Last Friday, May 1, around eight a.m., Springs resident Rian White woke up to find 19 men in his backyard, throwing everything in it into a Dumpster and crushing it.

After a seven-year battle with East Hampton Town and several of his neighbors over the unsightly state of his messy yard—including a conviction for littering on his own property earlier this year in East Hampton Town Justice Court and a $5,000 fine—the East Hampton Town Board finally sent an outside contractor to Mr. White’s property to clear the junk that Mr. White had refused to remove.

Mr. White said he considered the collection a life’s worth of treasure.

“I feel like a wreck, like my civil rights were just trampled all over,” said Mr. White. “They took my kayak and paddles. They took my lawn furniture and my mother’s dining room table. They took everything, everything. They even took the hot dog man, which was deemed legal, remember? And they put it in the back of a garbage truck and crushed it.”

One count against Mr. White during his January trial concerned a 6-foot-tall hot dog statue that he had on his lawn. The jury found him not guilty of having a “non-conforming sign” on his property.

In April, town officials sent a certified letter to Mr. White warning him that he had 10 days before a contractor would arrive to clear out his property.

The letter warned that the contractor would “effect a clearing on any items on his property that have been deemed dangerous to the public health safety and welfare.”

The letter also said that town code enforcement officers had visited Mr. White’s property on 35 occasions over the last seven years and given him many opportunities to clean up.

“There was nothing saying they were going to take everything I own,” Mr. White said.

The contractors, Two Brothers Carting, crushed his Hobie Catamaran, his 1965 Oldsmobile, 1969 Ford Galaxy and 1979 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, a 1908 stove rescued from the Bell estate, his dog’s bed, a duck decoy and firewood.

He was able to salvage his Vespa, his dive gear, and some clam shells from when he won the Town Trustees’ giant clam contest.

“I have an hour worth of footage of the whole thing happening,” Mr. White said. He said he had received legal advice to sue everyone on the Town Board and the town attorney.

“What happened to me,” Mr. White said, “could happen to everybody.”