Political Upheaval on the Southampton Shores

Amid the national “blue wave” at the polls Tuesday, engaged Southampton Town Democrats scored another triumph, most notably in sweeping five trustee seats, traditionally a Republican redoubt in much of New York’s Long Island.

Town trustees manage the various (and many) waterfronts, including both salt and fresh-water ponds (aka lakes). They are distinct from the town councils that handle inland affairs. As wealth-bred development continues to press up against these shorelines, the political quiet that has long surrounded trustee positions may grow louder. A hint of this comes from a recent Newsday article on controversy over private docks extending into precarious public waters in Southold town on the island’s North Fork. (Democrats also won all the trustee spots there on Nov.4 and the Southold town board subsequently okayed new restrictions as described in this East End Beacon article.)

Typically, campaigners for trustee posts mouth platitudes about protecting both the waters and public access to them. (By this latter pledge they sometimes mean the latitude to drive trucks onto sandy beaches, a cherished right among some locals.) Media outlets, to the degree they cover trustee races, simply summarize the candidates’ backgrounds and expressed sentiments. What’s more, they rarely cover the regular trustee meetings.

At the same time, environmental groups that might have special interest in trustee affairs have also taken an official pass. The Group for the East End, the most notable such outfit in that stretch of Long Island, does not question or score the trustee hopefuls. Even the New York League of Conservation Voters, which doesn’t shy away from endorsements for even local offices (virtually always Democrats), is silent about trustees at its site–and didn’t respond to an email query.

In this information vacuum, a party organization can play an outsized role, and Southampton Democrats did so with mass road signage and other voter outreach. They succeeded in ousting three Republicans who are community fixtures, and re-electing two of their own incumbents, giving them complete board control.

This was thus a watershed election (so to speak), much like the one in East Hampton Town in 2015, when Democrats finally won a majority on the trustees board. They have never given it up, and in a town they increasingly dominate, the party again on Tuesday won all the trustee posts.

As Southampton Town gradually loses its own competitive Republican base, the trustees may take on a more activist bent. Whereas in the past they were content to issue permits for the fishing, boating and hunting activity of the town freeholders, while maintaining the shorelines, the Southold situation may herald wider concerns over pools, extended structures and wetlands vegetation. These could intersect with the ambitions of expensive waterfront property owners.

Additionally, the new trustee board might be more aggressive in securing public (non-truck) access to those waters. For example, the Southampton trustees for two decades have husbanded about $200,000 intended for use on 54 acres along Peconic Bay-adjacent Cold Spring Pond. The land and funds were obtained when the Sebonack golf club was developed nearby, but no trail or other formal opening-up of the picturesque site has followed.

Perhaps, as in Southold, more attention on the trustees will proceed from the political upheaval that has reached the shores of Southampton.

Gridiron Riches Aren’t for Everybody on Saturdays

The “college” football season is in high gear, with ever bigger dollars flowing through what is actually a business. As a result–and also to raise their profile in attracting more students and fans–ever more schools are joining the bigtime (expensive) competition. Paradoxically, this is occurring even as participation rates in high-school football have declined noticeably over the past two decades.

First, the explosive growth: Boosters at the National Football Foundation point to a roughly 40% growth in the number of schools playing NCAA-level football since 1978. Although attendance at games has been flat over the last 20 years, the revenue from cable, broadcast and other video has risen enormously. It’s common to find 20 or more national game “feeds” on a Saturday, and an increasing selection on other nights. Recently, the number of “power” conferences has consolidated to four, but most remaining leagues enjoy greater exposure as well. Adding to the alumni loyalty factor as a draw for even non-marquee games is the mass legalization of sports betting, which engenders interest of a sort in any contest.

The result is an escalating spectacle aspect to the performances, culminating in the College Football Playoff among the top programs. Meantime, many players are now paid handsomely through the Name-Image-Likeness provisions to which the schools agreed under legal duress. And the coaches and other staff come at an increasing cost as well–into the tens of millions of dollars, even as they are (more often) fired for insufficient wins.

It’s as if America is a football-mad society, forgetting even the professional wing of the sport. That may be true from a spectating standpoint, but in fact fewer young males want to play the game. According to the National Federation of State High School Associations, the total of boys in 11-player football (meaning full-contact tackle) dropped by 106,000 between 2008 and 2018–nearly 10%. It has then risen by 23,500 by 2024, the last datum available. Overall school enrollment has been basically steady over the period.

We can’t know why the falloff, but during this time the risks of CTE brain injuries from concussions received wide publicity (and increasing liability litigation). Equipment advances have been made to counter this and other types of injuries, along with rule changes, but at the same time player techniques and physiques have heightened the potential for harm. More boys and their parents have opted to take a pass.

