Hamlet Studies Handed Off To Town For Next Step

The team of consultants that led the two-year effort to develop long-term planning recommendations for each of East Hampton’s five hamlets handed the ball off to the Town Board this week, with decisions to be made about how to proceed.

The final hamlet study reports, they said, give the town guidance on a number of ways to approach how to steer planning toward the future envisioned by residents during long discussions with planners of each hamlet’s development in the economic evolution of its downtown in the coming decades.

Be it stringent design requirements for a hamlet like Wainscott that wants to entirely recreate itself in a new format, to transferable development credits that could help Montauk’s giant oceanfront hotels retreat from rising sea levels, to basic site plan requirements that could make isolated clusters of businesses on Pantigo Road more compatible, the consultants said that each hamlet may follow different paths and can pick and choose the recommendations its residents want the town to apply.

The Town Board will now decide whether it wants to put the five hamlet study reports up for public hearing and adoption into, or as an addendum to, the town’s Master Plan, or whether some of the plans are ready but others need more discussion and study to ensure that the recommendations and guidance match residents’ vision of their hamlet.

“They are all in their individual orbits,” said Lisa Liquori, a local consultants who worked with the Massachusetts planning firm Dodson & Flinker on crafting the hamlet studies. “You can work on all of them, but we encourage you not to hold back if some of them aren’t going as planned.”

The studies themselves would not create new codes or zoning designation, only state a long-term vision for a given hamlet’s evolution and offer guidance to future lawmakers and development regulators about ways to steer toward that ultimate goal.

At the top of the list of recommendations for general applications was encouraging redevelopment of hodge-podge business areas with numerous entrances onto main roads, like Wainscott and Pantigo, to redevelop with shared parking lots and a mix of uses that would spread out economic activity throughout the day and evening, increase walking between businesses and ease traffic congestion on main roads.

In Montauk, where retreat from the sea is seen as a necessary next act, the consultants said that transferable development rights, that can be bought and sold between properties, could provide the off-ramp for hotels currently on the oceanfront to be relocated just inland, where they will be farther out of the reach of storm-driven seas.