Penny attorneys threaten East Hampton with lawsuit if Natural Resources department is closed

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The lawyer for town Natural Resources Department head Larry Penny has given Supervisor Bill McGintee a laundry list of complaints that could be the basis for a lawsuit against the town should it decide to eliminate Mr. Penny’s job by making his agency a division of the Planning Department.

In a letter dated June 9, Mr. Penny’s Manhattan-based attorney Louis Pechman cited at least four potential grounds for legally challenging the town’s plans to remove Mr. Penny after 25 years, including age discrimination and political recrimination.

The lawyer also blasts Supervisor McGintee and Councilman Brad Loewen for statements made publicly about Mr. Penny, which he said defamed Mr. Penny and violated town codes mandating that all discussion of town personnel be held in private.

Mr. McGintee is on vacation in Florida this week and could not be reached for comment on the letter’s accusations. Because of the specter of a lawsuit, other board members were reluctant to discuss the letter or the status of the plans to consolidate Natural Resources and the Planning Department, which is scheduled to be the subject of a public hearing on July 17.

Councilman Pete Hammerle did say that he was disappointed by the tenor of the criticisms from the public last week, when the board held what was to have been the hearing on the proposal. A formal hearing could not be held because of technical errors publicizing it; the board, while resetting the hearing for July, accepted comments from the crowd that had expected to be heard.

The roomful of critics seemed to think the town was planning to eviscerate its environmental protections with the move, Mr. Hammerle said. That’s not intention of the Town Board members, he said.

All five board members supported the proposal when a vote was held to schedule the proposal for a hearing. Councilwoman Pat Mansir has since withdrawn her support.

“My personal feeling is that what we did propose was not to abolish anything,” Mr. Hammerle said. “It was quite a scene at that meeting, where every speaker said ‘Abolish, abolish.’ There is nothing in there that I took to mean the department would be weakened or that the town didn’t take its natural resources seriously. I never would have voted to go to a hearing on anything I thought was a weakening of environmental review in this town.”

The letter from Mr. Pechman, a copy of which was obtained by the Press this week, is dated more than a week before the June 19 Town Board meeting at which dozens of local residents spoke in support of Mr. Penny and pleaded with the town not to close down the Natural Resources Department.

Board members have said that the move would not change the duties of Natural Resources staff or their authority in environmental enforcement, but would allow the board to eliminate the department director’s position and save money.

In proposing the consolidation of the two departments, Mr. Loewen, the Town Board liaison to the Natural Resources office, said that his observations of the department’s management and operations had revealed it to be “a mess” and that morale was low among employees.

But Mr. Pechman wrote in his letter that just a few months earlier the Town Board had voted to give Mr. Penny a 13-percent salary increase as the head of the department.

Mr. Pechman wrote that board members violated their own town codes by discussing Mr. Penny’s job performance in public session and then with a newspaper reporter the following day.

“The public criticisms of Mr. Penny’s management abilities and state of his department are defamatory statements impugning his ability to perform a job he has held for nearly 25 years,” Mr. Pechman, an attorney with the New York City firm Berke-Weiss and Pechman, wrote. “The critiques of Mr. Penny’s job performance are belied by the Town Board’s decision to award him a 13 [percent] salary increase in January 2008, a time when, according to Brad Loewen, Mr. Penny was allegedly responsible for ‘chaos, confusion, a lot of discontent within the employees, a lack of direction within the department.’”

Mr. Loewen made those statements during a May 6 board work session, during which he unveiled the proposal to merge the two departments and eliminate Mr. Penny’s position.

Mr. Pechman also referred to a statement that Mr. McGintee made in a letter to the East Hampton Star dated May 26 that blamed criticism of the proposal on political “operatives,” a reference that Mr. Pechman says seems to indicate that there may have been political motives behind the dismissal.

Mr. Penny ran for a Town Board seat as a Republican in 2006 against Mr. Loewen and Councilwoman Pat Mansir, both of whom were elected on the Democratic line.