Which boys? Here the numbers get fuzzier, but most reporting on the topic points to more affluent white families and to the Pacific Coast and Northeast regions of the country. These dropoffs have been mitigated by greater Hispanic participation, although that may simply reflect population gains in that sector. (At the major-college level, there’s a perceptible rise in international imports on some rosters, nearly tripling between 2012 and 2023 for NCAA Division 1, although in all they’re accounting for only 1%.)

So, you’d be excused if you saw a parallel here to the “two Americas” when it comes to waging military might: the cheerleaders for saber rattling and the young who actually do the fighting. Sure, in this case the battling has a potential payoff–commercialization of college sports has made football lucrative all the way down the line. But there’s apparently a limit to who will volunteer to wear the uniform.

Hamptons Builders Face Less Room for Outsizing

Today’s Newsday catches up with East Hampton township’s reductions in just how large houses there can be built. This issue has gathered on the East End of Long Island, N.Y., in recent years as “mansionization” is blamed for changing the characters of neighborhoods–both visually and demographically–and for quickening the rise in land and thus home prices. East Hampton–which includes hamlets such as Montauk, Amagansett and Springs–has long been tougher on developers than other nearby towns. So, its adoption of a modified tightening ordinance was not out of character, though builders and some property owners are complaining that the new strictures will limit not just big “spec” construction for high-end seasonal use (the primary target) but the enlargement of smaller homes with growing families. This debate should soon spread to neighboring Southampton town, which has been seen as more lax in its development controls. The prospect of a revised general plan there–tied to traffic that stems from trade vehicles serving expensive properties–is vaguely at issue in a town board election on Nov. 4.

https://www.newsday.com/long-island/towns/east-hampton-new-house-size-rules-k116em89

Is Southampton Using Permits to Weed Out Commerce?

It’s common among preservationists on the East End of Long Island, N.Y., to regard the town of Southampton as lax in its allowance of development and other commercial concerns. There’s some basis* for that, especially in contrast to the town of East Hampton, but just as much reason to see dilatoriness in getting projects approved when time is definitely money. A recent example is the extended consideration of marijuana dispensaries. Because these are supposed to be fast-tracked under a New York state law, Southampton officials are being brought to account, and this week they were ruled against, as noted in the local Press. (In court in a different case, the town has fared better.) Now, there’s a political backdrop to this situation that puts it beyond the usual zoning and permitting processes: Under the state law, towns could “opt-out” of the weed-selling allowance, which some of Southampton’s neighbors did. But, led by its former supervisor, Jay Schneiderman, the town board chose to allow the shops, subject to siting limitations. Schneiderman said he worried about losing tax revenue by opting-out, especially given that dope can be sold regardless on the self-ruled Shinnecock tribal land within the town. In the event, a flurry of dispensary applications was received, and sentiment in Southampton (as well as the composition of the board) has changed. State law prevents an opt-in town from changing its mind, however, so an alternative is to slow-walk site approvals, perhaps mindful that delay could effectively mean denial to a startup business with mounting bills. That is what pot-shop enthusiasts say is happening (here’s the latest lawsuit against the town, over an abandoned Hampton Bays site). On the other side, opponents surely will give the officials grief over any dispensaries that do open. Much in the way, you might say, other groundbreakings in the far-from-chill Hamptons evoke cries of laxity.

https://www.27east.com/southampton-press/new-york-state-poised-to-strike-down-southampton-site-plan-review-of-cannabis-stores-2399286/

* At board meetings in town there can be a seeming chumminess toward developers’ agents, though this can stem from past relationships. Many of these hired guns are former town officials themselves.

When YIMBY Comes to a Southampton Hamlet

Providing “affordable housing” in the midst of a price surge on the East End of Long Island, N.Y., is challenging enough—but the additional political wrinkles that come with each specific project were on display this month at a community-board meeting in the North Sea hamlet of Southampton town. It took place not far from where the first English colonists landed in the area in 1640.

The session was held to air (again) reactions to a proposed 34-unit rental project on a wooded lot that had been assigned 5-acre minimum residential zoning. Such a classification is the result of past efforts to contain “overbuilding” in the town from smaller lots—this was before expense became such a consuming barrier.

North Sea sports much bay waterfront, with occasionally splendid homes and seasonal or weekend gentry, but most of it is populated with fulltime residents in more modest domiciles built decades ago. Back then, they could enjoy a wooded or small-dock retreat, removed from the Hamptons summer crowd along the ocean. Now they’re more likely to feel pinched by crowding around them and pass-through traffic much of the year.

