Dan's Papers - June 5, 2009 - THE DISASTER THAT IS E. H. TOWN HALL

I spent an hour in East Hampton Town Hall last Wednesday morning. It is the saddest and most run down Town Hall in all the Hamptons, and for whatever reason it has sunk to this state, the responsibility for it rests with the current administration of Supervisor Bill McGintee.

When McGintee came into office four years ago, Town Hall was already bursting at the seams, of that there is no doubt. It was built in 1962 at a time when the population of the Town was a quarter of what it is now. Into it had been crammed the Justice Department, the Supervisor's Office, the Town Clerk, the Assessor's office, a records office, a building department and a town meeting hall, where the Town Board met and where the Judges held court. It was neat and clean. There was a broad front lawn with a horseshoe driveway leading up to the entrance of Town Hall with a large parking lot on one side. Some Town supervisors displayed sculptures by local artists along that driveway. Automatic doors welcomed you into a lobby and hallway area when you arrived. Out back, in what had been a field, there were already temporary trailers housing some of the other Town offices that would no longer fit in this small Town Hall. There was a 20-year-old police department building and there were plans already in place for the police department to move out of the Town Hall complex entirely to a bigger new building in the woods of Wainscott.

Today, the grand plans of Supervisor McGintee have created disaster on this site. The Town might have built a new and much larger Town Hall and when it was finished, have everybody move in, and then tear down the old. Instead, McGintee envisioned a sort of campus with a total of 11 buildings on it, either free standing or linked up by breezeways. The old Town Hall would remain. The other 10 buildings, a mishmash of new buildings, trailers and historical structures towed to the site, would be around it. The project started. There appears no end in sight.

To do business at Town Hall, you drive up one part of the horseshoe drive, passing the seven historical wood shingled buildings from colonial times that are now set on what had once been that front lawn. Some are still on the railroad ties that had been set under them when they were brought here. Others sit on foundations that have been freshly dug underneath them. All are still under construction, with the bulldozers and work trucks parked amidst the dust of what had been the front lawn, surrounded by a chain link fence. I wrote last week in this newspaper that there has not appeared to be anybody working on this project for quite some time. As I drove up the driveway past this site, however, I did see two people inside the chain link fence, one with an electric drill, and the other just standing around talking to him. They were doing something to one of the half finished buildings, I think. These were the first workmen I had seen there in some time.

To get inside the old, outdated, one-story Town Hall you drive around to the back of it and park amidst all the temporary trailers, which are still occupied by other Town departments. There is no parking lot on the side anymore. It has been torn up for the construction.

Dust from the front cakes cars in the back, but if you have business, you put up with it. In my case, I had to go to Town Hall because I had to get a beach parking sticker for my car. I already had a Town beach sticker on my car. I had gotten it years ago, and at the time I bought it I was told it would be good forever or for as long as I owned my car. But that was before the economic downturn struck. A few months ago, the Town Councilmen decided that they would issue a new sticker, good for only one year. And there would be a small charge for it. Boxes of them had only recently come in so you could buy them. But the Town police had already begun to enthusiastically give out illegal beach parking tickets that came with $125 fines to all who had the old stickers still on their cars. They had been promised to be good forever. They were not. The police might have issued warnings. They did not.

The way you enter Town Hall is through a small, unmarked door at the easterly side of the back of the building. You pull the door open toward you, and immediately see a dirty wall with a garbage can, a fire extinguisher and a cardboard box scotchtaped shut that has written on it FOR JUSTICE DEPARTMENT on the floor in front of it. You then walk through a rabbit warren of dirty hallways, past signs printed on typing paper taped haphazardly to the walls, to get to the Town Clerk's office, which is where it has always been, conveniently alongside a hallway leading in from the sliding doors at the entrance on the other side of the building.

A long line of angry residents stands in the Town Clerk's office and extends out into the hallway and, when I was there, out onto the no-man's land between Town Hall and the construction site. The automatic door madly opens and closes at will as people move about, alternately cutting off and then hooking up again the angry local residents who are there because they have been getting tickets. They want new stickers. And they want to do something about the tickets they got.

