Letters

I have lived here for 50 years and voted for the Sag Harbor School District to purchase the Marsden Street site as a park for school and community, using Southampton Town Community Preservation Fund revenue. The ballot stated that the purchase would be pending community meetings and input.

Pierson is becoming dangerously hemmed in by houses and traffic. It can’t afford to lose any open space around it.

The Marsden site was a natural kettle hole, then a dump. The dump site was covered with fill. More recently, forest trees have matured. The site, still a gully, again absorbs stormwater from village streets and provides habitat for wild creatures.

The school showed a drawing of an athletic field superimposed over the gully. I did not take it seriously. If engineers could somehow build a flat field there, how could it be maintained? Surely, this would be corrected at the promised community meetings. The site’s terrain would speak for itself.

The first meeting to discuss the purchase was for PTSA members only. The only subsequent community meeting concerned a new athletic field surface (untested in any American school) with a drainage system involving a grid of pipes below the surface that ran into an underground tank. Public questions were limited to 90 seconds. Questions regarding the advisability of an athletic field at that site at all were not allowed.

The first true community meeting was the Southampton Town Board’s. Architects admitted that they had no drainage plan, just a site plan that surrounded the playing field with concrete walls and necessitated cutting down almost all of the trees, costs (to taxpayers) of building and draining as yet unknown. The school superintendent hoped (though could not show) these would be between $3 million and $5 million. No mention was made of maintenance costs.

Public comments ran about four against the proposal to every one in favor. Concerns were environmental destruction, flooding, damage to houses, taxes. Comments in favor came mostly from parents of students now at the school who did not feel that the existing athletic field on school property and those at Mashashimuet Park are enough.

Eventually, the town postponed discussions until a meeting on March 14. Board members stated that many unknowns still needed addressing, and voiced their surprise that the public had many concerns to which neither district nor town have yet responded.

How will that field ever be responsibly approved?

It would be tragic, however, if the district’s brave efforts to acquire this site are thrown out with this one scheme, to which they have so far presented no alternatives. The superintendent must go back to Southampton Town with a plan that both school and community can support.

Carol Williams

Sag Harbor