Letters

On April 19, the Sag Harbor School Board held a disturbing public meeting at which they seemed intent on offering a revisionist history of the Marsden Street project and stifling rigorous public debate about the May 16 bond referendum.

For eight months, the Board of Education has presented a plan for an athletic field and 72-space parking lot on Marsden Street, and only that plan, hiring consultants to design it, presenting it at numerous public meetings, and refusing any alternative, including a compromise offered by the Southampton Town Council for a more modest athletic facility combined with a preserve. At one Town Council meeting, Superintendent Jeff Nichols repeated that there has always been only one plan for Marsden Street.

But on the 19th, the board suddenly insisted that they have no plan for the site. They also made the amazing claim that the Town Council had required the parking lot as a prerequisite for the $6 million appropriation from the Community Preservation Fund. Consider this: The CPF requiring clear-cutting a wooded area to build a 72-space asphalt parking lot in a residential historic district!

This is a particularly remarkable claim, given that in July 2022, when the School Board asked the Town Council for extra money to buy the property that would be proposed for a parking lot, the council refused the request.

Does any of this seem credible?

The School Board is pretending to back away from the only plan they have ever presented for Marsden Street because the plan is now receiving the intense scrutiny about costs, environmental damage and feasibility that they hoped to avoid. When many taxpayers began to look closely at the project, they saw how problematic it was.

We are now asked to vote only on the purchase of the lots, trusting the Board of Education to do the right thing. Because it does involve trust, rather than legal constraints. Once the school owns the Marsden lots they can do almost anything, because village and town zoning doesn’t apply to schools.

Common sense tells me that once it completely controls the lots, the school will return to its original plan, destroying a wooded area to build an artificial turf athletic field on a kettle hole, with a 72-space parking lot across the way, in an area that collects stormwater and feeds into our aquifer.

In the State Department of Education’s guidelines for land acquisition, they write that any such acquisition must be “considered in conjunction with ultimate development costs.” The Board of Education should detail a clear plan for Marsden Street, give it the legally mandated environmental review, make realistic cost estimates — and only then come to the voters for approval.

Kathryn Levy

Sag Harbor