So the more outspoken residents there tend to have a chip on their shoulders about how the area is treated, compared to the grander parts of town. For instance, North Sea was relegated to hosting the town dump in generations past—it’s now a recycling center and landfill up the street from the planned apartments. And when it comes to heightened efforts to develop wage-earner housing in Southampton, some at this month’s meeting reiterated complaints that too many such projects are being “steered” into North Sea. A 50-unit condominium not far away from the one at issue was put through in 2005, and other neighboring lots are possibilities for more. This, in what is still a rural-seeming stretch, as the above photo of the 8.6-acre site under discussion shows.

The economics of construction costs and land prices usually demand attached, multifamily buildings to achieve affordability. But this is not what many existing homeowners want. Stephanie McNamara, who chairs the community council that hosted the meeting, explicitly prefers half-acre, single-family plots—the way it used to be in North Sea. (You won’t find many such properties at under a million dollars now.) So far, her group has won concessions in that direction from the town’s housing administrators on a few subsidized developments.

But the “Epley” project (so called after the prominent Southampton family member proposing it) is more attuned to market pricing—and dense.  Because it wouldn’t take government grants, said supportive town councilman Bill Pell at the meeting, it could limit tenancy to participants in the local workforce. This is a popular notion—versus the idea of unselective “affordable” units going to undesired outsiders or opportunistic part-timers. The Epley rents, though, reportedly would begin at $2,500 a month, which prompted skepticism about who in that workforce could cover that.  “Would you want it to be less?” a supporter fired back.

The 40-some attendees (an unusually large turnout for the monthly gatherings) heard from two elderly volunteers for the North Sea fire and EMS services that a dearth of younger nearby recruits—who can’t find starter residences—means untimely responses when those longtime homeowners may call for help.  (North Sea, like many parts of Long Island’s East End, relies on volunteers for some emergency services.)

So the evening went, back and forth.  “A pig is still a pig!” even with the lipstick of local preference, one voice sounded. Road dangers and water pollution also figured in the opposition’s arguments. A minority joined Pell in emphasizing the unmet housing demand. Soon he and the rest of the five-member town board will have to decide on the change of zoning for the Epleys to proceed. If that goes through, hearings will follow to fine-tune the development, likely shaving the unit total and surely adding costs. Maybe it would then still pencil out and get built.

The YIMBY movement—Yes In My Back Yard—to erect more housing in America’s cities and towns has scored recent gains, particularly at the state legislative levels, where localized resistance is less dominant and the cries of a financially-stressed young population are heard. But at the ballot box, discontent is felt from an older set who have seen their familiar settings already disturbed by economic upheaval—from both wealth and poverty.  New York’s governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, entered office with a forceful housing initiative but backed away as the suburbs rose up against her party. (A substitute initiative hasn’t satisfied everyone, either.)

If all politics are local, as the saying goes, it’s worth tracking the course of YIMBY in North Sea. –Sept. 29, 2025

Asking for Relief to Hellish Hamptons Street Traffic

The traffic snarl and its side effects on the South Fork of Long Island have been a longstanding but worsening problem. Various efforts have been mulled or tried to alleviate it, though few would revisit the fateful decision a half century ago not to build a bypass to the sole east-west highway–which is often clogged. To deal with the acute issue of trade and other vehicles seeking to conjure such a bypass by using residential roads, the trick is to find a measure that would deter such maneuvers but doesn’t rely on town police enforcement, which is sparse. I’m focused on putting “humps” in the roads, thus forcing drivers to slow down or choose a different, smoother route (the highway). They’ve been employed in three independent villages within the town of Southampton, including Sag Harbor. Presumably, a lot of pass-through trips*, particularly those made by heavy-duty commercial trucks, would get re-thought. So I framed the matter as a ripe political choice for this November’s election, in the following short letter appearing today in the Southampton Press:

https://www.27east.com/southampton-press/deciding-issue-2396411/

*It’s estimated that as much as half the peak traffic through Southampton in most months is destined for sites east or west of the town.

There’s No Ducking What Curbed Long Island Farms

The agricultural history of the gentrified East End of Long Island is preserved in spots today through pricey row crops and vineyards that were not part of the early 20th century action. Back then, the big harvest was potatoes and there were plenty of local dairies and duck farms. This week’s edition of Dan’s Papers out of Southampton has a solid retrospective on that last sort of agriculture–or more precisely, aquaculture. As the article notes, it was the fouling (fowling?) of local waters that greatly spelled the near-demise of the once-famous local duck trade. Nostalgia for the old days, before incoming urban wealth displaced so much of what shaped the East End from the 1970s, sometimes masks what were real problems then. Pollution of the marvelous bays and ponds didn’t begin with the suburban septic tank (an odd manifestation of today’s greatly-unsewered Suffolk County). Likewise, the crude farm-labor practices of that era–briefly mentioned in Dan’s Papers–would not survive today’s scrutiny. Yes, rapidly escalating land prices (and their tax implications for family farms) had much to do with depleting the region’s agricultural base–on the waterfronts more than anywhere else. But most duck and other farmers of the 1950s could not have handled the environmental and workforce cost structures that exist today. That’s why “farmland preservation” efforts are mostly for token effect, even if their visuals are a nice reminder. (Here’s a recent article that describes the circumstances of Hamptons farming and its “$30 berries.”) –Sept. 7, 2025

Ghosts of the Past: What Happened to Long Island’s Duck Farms?

