Letters

Congratulations, Mayor Jesse Warren, and welcome, Trustees Robin Brown and Roy Stevenson. This was more than a hugely decisive election: This was a mandate.

What I heard voters say: This is the end of the lawless and damaging giveaways to developers, which have decimated our historic sites, decreased our village character and quality of life, while increasing the burdensome Southampton Town property taxes.

Just to show you how difficult it is to get rid of systemic pro-developer bias, let’s look at the local laws determining the announcement of public hearings, for example, at the Board of Architectural Review and Historic Preservation. This law was originally introduced by former Mayor Mark Epley’s enforcer, Elbert W. Robinson Jr., who wrote such a restrictive announcement law that only the four immediate neighbors of the applicant had written notice of the upcoming ARB hearing just 10 days later (from time of mailing, not time of receipt of notice).

Furthermore, Robinson, then assistant village attorney, applied this notice requirement to a legal and certified subdivision, properly voted into existence by a prior Village Planning Board and legally filed with the Suffolk County clerk. Using a local law that affected the property rights of owners in a certified and legal subdivision violates New York State law, which protects the rights of legal owners in a legal subdivision, and substitutes a local law for a New York State law. Obviously illegal, since our judicial system and laws are hierarchical.

But the still restrictive and narrow local announcement law also hurt property owners on such local village streets as Halsey Street, Elm Street, Wooley Street, Burnett Street and Corrigan Street, by making it difficult, if not impossible, in the short time given, and with the announcement so limited in distribution, that it was challenging if not impossible to mount any meaningful defense against an eight-bedroom house on a street of three- and four-bedroom houses. So our village neighbors were handicapped before the pro-developer procedures in our regulatory boards even began to sanction another developer giveaway.

Reforming a developer-biased system and developer-biased procedures was an insurmountable challenge for a sharply divided Board of Trustees. Let us hope that now we finally have a local government that considers itself responsible to our village and not to developers; a local government that is listening to the voice of the people; a local government that is ready and able to plan sustainable and necessary development, which takes into account the wishes and needs of our Southampton Village residents.

Evelyn Konrad

Attorney-at-law

Southampton