The Town Clerk's office that morning was staffed by six people. There were four "windows" where the public could get their new beach parking stickers, but four of the six people in that room had other things to do, so the two who were at the windows waited on the citizenry as best they could.

During the course of this, a collective groan went through the crowd. The Town Clerk's computers had gone down. There would be a wait while someone would find out what caused that. We all waited, until, finally, the computers were fixed. Then the line began to move again.

Some of the other offices in Town Hall have been moved out to a nice commercial building down the next street from the driveway to this building. There is no walkway from the commercial building to Town Hall, however. You drive from one to the other to do business.

There is also, incredibly, no telephone link either between the offices in the trailers, the commercial building, the main building or the new Town Justice Building, which has recently been completed and is located just behind Town Hall. (It's next to a dog catcher's building, which was also newly completed and also has no telephone link to anybody.)

If you call any department at Town Hall, you cannot be transferred. Every department has its own phone number. All are listed in the phone book. If you dial the building department, you will get them in the commercial building, and if you need to talk to someone in the assessor's office, you hang up and call that number.

One can say that this antiquated phone system is not the fault of the current administration. But you can fault them for not modernizing it. What was good enough for 1960 was good enough for 2005, I guess.

Worse is the fact that each of these separate departments has been operating with its own checkbook. There are 40 checkbooks, according to auditors who came in to look them over after it became apparent that there was about $10 million that nobody could account for. It was then found that most of these 40 checkbooks had not been balanced in years. Again, you can blame prior administrations, but then nobody fixed it from this administration.

And then there is this: When McGintee was running for reelection for his second term, he already knew about this huge shortfall. He did not have any answers about it at the time, but he made quite sure that nobody other than himself and the bookkeepers knew about it. He won reelection by a small margin. And he still has not fixed it. Indeed, things have gotten still worse. And now, finally, cutbacks are taking place because, frankly, there is no money. Just for good measure, for instance, none of the pens attached by metal chains to the tabletops of the "windows" in the Clerk's office worked. And nobody was coming by to replace them.

If you can avoid it, do not go to East Hampton Town Hall. The place is filthy, the equipment is antiquated and the people who work there are depressed because they are waiting to see if they have been selected to have the axe fall on their jobs.

The project on the front lawn is at a standstill as the cost of restoring those buildings has soared to $10 and then $12 million and there is nothing further to pay the workers. Maintenance is gone. All that remains is a wait until November for the time when all the elected officials will be departing. Indeed, those who have been responsible for this mess are either declining to run again or are being rejected by the party that put them on the ballot in the first place. No elected official at Town Hall now will be there after November. The bureaucrats, fortunately, will remain. When the new broom comes in, the bureaucrats will have to show them where the supply cabinet is.

And still, nobody seems to be able to get a handle on what happened to the money. Monies were shuttled from one account to the other in a way that would seem to be money laundering, except everyone knows the administration was too clueless to know if that is what it was doing.

When the bookkeepers threw up their hands, the auditors came in. They threw up their hands. A financial expert was hired, but then he was fired. Then the State tried to do the audit and it threw up its hands. It couldn't complete it.

Now the District Attorney's office has come in to see if they can figure out how the money got moved around. I say if nobody else can do it, there are low odds that they can, but if they can, then very possibly heads will roll and charges will be filed.

Finally, just this past week, McGintee's special budget manager, Ted Hults, whom he has fiercely defended all the way through this budgetary crisis - handed in his resignation. There would be firings, he wrote in his resignation. Perhaps he could be one of them and thus save the job of someone else. Go figure.

Just as a suggestion - when November comes, build a new and fancy state-of-the-art Town Hall attached to the Justice Building. I suggest that the 17th century buildings on the front lawn NOT be restored, but just cleaned up and made into a little historic museum village. And bring back the parking lot.