Letters

I no longer vote in our local elections. But, after 65 years as a seasonal and at times year-round resident of Southampton Village, I would like to offer a historic perspective on the current mayoral and trustee election.

The current winner has not offered a single new or additional plan in his program that substantially echoes the prior mayor’s platform, and both of these mayoral candidates ignored the existential problem of this village and of the wild east: the greedy, mindless construction of excessively huge and environmentally and economically disastrous residential structures on ever-smaller and more threatened land.

Both the village’s misnamed civil organization and the village government continuously bleat about a lack of seasonal workforce, a lack of affordable housing and ever-rising town property taxes. Neither group does anything about any of these urgent needs.

A comprehensive plan is meant to provide a blueprint, based on the wishes of the local population, for zoning changes. The Bill Manger “steering committee” intruded on the hired and professional, unbiased reporting of village residents’ wishes for the physical, economic and environmental look of the future village and the quality-of-life results implicit.

Thus, this politically dominated comprehensive plan fails to give trustees shelter against the inevitable protests of the spec builders, or developers, who always object to any curb on their greedy overbuilds.

So, what’s ahead for this unprotected, propagandized and politicized village?

1. The crass overbuild on the beaches of Meadow Lane and its bayside will eventually doom this fragile land strip to become the next “900 block,” but with far more valuable real estate than the Westhampton 900 block doomed to float into the sea or sink below the already inundated wetlands of the Shinnecock Bay side.

2. The continued degradation of the Southampton historic character, as the new mayor will echo the prior mayor’s ignoring of dominant issues, i.e., the illegal closing of the historic brick courtyard on historic Jobs Lane.

This issue is just one of the many brought to the previous mayor’s attention and ignored, as they will be by the new mayor, who has shown no awareness of them, i.e., the need for village regulatory boards to voice mission statements that conform to the law; strengthening the regulatory boards to support residents’ pleas against pressure from developers’ hired guns; providing the regulatory boards with summaries and verbatim references to the legal powers and responsibilities they have failed and continue to fail to exercise; showing awareness that rotating new board members who are ignorant of relevant laws is not sufficient for providing municipally responsible decisions, especially in view of inadequate legal counsel.

Of course, civility is important to discourse about issues. But what about the underlying principles?

Evelyn Konrad

Manhattan