Letters

On the Marsden Street purchase: Plain and simple, since the wealthy second-home owner NIMBYs got involved in this process, the Southampton Town Board, and specifically Tommy John Schiavoni and Jay Schneiderman, have been negotiating in bad faith.

There is ample evidence and correspondence to prove this. The latest example is of those officials making statements claiming that there is limited community support for this project, when the one legally implemented election passed by a significant majority. These types of statements by elected officials are enraging to those who believe in the democratic process.

For hundreds of years, access to education was only for the elite and used as a tool to repress the less fiscally fortunate. This is the reason the highest court in this land has defended the rights of school districts and places of worship from easily corruptible local boards and politicians, who have used zoning rules, signage limits, environmental angles, and other disingenuous rationale to stop schools and places of worship from growing.

Public education is one of this country’s greatest gifts to its people, and it attracts the largest immigration population in the world, which in turn is the singular greatest reason for our economic growth exceeding the world average.

We must defend our school. We must support what it stands for. We must fight misinformation and vote to purchase Marsden, with or without the town’s Community Preservation Fund.

Already, this minority opposition group is claiming that the school is shrinking — be very wary that their next legal and fake environmental line will be drawn on any expansion of our schools’ resources. Teachers’ salaries, new textbooks, subsidies for lunch programs — anything.

This is not the first community to have a self-interested portion of the demographic acquire new property and, over time, vote down the school system, for which they have no personal use, or for which they did not use, and instead sent their children to private schools.

If, on March 14, the Town Board votes against their current commitment to the project, in November we must remember and vote out those who stood against us and our teachers. Jay and Tommy John seem to dismiss that three of four teachers supported going public for the project, and that nearly 100 percent of our teachers support the purchase for our children’s academic enhancement.

For those in favor of our community and school being prioritized over a wealthy few, make sure that every Town Board member who ignores the results of the November 3 vote, which we passed, in favor of a self-serving fake narrative that Sag Harbor doesn’t support this project, does so at their own professional peril come this November.

Jeff Ziglar

Sagaponack