Issue #45, February 16, 2007

Ferries Win

Court Decision Foils East Hampton’s Attempt to Deep Six Car Ferry

By Dan Rattiner

If a great big ferry from Connecticut bearing 300 people and 120 cars pulls up to a dock next to your house, you can blame it on a decision made last Wednesday by the U. S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit. In a stunning move, the appeals court last week threw out the ruling of a lower court that had upheld a local law, a ban on car ferries in the Town of East Hampton. The case has been remanded back to the lower court for further consideration.

The Appeals court has not thrown out the East Hampton law. It simply says that the power of the East Hampton law is not enough on its own to stop car ferries from docking there. It has commanded the lower court to re-think the matter and this time, consider the full ramifications of what it would mean to allow it to stand in the face of the needs of interstate commerce.

This whole business of car ferries and East Hampton started almost ten years ago. At that time, the Cross Sound Ferry Service, which runs the big car ferries from Orient Point to New London, proposed to expand their business by running a new route between East Hampton and New London. They looked into building a dock in Fort Pond Bay in Montauk, at the Fishing Village, also in Montauk, and at a dock in the Promised Land section of Amagansett. Up in New London, by the way, they posted a big map with a dotted line showing the proposed route and asking riders’ opinions about it.

What the riders’ opinions were, according to the ferry service, were as you would expect, that they were all for it. In East Hampton Town, however, the proposal was greeted with horror. The Town immediately passed a law making it a crime for any passenger ferry to establish dockage anywhere along the shoreline of the town.

On the face of it, the law seemed to be outrageous. Local communities are not supposed to be able to stop interstate commerce. People objected, for example, when the big interstate superhighways were put through near their homes. But the highways came anyway. I recall that during the era of Robert Moses, the Village of Westbury, that quiet, wealthy horsey community, could not prevent the Long Island Expressway from cutting it in two — although they did hold it up for a while and in the end achieved at least something. There would be no Westbury exit off the Expressway. And there isn’t. It’s a ten mile stretch where you can look out and see Westbury, but you can’t get on or off there.

On the other hand, there was a certain logic to the East Hampton ferry law. East Hampton was then, and is today, a quiet rural town at the end of a peninsula. To put a ferry service there, particularly at its eastern end, would bring all sorts of traffic just passing through on the way to New England and the casinos and everything else. Certainly careful consideration would have to be given to allowing any ferry service in the town.

As the East Hampton ban on ferries made its way through the lower courts, its existence did attract the careful consideration of both Shelter Island Town and Southold Town, which ALREADY suffer from the heavy traffic of everybody on the way to and from the Cross Island Ferry in Orient.

Indeed, these towns were so outraged by the East Hampton Ferry law, particularly Shelter Island, which gets the traffic from the Hamptons that is trying to get to Orient, they filed a lawsuit against East Hampton. Southold, with Orient at the end, is also a peninsula. So it’s okay for us to suffer the traffic but not for you?

During this interval, another player appeared on the scene and this was Paul Forsberg of the Viking Fishing Fleet in Montauk Harbor. Forsberg, several years ago, ordered a new ship built to be called the Viking Superstar. It would be his biggest, and it would take passenger cars.

For many years, the Vikings had run a passenger-only ferry service in the summertime between Montauk and Block Island. Now he would offer the service with automobiles. Ferry boats with automobiles already go back and forth between Block Island and several points on the mainland, both in Connecticut and Rhode Island.

After the ferry arrived, Captain Forsberg said he would run his ferry with cars to challenge the ban imposed by East Hampton. But after the Town said they would ticket him and possibly impound his boat, he backed down. Instead, he is running it as that hamlet’s biggest fishing and sightseeing boat, awaiting the day when, he is sure, the law will be overturned.

The re-interpretation of the East Hampton Town car ferry law does not, of course, necessarily mean that ferries with automobiles will dock in East Hampton. There are still many permits to be obtained and many challenges to be overcome, on the town, county, state and federal levels. Along the way, consideration will be given to the essentially rural and dead-end geography of the Town of East Hampton, and it is possible that the Town will be considered an improper place for an automobile ferry after all. And a federal court could still rule that car ferries are banned from East Hampton.

What this decision DOES do is put East Hampton on the same level playing field as any other town when it comes to considering interstate commerce. The local laws must be taken into consideration. And the laws involving interstate commerce must be taken into consideration. So now the lower court must decide the matter again.

Does this newspaper support the ban on car ferries in East Hampton Town? Well, yes, sort of. I have been particularly moved by the idea that a car ferry might dock directly in front of my house on Three Mile Harbor. I am definitely against having a car ferry land in front of my house or, in fact, anywhere near my house within beer-bottle throwing distance. It is very important, and I urge all readers to rally around me in this, that I be able to write this newspaper in peace and live without all the car horn honking and ship’s horn hooting that could set the dogs off anytime of day and night at my house. And there are of course the environmental considerations. And traffic warming, and everything.

Further up Three Mile Harbor Road, perhaps it would be okay. In front of my house, no. Anywhere else in East Hampton, well, I’ll have to think about it some more. I suppose they have to dock somewhere. What if the ship sprang a leak? Would we turn them away then? In front of my house, yes, of course. Elsewhere? No.