East Hampton Town Residents Brave Cold & Snow to Score Discounted Beach Parking Permits

In what has become an annual rite of passage, East Hampton Town residents lined up by the hundreds on a frigid Thursday morning in late-January to purchase discounted parking permits for East Hampton Village beaches.

Originally scheduled for Tuesday, Jan. 27, the in-person sale was pushed back two days because of a weekend blizzard that brought an arctic chill and over a foot of snow to the East End.

As it has done over the last several years, the village made permits available for $500 for the season, a $250 discount off the normal $750 price. But residents were required to show up in-person to claim the discount. After the in-person sale, the remaining non-resident permits were made available online four days later on a first-come, first-served basis at full price.

Permits are available free of charge to East Hampton Village (EHV) residents. However, non-residents who live in the Town of East Hampton but not within the boundaries of the village itself are required to pony up for the privilege of parking at Main Beach, Georgica Beach, Egypt Beach, Wiborg Beach and Two-Mile Hollow Beach.

The well-choreographed one-day-only event, which has been tweaked for maximum fairness and efficiency over the years, qualifies as something of a happening during the village’s sleepy mid-winter months.

Despite the frosty temps and eye-high piles of newly plowed snow, people began queuing up as early as 7 a.m., coffee mugs in hand, at the Emergency Services Building at 1 Cedar Street, home of the village’s EMS, police and fire departments.

Residents who showed up early were given vouchers to secure their place in line and permitted to return at 9 a.m. when the sale officially kicked off.

“We put all hands on deck for this,” said EHV Administrator Marcos Baladrón. “It’s a process that we’ve really kind of ironed out over the last four years.”

As they do every year, the 1,550 or so non-resident permits sold out very quickly at the comparatively bargain-basement price of $500 a pop. Another 1,550 permits were offered for sale online at the somewhat less enticing standard price beginning on Groundhog Day, Feb. 2.

So, by the time you read this, you’ll know that Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow this year, portending six more weeks of winter. You’ll also know whether or not you were able to score a coveted non-resident EHV parking permit, which, by now are very likely unavailable at any price — unless there’s a thriving secondary permit market that we’re not aware of somewhere out on the fringes of the dark web.

“Matt,” a bundled-up East Hampton Town resident who asked us not to publish his last name, pointed out that while the $250 discount was a nice incentive, he chose to brave the cold and treacherous driving conditions not primarily to save money, but rather to ensure that he could actually score a permit for himself and his wife.

“My family and I have been going to Main Beach for 40 years,” Matt said. “Not being able to park there on say, July 4th weekend is not something I could take a chance on. I didn’t want to have to go online with everybody else and risk losing something that really affects my quality of life in the summer.”

As Baladrón pointed out, when the price for all 3,100 permits was still set at only $500 and the coveted passes were available exclusively online, it put certain people at a disadvantage.

“They would sell out so fast, and sometimes seniors, for example, weren’t able to navigate the process online,” he explained. “Plus, the purchase portal opened up at midnight at the time, so we were forcing people to stay up later than they normally would to get a permit.”

The online permit price was raised to $750 at least partially to slow down sales. But Baladrón also noted that another key tweak to the process to help dampen sales a bit involved limiting the number of passes each in-person customer could purchase.

In past years, a local resident was permitted to purchase multiple passes for his family, friends or neighbors as long as he showed up in person on Cedar Street with the proper credentials for each vehicle he was registering.

Not surprisingly, that led to well-heeled second homeowners sending their property managers or other hired workers to stand in line for the homeowners, and in some cases, the homeowners’ friends and families — a process that defeated the democratization the village was striving for.

“We’d see people buying five or 10 passes at the in-person event,” Baladrón said. “So, this year, we limited it. Each in-person customer was only allowed to buy a permit for themselves and one other person.”

Some East Hampton Town residents — particularly those who live just outside the boundaries of the village — tend to cry foul because village residents get their parking passes for free and are guaranteed no-muss, no-fuss beach access every season.

To those people, East Hampton Village Mayor Jerry Larsen has a simple response.

“I get complaints from Town residents that they can’t get a sticker because they sell out in no time,” he told this reporter a couple of years ago. “I understand their frustration, but non-EHV residents have to remember that they don’t pay taxes in the village.”