Hamptons Mayors & the People Asking Them to Resign

Now, almost a year later, the other five members of the village board want him to resign. He has strong opinions and sometimes writes things on social media that offend. He’s apparently not a big fan of diversity. When someone spoke about helping the homeless in Sag Harbor he said there were no homeless in Sag Harbor and people talking about it should see a psychiatrist. He’s also made disparaging remarks online about same-sex marriage and transgender people.

This upset people. Something he said to the longtime village clerk was declared by her to be abusive, and she resigned. An assistant village clerk resigned, but then returned. He’s apologized but remains rough around the edges.

It’s also true that he went ahead and gave raises to certain people without consulting the rest of the board. And this was when the village wanted to save money. The board not only wants him to resign, they also censured him.

Gardella refused to resign. He said, correctly, that he had not asked to run. But they’d wanted him. So they got him.

At the same time this is happening, five residents of Southampton Village are trying to get their mayor to resign. They’ve filed a lawsuit. And they want him held in contempt. The issue concerns a park on Windmill Lane. The mayor allegedly wants to turn this park, a dog park, into a large internet battery storage facility. A piece of land elsewhere that is similar in size to the dog park will now become the dog park.

Let me tell you, from my long experience with Dan’s Papers going back 65 years, I’ve discovered that town supervisors, who do the same job but on much larger pieces of the Hamptons, can be investigated by the state and bounced out for disgraceful transgressions, but village mayors, on their little patches, have broad authority to do exactly what they want, often without consequences.

Why? Probably the biggest reason is that they serve only a two-year term. If they are not to a village’s liking, they can be voted out quickly without causing too much damage.

I’ll give you a bunch of examples of this. I might note that sometimes this results in good things happening.

The 1950s — and this was before my time but I’d heard about it — involved the most exclusive street in East Hampton, West End Road. Mansions owned by millionaires lined both sides of it, the properties backing onto the ocean on one side and backing onto Georgica Pond on the other.

One particular millionaire befriended a bayman. The millionaire had two lots, one with his house on it next to the ocean, the other an empty lot backing onto the bay. Because his friend brought him freshly caught fish for dinner, the millionaire deeded the empty lot to the bayman. Trucks owned by the bayman could now come down this narrow one-lane road, turn in and park on the empty lot.

A generation later, owners of the other mansions decided to prevent the baymen from going to their lot. They placed a line of boulders along the road, completely shutting access. The baymen complained to the mayor. The mayor, the law be damned, said the boulders stayed. The boulders remained for decades. And nobody prosecuted the mayor.

In the 1970s, Bill Hattrick Jr., a local stockbroker who served the rich in Southampton Village became mayor. He wanted to build a beach pavilion at Coopers Beach, where the locals swim. Again, the rich objected. There’d be too many locals there. The mayor, nevertheless, had a set of plans made. But the village board would not fund its construction.

As a result, one dark night, the mayor secretly brought his building department workers down to Coopers Beach, gave them the plans, and as the dawn rose, there was the new pavilion. Illegally built, but who’s to say. Again there today.

Around 1995, Gines Serran-Pagan, a respected artist from Spain, bought an old farmhouse on North Main Street in Southampton Village. Built around 1750, much of the land around it had been sold off. But the artist, the new owner, made his studio there and brought in farm animals that included goats, pigs and a llama. Zoning permitted it.

But the mayor’s father, age 91, lived next door.  And he leaned on his son to get the animals out of there. Without the slightest change in the law, the mayor simply sent ordinance officers over there every day to ticket the artist for this and that until, finally, the artist sold the property and moved away.

This year, villages in the Hamptons are considering allowing mayors to serve four-year terms rather than two. Some town supervisors serve four-year terms. But I think it’s a mistake to let mayors do that. Both great and stupid things come about with mayors. But with two-year terms, problems get sorted out pretty quickly.

I might note that preposterous things get into the ordinance books but never get enforced. So they remain, a cause for delight.

Here’s three of them. When surfing became popular years ago, Westhampton Beach decided surfers should buy surfing stickers. Paste them on your board. No sticker? That’s a violation. Pay up. Nobody’s ever done it.

In Southampton Village an ordinance forbids skimpy attire. Everyone had to cover themselves from just above the areola (the center of the nipple) to midway between the hip bone and the knee when walking downtown.

And in East Hampton, there’s an ordinance allowing ordinance inspectors to come onto your property to make sure an artists studio there doesn’t have a kitchen or bathroom. If it does, it’s an accessory cottage and that’s illegal. You also need to prove that your artwork got shown at a gallery within the past year.