Westhampton Board Meets and Bores Citizens

The Westhampton Beach board had its inaugural meeting July 5, inflicting nearly two hours of bureaucratic motions and legalese on 30 residents before letting any of them speak.

William Glass

The agenda passed out at the beginning of the meeting listed 47 resolutions that had to be read out in full and passed before discussion of a radio antenna at the new firehouse could begin.

William Glass, lawyer for the WHB fire district, with the help of Dennis Kenter of Relay Communications Corp., held the floor for nearly an hour, covering every possible angle related to firehouse sirens, radio and telephone communications with firefighters.

Only when residents were allowed to speak at nearly the two-hour mark was it brought out by one resident that sirens are not really necessary since firefighters can be contacted by pagers, cellphones and regular phones.

Mike Control Was the Strategy

Mayor Maria Moore sat passively while Glass droned on an on, returning to the mike several times just when residents thought he had exhausted about everything that could be said about sirens.

We have witnessed the same type of mike control at Assemblies of PR Society of America where ten or more leaders and staff will dominate the entire morning session with speeches and reports. Annual delegate pleas to put all such reports in writing and provide them beforehand are ignored.

Any citizen who is in a masochistic mood and wants to see and hear Glass ramble on and on about virtually nothing can do so in about a week when the two-hour video of the meeting is posted on the WHB website.

That’s a key fact—residents have to wait a week to see this! How many of them will do that?

The Southampton Council webcasts its meetings live. There’s no reason WHB could not do the same thing except that it would be ashamed to do so.

Citizens would see the lengthy recitation of minor bureaucratic matters that takes place such as “Appoint village attorney,” “Appoint Planning Board member.” That stuff belongs in the monthly “work” session of the board.

Two Residents Speak Including This Writer

Finally, after nearly two hours of legalistic and bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo, residents were allowed to speak. What they had to say should have been first on the agenda—not last.

Lawrence “Chip” Porter felt he had been unfairly treated by WHB officials and discussed it with the board for nearly 15 minutes.

Trustee Ralph Urban had seen him piloting a motor boat in the bay in apparent violation of the rule against causing a wake. Porter said the bay was choppy at the time and he had to maintain a certain rate of speed to avoid taking on water.

Porter had previously lived in WHB but had moved away. WHB officials then determined that Porter was not a resident and his boat was not registered to WHB nor had he paid the required launching fee.

Urban was present the next time Porter showed up and told Porter he had to obey all WHB rules. Heated words were apparently exchanged between the two.

Porter had the right to air his charges of mistreatment.

WHB Ignores Radiation Threat, Violation of Constitution

Having determined that no one else wanted to speak, this writer took the podium for the sixth time since last year. We spoke for ten minutes to two of the meetings in 2015 but were then limited five minutes according to a “rule” that was cited by the trustees.

Jack O'Dwyer

So we asked WHB clerk Elizabeth Lindtvit for a copy of this rule. There is no such written rule, she said. The board simply made it up to limit our freedom of speech.

What doesn’t the board want to hear? That Wi-Fi pulsed radiation levels, as measured by an Acoustimeter that we displayed to the room, were in the danger zone. We have sent copious data and documents to Mayor Moore, the WHB trustees and the Westhampton Library board showing that radiation levels in Vlllage Hall and the library are a threat to the health of patrons and especially staffers who are radiated all day long.

Two such sources are bioinitiative.org and the 54-part essay by Camilla Rees. The O’Dwyer website has more 300 entries on the subject, almost all of them in the free area.

More than one million members of teachers’ unions in the U.S., Canada, U.K., and Germany have signed petitions to remove industrial-level Wi-Fi routers from their classrooms, reports David Morrison, who operates wirelesswatchblog.

Constitution Breached by Eruvim

Another subject the board does not want to hear is the fact that the eruv Jewish boundary accepted last month by the WHB board is a violation of the U.S. Constitution, which Mayor Moore swore to uphold at the July 5 meeting.

This is an opinion by law Prof. Marci Hamilton of Yeshiva University that was expressly written for WHB by her in 2008. Many others share the same opinion.

Court decisions to the effect that the “lechi” markers are hard or even “invisible” fly in the face of the depictions of eruvim on hundreds of Synagogue websites including the website of the Hampton Synagogue in WHB.

Despite the high visibility of eruvim on websites, the Southampton Press on July 23, 2015, editorialized, under the heading, “Words of Wisdom,” that “Nobody can see the lechis that reportedly mark the boundaries of an eruv, a symbolic ‘roof’ in Westhampton Beach Village that allows Orthodox Jews more flexibility for benign activities, such as carrying keys or pushing strollers on the Sabbath."