Inside Out: Wired to like the local nitty gritty

When I started out as a reporter for the Southampton Press eons ago, I don’t recall ever thinking any story I did was boring. I knew plenty of them, once published, would bore some people, if any actually read them. An endless summary of zoning hearings, for example, might be important to a handful of people — the property owners and neighbors involved in each case — but not to the typical fellow browsing through the paper over a cup of coffee on a Thursday morning.

I knew a lot of reporters over the years who found certain stories they had to write dull, too. They tended not to do a very good job with those stories. Thanks to some kind of quirk in my wiring, I liked every story I did once I got past the inertia that kept me from starting in on it.

Every story was, essentially, about people and how they behave toward each other. There was also a lot of history behind most stories — who was who, what was what, and how things got the way they were. I always imagined somebody out there was interested in these elemental topics, too, and I wrote with that imaginary person in mind. But when it came to real, live people, I saw a lot of eyes glaze over when I talked about my job.

Take the Town Trustees, a beat I loved — and I was always ready to tell anyone who’d listen all about them.

How many people in the Town of Southampton know there is a government agency called the Town Trustees … actually, the Trustees of the Freeholder and Commonalty of the Town of Southampton. Not many, I bet. There are similar boards of trustees in Southold and East Hampton. Shelter Island had one once, I presume, because — like the other East End towns — its form of government and control of its natural resources were regulated under the terms of a 17th-century royal patent signed by the governor of the colony of New York.

These patents created a board of trustees in each town to regulate the taking of finfish, shellfish and game and to oversee any undivided property. Those who sat on these boards were elected. They were the local government until the 19th century, when the State Legislature first established “town boards” to run the show in each town.

When that happened, the boards of trustees continued to operate but with a more restricted role as a kind of natural resources manager. Riverhead and Shelter Island eventually gave those duties to their town boards and did away with a separate board of trustees. The boards of trustees that continue to operate, their members elected as always, trace themselves in a direct line back to the mid-1600s. The East End towns recently relied on the patents that created those boards to force New York State to abandon its plan to license saltwater fishermen. That’s our prerogative, not yours, the towns argued — and the courts agreed.

I thought it was cool — an elected government body that had been in continuous existence and operation since before the United States existed. In Southampton, the five people who got elected to the board tended to be independent characters who spoke their minds. Some were baymen. One was the greenskeeper at the National Golf Course. Another was a tall, elderly carpenter. I liked those guys. They were true-blue working men, Republicans all (it remains rare for a Democrat to win a seat on the Southampton Town Board of Trustees).

They didn’t like to be messed with by big developers, whose subdivision plans they reviewed if they involved waterfront; they didn’t like the state, which they considered a late-coming interloper imposing on their local authority with environmental and game regulations; and they didn’t like the Army Corps of Engineers, with which they also clashed over jurisdiction.

They even clashed with the Town Board, which controlled their budget, much to the trustees’ annoyance at times — such as when there was a town supervisor, Fred W. Thiele Jr., who also had an independent streak.

Because of my enthusiasm for these stories — and their nature — they had strong leads and a certain energy to their flow and there were always great quotes from the board members, who were never at a loss for words and never shy about blasting whoever they believed to be stepping on their toes. My boss liked my copy. When you’re an editor and you get good copy about conflict and strife, it makes you happy.

Did anyone really care? Judging by the yawns and fidgeting whenever I tried to talk about the trustees among friends, family or acquaintances, not many people really did. A few local history buffs took it all very seriously and so did the trustees — maybe because it was a very easy way to look good to their constituents without having to do much.

The trustees had their fans and antagonists among local people. But the people then flooding and redefining the town, the city folks who read Dan’s Papers because it was free and about fun things, couldn’t have cared less about this particular oddity of local life.

The next reporters who covered the trustees did not find them as interesting as I did, apparently. All the stories about “home rule” and the bad guys from Albany treading on our sacred and ancient rights disappeared. Perhaps the board suddenly turned meek and mild — or maybe the feds, the state, the town and the Town Trustees all resolved their jurisdictional disputes. Or maybe no reporter or editor cared anymore.

Which is worse? A bored reporter who can’t see a news story right in front of him … or a reporter and a little group of politicians who, perhaps with the best of intentions, develop a certain working relationship that creates a lot of news that, in the end, is all fire and light but doesn’t really matter?