Dan's Papers - February 15, 2008

While most East End businesses are scrambling to find summer workers, the East Hampton Village Police Department is looking to replace 19 seasonal positions with one camera. That camera, which costs $65,000, would be mounted on a police car, and, according to East Hampton Village Police Chief Gerard Larsen, significantly help with monitoring parking during summer months.

In beach season, East Hampton Village hires the additional traffic control officers to monitor parked vehicles. Currently, parking is monitored two ways. In the Village's Schenck and Reutershan parking lots, the police department relies on tickets with a time and date dispensed from machines. With the tickets displayed on the dashboard, traffic control officers can keep an eye on how long the car is parked in the lot.

The other monitoring strategy involves a large stick of chalk. One of the vehicle's tires and the pavement below are marked with chalk, so that the two chalk marks align. If a vehicle's chalk lines appear to remain aligned beyond the time limit for a particular parking spot (one to two hours in the Village), the windshield gets slapped with a ticket.

"The chalk system has many flaws," said an employee at a real estate agency on Main Street in East Hampton. "I would leave my parking spot to go to lunch, come back and park in the same spot, and then get a ticket even though I was never parked in the spot for more than two hours at a time. One summer I paid almost $575 in parking tickets."

Another employee described methods to beat the system. "I know some people who wipe the chalk marks off with water," he said. "Or they pull out of the parking space and change the alignment so the chalk marks don't match up."

Another East Hampton resident described an incident when a traffic control officer never marked her tire with chalk, but ticketed her anyway, claiming that he "remembered the car was there."

Many tickets are dismissed because of incidents like this (several thousand last summer), but with the proposed camera, the court would have a photograph and GPS log indicating how long a car is parked in a particular space, so there would be little discrepancy.

Although the Town of East Hampton has not yet expressed if it believes the camera would be beneficial, Chief Larsen suggested that it could also photograph license plates at East Hampton beaches and assist the Town with confiscating fake beach permits by recording the license plates of those who purchased permits.

Chief Larsen proposed purchasing the camera at an East Hampton Village Board of Trustees meeting last month and the Board agreed to send him, along with two other Village officials, to Jacksonville, Florida, where the police department currently uses the camera, to see its capabilities. At the meeting, Chief Larsen also explained that his department spends an unnecessary amount of time and money training and monitoring the seasonal workers, all of which would be eliminated with the purchase of the camera.

If the camera were purchased, the Village would be continuing its adoption of new technology, as two high-tech cameras, which are currently being used to monitor passing motorists and have already led to many arrests, were purchased just last month.