Southampton Trustees To Appeal Threat To Jurisdiction

The Southampton Town Trustees are once again going to court, this time in what could be a final chance to preserve the Board of Trustees’ jurisdiction.

The Southampton Town Board voted on Tuesday to fund the Trustees’ appeal in the State Court of Appeals of three separate but parallel court decisions made on April 22 by State Supreme Court Justice Peter H. Meyer. The decisions claimed that the Town Trustees do not have the right to approve or block the construction of erosion control structures along the oceanfront.

Lawsuits had been filed against the Trustees by the villages of Quogue and West Hampton Dunes, and by Albert Marine Inc., a contracting company that performed work for homeowners in Quogue without a permit from the Trustees. In his decisions, the judge cited a 19th century state law that limited the Trustees’ authority over lands in Southampton Town, leaving them control over only fisheries, bay bottoms and activities in town waters—though the Trustees have traditionally held responsibilities on a portion of the oceanfront beaches as well.

Now the Trustees are arguing that the 1818 law is not specific enough about who has jurisdiction over what—and Trustee Eric Shultz says that the State Legislature is going to have to step in to clarify the point with new legislation.

“This is a matter for the state to straighten out, because you have one judge deciding, like, five cases, and I don’t think the court system that we have gone through understands the problems at hand,” said Mr. Schultz. “Without change, ultimately the villages are going to decide if someone can put a steel wall within their bounds, which will affect the rest of the town’s beaches with increased erosion.”

Justice Meyer’s April rulings overturned a 2012 declaration by a State Supreme Court justice declaring that the Trustees could regulate activities along the oceanfront in the interest of protecting public access to the beaches and waters; the Trustees maintain that access is jeopardized by the installation of hard protective structures buried in sand, and that such hard structures can impact other beaches nearby as well by worsening erosion.

His decision acknowledges that there remains a public easement for the right to access and travel along the oceanfront, but it also states that the Trustees do not hold authority to impose any regulations within that easement beyond controlling the gathering of natural resources, like fish and seaweed.

“All of the Trustees’ suits are important to us, because they are potentially precedent-setting,” Southampton Town Supervisor Anna Throne-Holst said this week. “This is potentially troubling to us.”

According to Mr. Shultz, the issue of jurisdiction goes back to the 1880s, when there were two different Trustee boards—the commonality Board of Trustees, which still operates today, and the proprietary Trustees, a position eliminated in the 1880s. The commonality Trustees were granted the rights to govern fisheries, bay bottoms and activities within town waters, while their counterparts ruled over common lands, like sheep pastures. At that time, the proprietary Trustees argued that public beaches were a part of the common land.

Mr. Shultz said the current problem stems from what happened after the proprietary Trustees board was abolished. No official declaration was made then as to who would take jurisdiction over the property the proprietary Trustees had held—although the commonality Trustees asserted that the jurisdiction was theirs.

That decision had not been challenged until the ruling this April, which said that the villages and town retained jurisdiction—a challenge Mr. Shultz said the villages are not equipped to handle. “This whole erosion situation has to be treated on not a townwide but an islandwide basis,” Mr. Shultz said. “Because any kind of structure put up will affect other beaches down the line. These villages cannot operate within a bubble. It is all one big management plan that has to be put into place.”

The court battle has been a complicated one. In 2012, the Town Trustees filed lawsuits against Quogue Village and Albert Marine after the village and three of its residents—Paul Napoli, and Randi and Jeffrey Levine—placed rows of large sandbags along the eroded oceanfront in front of the Quogue Village Beach and the two adjacent homes following severe erosion during winter storms in 2011.

The Trustees claimed that installation of the protective barriers, which were buried under artificial dunes, was done without required Trustee-issued permits and violated their regulations on the types of protective measures that can be used on the oceanfront

Quogue Village and Albert Marine filed a countersuit against the Trustees, and West Hampton Dunes filed a companion suit charging that the Trustees should have no authority to regulate activities along their oceanfront, either.

In February 2014, Justice Meyer ruled in the West Hampton Dunes case that the Trustees did not have authority to regulate the beaches beyond controlling traditional activities that take place within the easement. In one of his earlier rulings in the Quogue case, he had, however, declared that the Trustees could, in fact, regulate activities outside the easement, and within the village, as a means of protecting it from being threatened by erosion caused by activities of adjacent landowners.

Because an Appellate Court refused to hear an appeal of Justice Meyer’s April decisions, the current appeal in the State Court of Appeals could be the Trustees’ last chance in court. According to Trustees President Edward Warner Jr., the appeal is the final course of action for the Trustees in this case—and if the latest ruling cannot be overturned completely, he is at least hoping for some clarity.

Now that the town has authorized the appeal, the attorney for the Trustees, Richard Cahn, will file papers with the court in the next few weeks.

“We have to get our determination on what we are going to be allowed to do in the future with the beaches,” Mr. Warner said. “Right now, they have taken away our regulatory authority on the beaches, which we have been regulating since the early 1900s. It is a very big determination.”