Town Board: Seaplanes, old nursery and an ‘ambush’

Concern about the safety and legality of seaplane landings at Crescent Beach and complaints from neighbors about the vacant Shelter Island Nursery building and property on St. Mary’s Road were among the new topics aired at Tuesday’s Town Board work session. Also on Tuesday, a tiff between Supervisor Jim Dougherty and the Town Board member who wants his job, Councilman Glenn Waddington, picked up where it left off last week.

Councilman Ed Brown raised the seaplane issue and Mr. Dougherty reported neighbors were concerned about the deteriorating nursery property after the board had completed an agenda that listed only two items, one long familiar and the other new: a planned upgrade to the Senior Activity Center kitchen, which has been a topic for many months, and the need to install a new fire suppression system in the Presbyterian Church kitchen, where the town prepares meals for seniors as part of its nutrition program.

A recent routine fire extinguisher inspection by a state fire marshal revealed that the fire suppression system for the stove is not up to code, Mr. Dougherty said. Nutrition Program Manager Karin Bennett and Public Works Commissioner Mark Ketcham said they would seek bids for the work, which is required for jobs expected to cost more than $3,000.

On the kitchen project at the Senior Center, Mr. Ketcham reported that he had been talking with local contractor Peder Larsen of Shelter Island Sand and Gravel to consider ways to minimize the cost of the site work necessary to install a new septic system, remove an old oil tank and relocate a water well. Mr. Ketcham said he wanted to “get together with him and the engineer to tweak” the plans to save costs.

He and board members discussed options for a new project engineer with Matt Sherman, who prepared the upgrade plans but in a matter of days would be moving off the Island with his family for St. Croix.

SEAPLANES

People are concerned after seeing a seaplane land off Crescent Beach and come ashore at an old private ramp area to pick up passengers. There was talk, Mr. Brown said, that seaplanes had been banned “in the Hamptons” so traffic had been diverted to Shelter Island — an assertion that appears to be incorrect.

Councilman Peter Reich discussed how Shelter Island speed restrictions for vessels apply to seaplanes and said the “bay constable is watching” the operations and “so far” the pilots were abiding by the rules.

Mr. Dougherty warned that, when the economy eventually improves, “there is an invasion waiting to happen” as air traffic picks up, particularly helicopters. He said despite the diversion of some helicopters bound for East Hampton from New York to the ocean route along the south shore of Long Island, too much traffic continued to fly by the Silver Beach and Shorewood areas especially.

NURSERY

Neighbors are troubled by vagrants or youths who’ve been seen on the Shelter Island Nursery property, which owners Sean and Erin McLean closed down last year after having proposed a 20-unit apartment complex on one acre behind the nursery building in 2009. That plan appears to have been abandoned.

Mr. Dougherty said he and the neighbors were concerned that the nursery, “which has not been in business in quite a while,” may be another case of an abandoned and unsafe property like the Boylan house on Manhanset Road, which the town ordered demolished recently as a hazard.

He said neighbors had observed old propane tanks inside the building and unsecured doors. The town had to decide if the property posed a “health and safety hazard” and “we should have evidence soon from neighbors,” he said, to help that process along. The town code includes a provision that establishes a process for the Town Board to order the owners of unsafe properties to repair and secure them or face a demolition order.

“If it’s a false alarm, it’s a false alarm,” Mr. Dougherty said of the possibility that the property posed a hazard to the community. But “it’s not a pretty sight.”

Mr. McLean is president of the Shelter Island Chamber of Commerce.  A call to him was not returned by press time.

CANDIDATES SPAR AGAIN

The sparring between Mr. Dougherty and Mr. Waddington started up again when the supervisor described the councilman’s pointed questions to him at last Tuesday’s session — about how the board’s proposed causeway regulations were being revised and who was involved — as “last week’s ambush.”

Mr. Dougherty said “a lot of people were disillusioned and upset, really, really upset” by Mr. Waddington’s questioning but that the supervisor had avoided damage to the revision process, which last week he said members of the Ram Island Association were working on.

“I put Humpty Dumpty back together,” he said.

The issue came up after resident Richard Kelly, speaking from the audience, spoke at length in response to critical comments the supervisor had made about him last week. The supervisor made the comments after Mr. Waddington had said Mr. Kelly had been phoning him with frustration about the causeway revision process.

Mr. Kelly and Linda Holmes, who also attended this week’s work session, were a two-person “task force” named by Mr. Dougherty in early June to study flora and fauna on the causeways to determine wetlands.

In his response this week, Mr. Kelly said he wasn’t “excitable,” as Mr. Dougherty had described him when he’d chastised Mr. Waddington last week for taking Mr. Kelly seriously. Rather he had “a sense of urgency” and noted that causeway legislation has been in the works for 18 months and yet “nothing has happened.” He said the supervisor had “publicly smeared” him even though Mr. Dougherty had recruited him as a volunteer for his task force.

He said Mr. Dougherty had mislead him in telling him he would have on the board’s agenda Tuesday a proposal to hire environmental consultant Steve Gross of Hudson Highlands Environmental Consulting to delineate wetlands on the causeway.

He said that Ed Barr of the Ram Island Association never answered his calls or emails and that he and Ms. Holmes had been kept in the dark about whatever the association was doing to come up with a new causeway proposal.

Mr. Dougherty responded that “good legislation” was in the works and that Town Attorney Laury Dowd and Councilwoman Chris Lewis had met the previous day to review the causeway proposal as it now stands. He said he was a person who liked “to get from A to B and get a result” and that he’d salvaged the process after “last week’s ambush” by putting Humpty Dumpty back together. He praised Mr. Kelly for having done “fine work” but said one volunteer doesn’t have all the answers.

“I don’t know any other volunteer who was back-handed that way either,” Mr. Kelly said.

At that point, Mr. Waddington asked Mr. Dougherty “what was the ambush?”

“You’re the author of it,” Mr. Dougherty said as the two spoke over each other at times.

“Here we go again,” Mr. Waddington said.

“Here we go again is right,” Mr. Dougherty said.

Councilwoman Lewis tried to break up the spat. “Let’s stop, let’s stop,” she said.

“Yeah, I don’t understand this,” Mr. Dougherty said. “It was obviously carefully orchestrated by the three of you,” he said, pointing back and forth from Mr. Waddington toward the audience. “Front page news,” he added.

Ms. Lewis stopped the imbroglio by referring back to Mr. Kelly’s point about the many months the causeway legislation has been in the works. She said that none of the people who objected to the proposed causeway legislation at a public hearing on June 10 — after which the board tabled it — had made any effort to take part in the long and public drafting process by contacting the supervisor or any Town Board member “until suddenly it looked like there was a law.” She said she wishes townspeople would get involved in issues that concerned them.

Mr. Kelly responded, “Christine, I was asked to get involved … Now I find myself on a sandbar with the bottom of my boat knocked out after last week … If anybody was ambushed it was me. I was the one who was ambushed. I mean you (Mr. Dougherty) need to play that thing back. ‘Who can talk to Richard Kelly?’… This was not good stuff and I’m a volunteer …”

“The only thing I want to say,” said Mr. Waddington, “is I don’t see how you can characterize me ambushing you. I asked you three times what was happening with this … task force. I asked a fourth time. Then I told you about my discussions with Dick because he was the one who had been calling me. If that’s an ambush, well, then you’ve got a lot of things to worry about.”

“Oh really!” Mr. Dougherty said. “Oh, I’m really scared to death.”