East Hampton Trustees Will Embark On New Legal Fight For 'Truck Beach' Access

The East Hampton Town Trustees will pursue a new legal challenge to the claims by a group of Amagansett homeowners that fishermen and vehicles may not access a 3/4-mile stretch of ocean beach long known as “Truck Beach.”

The Trustees on Monday night authorized one of their consulting attorneys, Daniel Spitzer, to work with an attorney representing commercial and recreational fishermen in preparing a new challenge to an injunction that has since June prohibited any vehicles from crossing onto the beach east of Napeague Lane in Amagansett.

The attorney told the Trustees that they could join a pending town counter-suit against the homeowners, or file a new class-action suit with fishermen demanding the court lift the total ban on vehicle access and enforcing the rights granted to town residents by a “reservation” in an 1882 deed that promised access to the beach in perpetuity for “fishing and fishing-related purposes,” as a state court described it last winter.

“There are 25,000 residents of your town and every one of them has the right to use that access,” Spitzer said during Monday night’s Trustees meeting, via Zoom. “If you look at it in a smaller class, there are 1,802 people with fishing licenses who are being deprived of the right to use those fishing licenses on property that was expressly reserved for fishing.”

Spitzer said the Trustees position would be that the reservation in the deed demands that fishermen should be allowed to access the beach with 4x4 vehicles. Attorneys for the homeowners have said that they see the allowance in the deed as extending only to the specific appurtenances employed by fishermen when the deed was written in 1882 — meaning no motor vehicles.

“We respectfully disagree with the comments about wheeled vehicles,” Spitzer said, noting that certainly fishermen in the 1880s used wheeled vehicles to haul their boats and the thousands of pounds of fish they caught on and off the beaches. “We don’t believe it’s a legal issue about whether or not the latest technology is prohibited just because there were no automobiles being used at the time of the express reservation.”

After Spitzer’s pitch on Monday night, the seven members of the Trustees who were present for the meeting voted in favor of authorizing him to move forward with the new legal tack.

It would be the latest in the now 13-year legal battle over access to what was once one of the town’s most remote stretches of shoreline, but was discovered in recent decades by both wealthy home buyers and a huge new community of 4x4 owners since the advent of the SUV. Hundreds of new homes sprang up behind the dunes and hundreds of trucks — loaded down with coolers and grills and surfboards and other amenities not easily carried on foot — flocked to the largest of the sand beaches on the other side, where the town allowed 4x4 access during the daytime in summer when vehicles are barred from other beaches.

In 2009, the homeowners sued, claiming that, unlike in most of the rest of the town, they owned the beach that bordered their subdivisions, thanks to an 1882 deed that included the sand beaches with the hundreds of acres of upland that is now their neighborhoods. In 2016, a judge dismissed their complaints. The homeowners appealed, and in February 2021 a state appellate court overturned that decision, declaring that the homeowners held title to the beach.

But the court left in place the reservation that gave “the inhabitants of the Town of East Hampton the right to land fish boats and netts [sic], to spread the netts on the adjacent sands and care for the fish and material, as has been customary on the South Shore of the Town lying westerly of these conveyed premises,” as the original text of the reservation read.

As the first summer season since the court ruled the beach private approached last spring, the town posted signs at the entrances to what had once been Truck Beach saying that the beach was open to vehicles only for “fishing and fishing related purposes,” which is how the appellate court had described the rights in the reservation. The town took no active steps to block vehicles from entering the beach — officials pointing out they don’t take specific action to bar anyone from trespassing on someone else’s property, until there is a complaint.

Commercial fishermen led a parade of defiance of vehicles that rolled onto the beach and east of Napeague Lane and back off again, while Town Police officers looked on, saying they would need a complaint from the homeowner to site the vehicles’ drivers.

The homeowners went back to court, asking a judge to issue a direct order blocking all vehicles from the beach under any circumstances, ordering the town to enforce the prohibition and accusing several town officials — including the entire Town Board, the chief of police and the head of the town’s Marine Patrol — of contempt of court, for scheming to not apply the court’s findings.

An injunction was granted and hearings on the contempt charges were held on two days earlier this month in a Riverhead Court, at which members of the Town Board turned over hundreds of text messages and emails and testified about their discussions and behind-the-scenes interactions regarding how to react to the court ruling last spring.

In the meantime, the town has filed its own legal counter-punch to the ruling, asking the court affirming the reservation’s rights of public access and specifying what, exactly, is and isn’t allowed under the reservation.

Members of the homeowners group and their attorneys have said that they have no issue with commercial fishermen using the beach, or even recreational fishermen passing through in search of striped bass and bluefish. But what they fear is that too broad a definition of “fishing and fishing related activities” will allow the former scene of trucks to flood onto the beach again if each one has a fishing pole in the back.

“Traditionally, the fishing season is November, December through May … and if they wanted access, we can work something out with them,” one of the homeowners, Ken Silverman, said during a forum on the subject in November. “We don’t have a problem with them. It’s not in the summertime, there’s not a large number of people, that could be worked out. We don’t think it applies to a guy who puts a fishing rod in his truck and says, ‘I’m great, I can be here all summer.’”

Spitzer said that the town’s position is that, yes, the Truck Beach of the past as a recreational gathering place is done with, but that the rights of access for fishing are still in the deed.

But members of the Trustees also noted that in the 1880s, the activities around harvesting marine life from the sea was often a community activity. There would even be shanties set up on the beach in the days when traveling to and from far-flung stretches of sand was a long journey. The board’s attorney, Chris Carillo, said it was likely that family members would accompany fishermen to the beach with picnics while the men soaked their nets.

The Trustees, Spitzer advised, could simply intervene in the town’s case — an approach that may face legal hurdles because both boards were a party to the original case and a court may say “you don’t get a do-over,” he said.

But a new class-action, on behalf of the fishermen — and all town residents with the potential to be fishermen — who have been blocked from land they were specifically given the right to access, might have legal legs to stand on, Spitzer surmised.

“The fishermen are not trying to fight over whether or not the reservation exists or not,” he said. “They’re trying to maintain what they’ve been doing for hundreds of years.”