On September 10, 2025, the New York State Supreme Court Appellate Division closed out a fight that had been running since a permit application first went in for a property at 275 Three Mile Harbor Road. The court sided with the homeowners, John McGinn and Cary Davis, clearing the way for a 70-foot-6-inch dock they had pursued for years. Town officials tracking the case read the outcome the same way locals had for months: this is likely the last new residential dock East Hampton will ever permit in Three Mile Harbor.
That single sentence matters more to a waterfront buyer here than square footage or which way the deck faces. In most of East Hampton Town's harbors, ponds, and creeks, the right to build a private dock stopped existing decades ago, and at the end of 2023 the Town Trustees put that fact in writing, permanently, with almost no exceptions left standing. If you are looking at bulkheaded or bay-front property anywhere from Three Mile Harbor to Napeague, the dock in your mental picture of summer may not be legally possible to build.
A Ban That Predates Most Current Owners
The East Hampton Town Trustees, the nine-member body that has owned and managed the town's harbors, ponds, and bottomlands since colonial times, banned applications for new docks in most of their waterways back in 1984. Three years later they extended that prohibition to cover all but the eastern shore of Three Mile Harbor, the one sliver of town water where a new dock still had a theoretical path.
That path is what McGinn and Davis walked, and it took most of two decades. In October 2021 the Trustees voted 5 to 3 to approve their dock, the first new residential approval on that harbor in more than three decades. The vote itself triggered a moratorium. The Trustees spent the next two years inventorying every dock in their waters, using drones to check what had been built against what had been permitted, and in December 2023 they codified what they found into permanent policy. One resolution banned any new residential dock, fixed or floating, anywhere in Three Mile Harbor. A companion resolution banned new platforms and similar structures across Georgica Pond, Georgica Cove, Wainscott Pond, Hook Pond, and Northwest Creek. The Town Zoning Board of Appeals had separately denied the McGinn-Davis application in 2022, writing that a new dock could cause an "adverse change to natural resources" through altered sediment flow and disrupted bottomland habitat. Two courts overturned that denial before the Appellate Division let the ruling stand.
What's Actually Off the Table
Here's the water-body-by-water-body version, current as of this writing:
| Water body | Status for new private docks |
|---|---|
| Three Mile Harbor | Banned entirely, Resolution 2023-38 |
| Georgica Pond and Georgica Cove | New platforms and similar structures banned, Resolution 2023-37 |
| Wainscott Pond, Hook Pond, Northwest Creek | Same ban, Resolution 2023-37 |
| Accabonac Harbor, Napeague Harbor, Hog Creek, Duck Creek, Hand's Creek, Alewife Brook, Pussy's Pond, Fresh Pond | No new dock applications accepted since the original 1984 policy |
| Commercial marinas and duck blinds | Not covered by the residential ban |
The pattern holds across nearly every trustee-controlled water body in the town. The exceptions are commercial marina south of the old Three Mile Harbor dividing line, which can only replace in kind, and duck blinds, which the Trustees exempted specifically at a clerk's insistence during the 2021 debate.
If the Property Already Has a Dock
None of this touches a dock that already exists under a valid Trustee agreement. Owners with a documented, legal dock can maintain it and, in most cases, replace it in kind and in place. What changed as of August 2026 is the cost of getting caught with an undocumented one. The Trustees adopted a fee schedule for unauthorized as-built dock changes: an $8-per-square-foot one-time fee or a $600 minimum, plus up to two years of backdated annual fees for structures modified after the original 2021 moratorium took effect. Owners who would rather not pay can restore the structure to its prior dimensions instead.
For a buyer, this means the dock agreement itself is a document worth requesting before the property inspection, not after. A seller who says "the dock has always been there" is not the same as a seller who can produce a Trustee agreement showing what was permitted and when. The difference shows up at resale, and increasingly it shows up in enforcement.
The Alternative Nobody Mentions First
Buyers who lose the dock still keep the water. Moorings and floats remain available through the Town Harbormaster or the Trustees, depending on which waters the property touches, and permits run from April 1 through December 1 each year. It is a different way of keeping a boat, tender to shore by dinghy rather than walk down a private dock, but it is the realistic option on water bodies where new construction is closed.
What It Actually Changes About the Purchase
This is the part that reshapes how a waterfront search should run in East Hampton. Two properties on the same harbor, same square footage, same bulkhead, are not the same product if one has a documented dock agreement and the other does not. The first can put a boat at the back door. The second is buying a water view and mooring rights, which is a real amenity but a different one, and it should be priced and evaluated as such rather than assumed to be interchangeable.
The contrast with Southampton Town next door sharpens the point. Southampton has historically leaned on riparian rights, the old legal principle that a waterfront owner can reach public water from private shoreline, to support dock approvals along Peconic Bay. East Hampton Town has gone the opposite direction for forty years. Even that Southampton tradition is now under pressure. At a Southampton Town Board hearing on January 30, 2026, residents and environmental advocates pushed for a ban on new docks along most of the town's Peconic Estuary shoreline, arguing the precedent set by a couple of recent unpermitted docks was becoming impossible to undo. Whether that measure passes or not, it shows the direction both towns are moving. In the Hamptons right now, existing dock rights are becoming the scarcer asset, not the assumed one.
Questions Worth Settling Before You Fall for the View
- Does this specific property have a documented Trustee dock agreement, and can the seller produce it?
- If there is an existing dock, was it built in kind and in place, or has it been modified since the 2021 inventory began?
- Which water body is this on, and does it fall under the 2023 resolutions or the older 1984/1987 policy?
- If a dock is not available, what does a mooring or float permit through the Harbormaster actually look like day to day?
- How does the absence of a private dock affect what you'd expect to pay compared to a similar property with a legal one?
None of these questions show up on a listing sheet. They show up in a phone call to the Trustees' office or a review of the property's permit history, and they are worth making before an offer goes in rather than during due diligence.
If you are weighing a waterfront property in East Hampton and want a straight read on what it can and can't do before you fall for the view, Mala Sander+Team can walk the dock history with you property by property.