Dans Papers - June 8, 2007 - Exposing The East End's Ugly Gas Rip-Off

One of the things that happens when you continuously publish a weekly newspaper for years and years is that you see public officials doing the same hopeless things that have been done by others years before. They're new on the scene. So they forge ahead. What do they know? So I write about the coincidence. Sometimes it helps.

I refer, of course, to a newly elected official's most recent announcement that he has discovered that the further east you go on Long Island, the higher the price of gasoline. And, by God, he is going to fix this scandal. This week, for the first time, the price of gasoline was $4 a gallon out in Montauk. In East Hampton it was $3.80. In Southampton it was $3.60 and in Riverhead it was $3.40. And, of course, the further west you go the less it costs.

He's mad as hell and, on behalf of his constituents, he is not going to take it anymore, he said in a dramatic, fist-shaking, determined manner. He's going to fix it and punish the perpetrators. The flashbulbs popped and the people cheered.

Well, I will spare you his identity.

As I recall, the first person who announced this exact investigation was Teddy Roosevelt. He was Governor of New York at the time and it was 1899 and the automobile had just been invented. I was just a tiny tot on a tricycle. But I was there at his news conference.

In more recent times, this exact same investigation, which led to no result, was announced by New York Mayor Jimmy Walker in 1927, by Congressman Stuyvesant Wainwright II in 1956 (R-Wainscott), by Congressman Otis Pike (R-Riverhead) in 1967, by New York State Speaker of the House Perry Duryea Jr. (R-Montauk) in 1977, and I forget who in 1980 or 1990, but in 2000 it was Assemblyman Fred Thiele (R-Sag Harbor). And you can ask him how that turned out. He's still our Assemblyman.

The basic idea, of course, is that the price of gas ought to be the same wherever you go on Long Island. The original story I heard was that the retailers just threw their hands up when asked about it and said they were at the mercy of the wholesalers. The wholesalers said they were at the mercy of the truckers. And the truckers said, well, the problem was in Texas, or, later, in Alaska, or, later, in Saudi Arabia. One time, I actually stopped a trucker on the highway and asked him about it.

"It's how far you drive from the storage tanks," he told me. "There's none out east, so we have to charge more the farther away from it we get. It's all printed up in a rule book."

"But Montauk is just eighteen miles further out than East Hampton," I said.

"You're holding me up," he said, revving his engine. "It's also based on time. So if it's fewer miles but windier roads, it's more. If people stopped accosting us and let us do this job, we'd take less time, use less gasoline and we could get on with it."

He shifted into a forward gear. I stepped aside.

In more recent times, I have heard that the gas companies charge more in wealthy areas than in poor areas. Or that they can charge whatever the hell they want, wherever the hell the want.

This morning, I heard a commercial on WINS News Radio brought to us by the American Oil Industry Association, during which they said, among other things, that the outdated laws placed on oil companies in the 1970s were crippling them and that we should urge our congressmen to have them repealed.

One of the laws they wanted repealed involves government regulation of oil prices.