TYPOS, SLIP-UPS & OMISSIONS, HAMPTONS STYLE

By Dan Rattiner

One might expect mistakes to be made in a small town every once in a while. But just last week, so many of them popped up, it was hard to believe such bungling was possible.

In Sagaponack Village, there was the matter of the error in the newly passed zoning code. Apparently, in typing it up, the typist fouled up. Those businesses which were non-conforming and pre-existing not only didn't have to be brought up to code, but they were-here's the error-allowed to expand in the future up to twice their current size.

The error became known when the Animal Rescue Fund (ARF) bought a property on Montauk Highway in that village, where they intend to build a much larger store than is there now in order to accommodate the needs of their thrift shop, which they will move from Sagaponack once the new facility is complete.

"This is much too big," the village told ARF when first shown the plan of the big new store to be built in Sagaponack. Then they found it was not too big. It was legal.

"That is why we bought it," a representative of ARF said. "We need lots of space for the home furnishings-beds and chests and sofas and things."

"It's a mistake."

"If we had known that, we wouldn't have bought it."

The property has a 1,700-square-foot house on it. They will expand it to 3,100 square feet, though they could take it to 3,400 square feet if they read the code correctly, which they did.

The code is being corrected. But, woof, ARF wins this one.

In East Hampton Village, village trustees have discovered that a law preventing residents from bulldozing the ancient Double Dunes, a line of oceanfront sand dunes extending six miles between Georgica and Amagansett, does not exist. They thought it did. It doesn't.

The Double Dunes are a unique series of dunes that extend back from the ocean as much as a quarter of a mile. They are unlike any in the world. About three miles of them are in the Village of East Hampton, and about three miles of them are adjacent in the Town of East Hampton. They are protected by rangers from the State Department of Environmental Conservation, and are supposedly supported by village and town laws. The town has such laws. The village does not.

"Our laws only protect dunes a certain number of feet from a house," a village official said ruefully after poring through the ordinances.

The fact that the village does not have an ordinance was brought into the spotlight a year ago when a rich homeowner named Ron Baron built a concrete wall parallel to the beach for 800 feet through the Double Dunes on his property. No one had ever done that before. It was a flagrant violation. The town went after him, and he ultimately had to jackhammer the part of it in the town out. It was quite clear at the time that what he did in the village was legal because there was no such law. The wall is still up there, and the village ignored the problem.

In recent weeks, however, the village has been scrambling to prevent other village residents from bulldozing the dunes, which, suddenly, they have begun to do. The village rewrote the code to add the restriction and hopes to send it to the state for its stamped approval by this past Monday.

In the meantime, though, two oceanfront homeowners in the village have had bulldozers out, trying to flatten the dunes so as to improve their ocean views.

One is Brian Brille, president of the Asia-Pacific operations of Bank of America, who has started operations to flatten the dune, put in a retaining wall, relocate a wooden walkway and re-grade and landscape the project with native plantings.

He proposed this six months ago. The village building department, seeing no reason not to, approved it. Last week, the village said that he could bulldoze until Monday and get whatever he wanted done by that time. But that was it.

Brille is on the Board of Trustees of The Nature Conservancy, which supports the protection of the Double Dunes.

Also underway is a Double Dune destruction project by Christopher Brown, a resident of Further Lane in East Hampton Village. This past week, Brown's bulldozers were working furiously to re-grade the dunes on his property.

Brown is also on the Board of Trustees of The Nature Conservancy.

Finally, there were the laws passed recently by the State of New York requiring all surfcasters to buy $10 state fishing licenses. Their reasons are that they want to keep track of how many fishermen are out there (they are desperate for money), and they want to better see what kind and how many fish are being caught (they are desperate for money). No one bothered to look into the laws on eastern Long Island where in three towns, Southampton, Southold and East Hampton, there are ancient trustee laws that prevent the state or anybody else from charging local residents to fish in the ocean, ponds or bays. These laws have been upheld in the courts over and over again.

The state law went into effect on October 1. All around the state, people are buying licenses online and in sporting goods stores. On October 2, the three East End towns filed a lawsuit, and so far as anybody knows, even though the law was passed, not one state police officer has asked a surfcaster to show him a license in those towns.

The matter will probably be in court for years since it is highly unlikely the state will go into its ordinance books with an eraser. We know the outcome.

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