Public Hearings On Leaf Blowers, Food Pantry Application Draw Big Crowd At Southampton Village Hall

The Southampton Village Board hosted a trio of public hearings on Tuesday night, including two that related to issues that have been a hot topic in the village for weeks.

The hearings drew a standing-room-only crowd at Village Hall, with many residents waiting in the hallway and even extending out the front door onto Main Street, waiting for their turn to speak. Because it was a hybrid meeting, several attendees tuned in via Zoom and also participated remotely as well.

The evening began with a public hearing on a proposed law regarding the use of gas-powered leaf blowers by landscaping companies. The law would regulate the companies themselves, requiring them to obtain a valid home improvement contractors license through the Town of Southampton.

Southampton Village has been at the forefront of instituting seasonal blower bans, but in recent months many residents have asked for gas-powered blowers to be outlawed entirely, citing both the noise nuisance they create and their negative environmental impact.

There has been pushback from landscaping contractors, who insist that the electric-powered blowers, considered by many to be a viable and environmentally friendly alternative, have not yet advanced enough technologically to approximate the job done by the gas-powered blowers, particularly during the busy season.

They’ve also cited the financial burden of having to purchase new electric blowers, as well as supply chain issues that would make it hard or even impossible to get their hands on enough electric blowers. Keeping the electric blowers charged throughout a full day of work is another hurdle the landscapers pointed to.

Stakeholders on both sides of the issue — including members of a leaf blower task force committee that met several times to help draft legislation — expressed frustrations with the proposed legislation on Tuesday night. The proposed legislation calls for a full ban of gas-powered blowers by October 2024, which some said was too long to wait.

“It might be possible that the electric blowers will never perform as efficiently as the gas-powered blowers,” said village resident Penelope Wright. “But that possibility should not be a determining factor in when or whether a ban should be implemented. Carbon emissions need to be reduced now.”

While there was disagreement over how and when to ban gas-powered blowers, there seemed to be support for requiring landscape contractors to be licensed in order to operate within the village.

Representatives from several landscaping companies said that if that aspect could be instituted — and more importantly, enforced — it would lead right away to a decrease in the noise nuisance the blowers represent that upsets many village residents. Several of them also pointed out that better education on how to properly use the blowers could lead to a reduction in the degree of noise and frequency of use.

Mayor Jesse Warren said he is in favor of licensing and added that the village would try to work with the Town of Southampton to leverage the town licensing setup so that landscape contractors would not need to go through the hassle of obtaining multiple different licenses. He also added that money had been earmarked in the budget for adding another code enforcement officer during the summer months.

After more than an hour of back-and-forth, the board ultimately decided to table the resolution, with Village Attorney Ken Gray advising the board to redraft the local law, taking into account input from the public hearing, and scheduling another hearing on the matter.

Up next was a public hearing on an application from Heart of the Hamptons for a special-exception use to operate a food pantry.

The Village Board passed a law in February that created an avenue for Heart of the Hamptons to apply to open a food pantry at the old village ambulance barn on Meeting House Lane. Linda Riley, the attorney for the applicant, argued that while the adoption of that law required environmental assessment under the State Environmental Quality Review Act, the application itself does not.

John Ellsworth, a representative from the engineering firm Nelson Pope Voorhis — which helped draft the special exception use legislation and reviewed the application — said the firm was in agreement that the application does not require further environmental review.

Gray pointed out that in a letter dated earlier this month, the Planning Board stated its support in granting the special-exception use, with the understanding that Heart of the Hamptons would go before the Planning Board for further review and comment.

The contingent of village residents who have been opposed to plans for Heart of the Hamptons to operate on Meeting House Lane expressed their views once again at the hearing. They cited concerns about traffic and insufficient parking as reasons to deny the application, insisting they are in support of the organization’s mission to provide food for families in need but believe that the Meeting House Lane location is not appropriate.

Heart of the Hamptons Executive Director Molly Bishop spoke briefly to push back against assertions that the food pantry would create traffic and parking nightmares on Meeting House Lane, saying that the organization “never had an issue” with parking at its previous location at the Basilica Parish of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary on Hill Street.

“I don’t know how to explain to people that it’s not been an issue when they want to make it an issue,” she said.

She added that although the pantry was serving more than 800 families during the peak of the initial COVID surge in the spring of 2020, the majority of those families have gotten back on their feet and no longer require the services of the pantry. “Right now, we’re only serving 130 families per week,” she said, adding that each family typically takes only a few minutes to pick up their food, and that they don’t all come at once.

Sean Hattrick, who is on the board of Heart of the Hamptons and also works on Meeting House Lane, said the food pantry clients typically arrive during the least traffic dense times of the day, and that the pantry sees fewer visitors in the summer months, which is the busier season for traffic in the village. He was passionate in his defense of the pantry and its mission, and described efforts to derail its plans as “maddening” and “shameful.”

Turning to Mayor Warren and the rest of the board he said, “I applaud you for taking a chance on us.”

The board unanimously approved the receipt of the application, over the objections of Anton Borovina, the lawyer retained by Meeting House Lane property owners opposed to the plan. Warren told Borovina he would have the opportunity to further argue his case when the application goes before the Planning Board at a later date.

The final public hearing was short and without much fanfare. The board unanimously approved a resolution to amend the code regarding site-plan review. Warren described it as an effort to streamline the approval process for local businesses, trying to eliminate the need for nearly every matter requiring a building permit to go before the Planning Board for site-plan review.

Trustee Roy Stevenson, a former head of the Planning Board, expressed his support for the code revision.

“I think the modification is a strong one, and one we should do immediately to relieve pressure on businesses in the community, especially as we move into the busy season,” he said.

Before the conclusion of the meeting, the board added a walk-on resolution to set a public hearing for April 12 on a proposed rental registry law. Many local municipalities have added or are in the process of creating rental registries in response to a series of state laws. In 2019, the state passed a law that landlords could only collect one month’s worth of rent up front as a deposit or advance, which created a problem for the many homeowners on the East End who seek to rent out their homes seasonally, often from Memorial Day to Labor Day, since it did not allow them to collect all of that rent up front as they typically did. In response, New York State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. and State Senator Brian Kavanagh helped push through legislation last June that allowed for landlords to collect all the rent up front for a seasonal rental as long as they obtain a seasonal rental permit from their local municipality.

It’s a proposal some residents have chafed at, but Warren said he and the board want to make it simple.

“Our job is to create a registry and make it as seamless as possible,” he said. “We don’t want to have the building inspector coming in.”

He vowed that the village’s registry would be much simpler than what the Town of Southampton has proposed.