East Hampton Town Makes Emergency Dispatch Deals With Sag Harbor, Springs

East Hampton Town and Sag Harbor Village have struck a five-year deal that will shift fire and ambulance emergency dispatching services to the town’s dispatch center from East Hampton Village, saving the village more than $150,000 a year.

The town has also agreed to provide fire and ambulance dispatch services to the Springs Fire Department, which also formerly contracted with East Hampton Village, for no charge, also saving that district more than $150,000 a year.

The development, which the town announced this week, was the latest in a landscape that began to shift earlier this year when East Hampton Village Mayor Jerry Larsen informed the town that he wanted to recoup a portion of the estimated $3.6 million the village was spending each year on dispatch services. The village was providing the service free to the town, which, it said, was responsible for about 40 percent of the cost.

Negotiations fell apart quickly, though, with the town rejecting the village’s offer and deciding to provide its own fire and ambulance dispatching to go along with the police dispatching it was already doing.

“We said ‘no’ to proposals that didn’t make sense for our taxpayers,” said Supervisor Kathee Burke-Gonzalez in a press release. “Public safety has always been handled as a shared responsibility in East Hampton — not a revenue stream. We intend to keep it that way.”

Aftershocks were felt in Sag Harbor, where Mayor Tom Gardella said East Hampton Village officials presented him with a contract that proposed a 400-percent increase over the $288,925 it was currently paying in the last year of its own five-year contract with the village for fire and ambulance dispatching.

Gardella said he presented the dilemma to the rest of the Village Board, whose members gave him the go-ahead “to explore all options.”

The mayor said East Hampton Village officials later offered a contract that would have raised the existing rate by 3 percent a year, but that when he informed them he was not ready to sign, the village withdrew its offer.

Under the new deal with the town, Sag Harbor will pay the town $134,047 for the first year of the contract, which will begin on January 31, 2026. The rate will increase by 4 percent the second year, 3.5 percent the third year, and 3 percent of each of the remaining two years.

The agreement does not include the Sag Harbor Village Police Department, whose calls are routed through East Hampton Village’s dispatch center. The village currently pays $77,591 a year for that service under an agreement that ends on May 31, 2028.

Gardella said East Hampton Village had informed him that it would no longer provide the police dispatching service when the current contract expires. “They are out of the game,” he said. “When it gets closer to 2028, we’ll have to have this discussion again with the town.”

Sag Harbor bills North Haven Village and Southampton Town for the fire and ambulance service it provides to those areas, and Gardella said it would have had to pass the cost increases along if East Hampton Town had not agreed to a contract.

“On behalf of the Village of Sag Harbor and its Board of Trustees, I wish to express our appreciation to the Town of East Hampton for entering into this agreement,” he said in a press release. “This collaboration strengthens our ability to protect the health, safety and welfare of our communities. It stands as an example of how local governments come together to better serve the people we represent.”

The Springs Fire District is paying $151,342 this year to East Hampton Village for its dispatch services. The town will now provide those services for free.

Officials from Springs could not be reached for comment.​​​​​​