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The East Hampton Village parking enforcement vehicle. The village is being sued by the company that manufactures the license plate scanners mounted on the truck after it decided to use a different company's scanners.
A company that sold license plate scanning cameras to East Hampton Village that the village used in the early weeks of its new digital parking controls program is suing the village for non-payment after the village backed out of the contract in favor of a different company.
The company, Tannery Creek Systems, won a bid in August 2020 to provide vehicle-mounted scanners that would use car license plate numbers to track how long a vehicle had been parked in a given spot and assess parking fees to the owner. The contract was for $69,800 for the small SUV outfitted with several scanners.
The village had touted the new system as far more efficient than the traditional labor-intensive method of traffic control officers on foot chalking tires — an approach that had recently been challenged in court as unconstitutional. The village said that the single scanner-mounted vehicle would be able to check every parking spot in the village business district and all the beaches every hour and automatically charge the owners appropriate parking fees or issue tickets for overstaying time limits.
But after only a couple months of service, the village decided it was dissatisfied with Tannery Creek Systems equipment — the appearance of the vehicle in particular — and turned to a new company.
“We switched to a system that is, I guess you’d say, less obtrusive,” Mayor Jerry Larsen said this week. “That vehicle looked like a monster. We used that equipment for less than three months and weren’t happy with it, so we asked to return it. They won’t let us return it and now they want full payment for it.”
In the lawsuit, filed last month in state court, Tannery Creek Systems claims the village still owes $48,860 toward the purchase of the parking monitoring equipment and demanded $100,000 in damages.
The company said that village officials had seen the equipment and the patrol vehicle prior to agreeing to the purchase.
“The village utilized the equipment for two months,” Tannery Creek’s attorneys state in legal documents. “On December 30, 2020, Captain [Anthony] Long wrote to Tannery Creek as follows: ‘We have been using the [Tannery Creek Equipment] for the last two days. Working well!’”
The Village Board last week agreed to a contract with the village’s longtime historic preservation consultant, Bob Hefner, for up to $20,000 of his services for the 2021-22 fiscal year — eliminating what had been a full-time position in the village for decades.
Mr. Hefner has been the village’s historic services director for more than 40 years, leading the historic preservation and renovations and helping craft numerous codes and preservation programs that sought to protect other historic structures throughout the village and town.
“Bob has done a great job for the village over the years and with all the museums,” Mayor Larsen said on Thursday. “But the last real project we have is the Dominy Shop and he will continue to work with us on that, it will just be on an as-needed basis. We don’t really have a need for a full-time position any more.”
Mr. Hefner’s position as historic services director paid him $105,146 base salary in 2020-21 and $145,446 in total compensation.
Mr. Hefner did not respond to a call requesting comment.
Mr. Larsen said that Mr. Hefner will be officially retiring from the post and will be re-hired as an independent contractor. The new arrangement was approved unanimously by the Village Board.
Michael Wright on Jul 7, 2021