No Easy Answers

It was an unfortunate development, both for the East Hampton business community and the Express Sessions event held at Rowdy Hall in Amagansett last week, when Mary Waserstein, the relatively new executive director of the Greater East Hampton Chamber of Commerce, decided to resign from the position. The Sessions event, titled “Can the Winter Be Brisk for Businesses in East Hampton?” was to include Waserstein alongside East Hampton Village Mayor Jerry Larsen and an assortment of business and community leaders.

Prior to her resignation, many applauded Waserstein and the members of the chamber’s board of directors for their fresh approach and mission to provide services, networking opportunities and support to the business community in East Hampton Town. As Waserstein said in an interview with The Press before her resignation, chambers of commerce have morphed in recent years from being “small fraternities” to “structured more like a business themselves.”

She and the board, made up of familiar faces with collective decades of doing business in East Hampton, talked about expanding beyond the commercial district of East Hampton Village to include businesses in Amagansett, Springs and Wainscott, including landscapers, construction and service companies, and Latino-owned businesses in general — under a common united interest in all things that impact commercial enterprise.

“That is a big focus for me, turning the chamber into something that advocates for all business,” Waserstein said. “Even if you are in different industries, you still have this commonality of experience that you are looking for. You want to understand what’s going on with local government that is going to impact you, be it signs on the sidewalk or whether you can use a gas leaf blower. We want to be the source for that.”

But unrealistic expectations in terms of rapid growth in membership and revenue, especially going into the winter months, coupled with Waserstein’s understandable need to work for a reasonable amount of compensation, has now sent the chamber back to the drawing board.

The setback, all agreed, was unfortunate, but we hope the board continues to chart a productive path forward. In a world full of polarization, many of us at the local level are desperate for unity, compromise and real solutions to the myriad issues facing businesses throughout the East End. The cost of real estate and a lack of affordable housing, coupled with a corresponding increase in commuter traffic, has made finding reliable and experienced staff nearly impossible, and that has pushed many small-business owners into a true state of crisis.

Fairs, events and festivals are fine and should be encouraged, as they have been by both East Hampton Village and its charitable arm, the East Hampton Village Foundation. The chamber has promised to pick up on that momentum, which is laudable. But the issues facing small businesses will not be solved by a busy few days of foot traffic, as helpful as those days might be to the bottom line.

More important are some of the potential services a chamber of commerce can provide to members, such as educational seminars about insurance, workforce housing and financial grant opportunities. Providing a source of connection and networking as the community continues to recover from the pandemic also is important, and without an active chamber of commerce those opportunities have been more and more difficult to find.

Comparisons to Sag Harbor were made time and time again at last week’s Express Sessions event as panelists and guests pointed to that village’s vibrant downtown, as compared to the quiet offseason streets of East Hampton, and its active chamber of commerce, which over the weekend held its HarborFrost celebration and turned Sag Harbor Main Street into a state more like the Fourth of July. The Sag Harbor Chamber of Commerce is run entirely by volunteers, the same type of business and community leaders who sit today on the Greater East Hampton Chamber’s board.

“It takes a village,” the old adage says, and for these groups to be successful, in a time of great need for their business communities, there are no easy answers outside of more engagement and a commitment from business owners as volunteers who truly care about the town in which they operate, and in the people they are expected to serve.