group that's in charge of seeing to it that whoever you talked to last week has just been replaced by somebody with exactly the opposite ideas.

It works! Just look around you. There's no Waldbaums. There's Schiavoni's Market. There's no Ralph Lauren. There's DJ Hart. And there's no Kmart, there's the Five and Ten with the little jiggly horse out front that you can stick a kid on, put a quarter in, and watch him whoop and giggle.

And you can go back decades. There was the great New York State Transportation roundabout battle, when the State wanted to put in a roundabout and the locals said yes and no and maybe and come back next week. So do we have a roundabout today? Do fish fly?

There was the battle to keep out the CVS. That was just last year. They ran into Sag Harbor waving papers and firing guns. Has anybody heard any news about CVS? No.

There was the battle for the condominium project at the abandoned Bulova factory. You might ask WHICH Bulova factory project? And it's a fair question. There was one 15 years ago, there was one eight years ago, and there was one that is, well, the battle that has been going on for two years with Sag Development Partners who want to spend $12 million to make 65 condominium units. And Sag Harbor said yes, and no, and maybe and come back next week and we'll think about it some more.

(Here's a big secret. After these past two years of trying during great economic times and getting the runaround, Sag Development Partners have just informed Sag Harbor this past week that the whole thing is off while they assess the new economic downturn.)

And who can forget the three-year ordeal that Jon Gruen was put through when he wanted to renovate, improve and slightly expand a store on Main Street that was not historically important but was NEXT to a structure that was historically important. Same thing. Yes, no, maybe, come back next week, we love you, we hate you.

The National Historic Trust did not charge a single penny for the local population to come hear what they had to say at Bay Street. And the reason is they have nothing new to offer.

What should happen is that next week, the government of Sag Harbor should hold a meeting at which they invite all the members of the National Historic Trust to come and pony up $200 a head to learn what Sag Harbor has to say.

Wait. Somebody just said that's a great idea, no a bad idea, no fill out this form. Maybe we ought to do this in two months. Or why should we share what we know with them anyway?