Text Journalists Should Stick to Their Keyboards

I’m sorry to be seeing and hearing so many of America’s ranking journalists. And why is that?

The mission of the journalist is to Find Stuff Out, and ideally convey the Stuff clearly, concisely and accurately. That’s why we bemoan the shrinkage and even closure of so many news staffs, particularly at the local level. We don’t find out.

In order to survive and even thrive in this new media environment, news organizations believe they must “engage” better with their intended audiences. Part of that strategy now entails various interfaces: podcasts (audio and video), other forms of on-camera appearance or narration, and live events for targeted subscribers or clients. Increasingly, traditional text journalists–not just those who’ve always done TV or radio work–are out front for this.

So, we get to hear these reporters and editors recapitulate their news, sometimes in sound or video bites, sometimes in conversations with each other or with a moderator who “interviews” them. At an event, the journalist may exchange on stage with a notable (or, I should say, even more notable).

In some ways, everybody gains from greater exposure to the people behind the news. For the boss, maybe this gets more productivity out of the talent–certainly more social-media sharing. But I’d argue that, with few exceptions, the hours spent producing this “content” is time not spent Finding Stuff Out. Time not on the phones or the web, not working the beat with sources. Ultimately, we end up with less news per dollar invested (and there’s less of that, to boot).

In the olden days, some print people would get assembled for weekly broadcast roundup shows. Later, 24/7 cable news would fill minutes with such talking heads. I never learned much from any of that, compared to reading what they actually published. I still don’t think I’m gaining much from watching or listening to journos whose most useful tool remains a keyboard.

Data Factories Within Reach of the Hamptons?

Squaring New York State’s stringent green-energy law with the looming demand for power-intensive data and AI centers is going to be hard enough most places, but especially on Long Island. There, long-standing grievances against the electric utility, now known as LIPA, that date back at least as far as rejected nuclear-plant aims from the 1960s hang over any such project. So this week’s report in Newsday about a 550,000-square-foot data facility being eyed for a developing area of Brookhaven town west of Southampton should send up the red flags. As with all sizable commercial or residential growth in Suffolk County, this will be subject to intense scrutiny and review that only the most bulletproof plans are likely to survive. (Not only energy but water usage is a factor in these East End environmental studies, on top of traffic, biodiversity, etc.) The results may have a lot to say about whether economic dynamism has much of a future in an area where most voting residents are comfortably situated to enjoy the picturesque surroundings as they are. –July 19, 2025

https://www.newsday.com/long-island/computer-data-center-warehouse-yaphank-hfdnl8i8

Moneyball 101: Reloading and Releaguing College Football

“College football” is not only more like a professional game at its higher levels these days, but it is also as much of a business story as a sports one. At the moment, the phenomenon of NIL (name-image-likeness) payments to the athletes is focusing attention on Texas Tech University. For years, Texas Tech has had interesting if uneven teams, rarely competitive in the top ranks. But, being Texans, boosters of the school are sparing no expense trying to bring the Red Raider brand to the pinnacle, a national championship, through recruitment.

Whether money will talk louder than anything else, including tradition, location (Lubbock, TX) and even the instruction leading to a degree, is uncertain. That’s what makes this an interesting business case study as well as a game-day test. The existence now of a “transfer portal” that allows the hired heros essentially to be free agents during their college years, moving from program to program with no interruption in their eligibility, adds to the commercial challenge.

These kinds of situations aren’t limited to the quest to be No. 1. At various ranks, moneyball is making for hectic change. Take the great realignment in conferences, which comes down to grabbing greater TV or streaming payments to the schools for showing their teams in action (so that more people will bet on that action, but that’s another story). Some athletic conferences are worth more than others, so college presidents have been chasing spots up the ladder, sometimes consigning their student-athletes to distant trips as a result. You see this even at the lower rungs of the ladder.

Take the case of Northern Illinois, which for 28 years has belonged to the Mid-American Conference (MAC), a league of long-established but “smaller school” football teams in the upper Midwest. The Huskies, as these Illinoisans are called (“Illini” is another, “bigger” team in the state), haven’t exactly dominated the MAC but they have risen on occasion to national stature. Last season, they were the only team to defeat Notre Dame until the national title game, when the “Irish” were defeated by Ohio State.

Now Northern Illinois is going to leave the MAC, for football only, beginning in 2026. They will join a revamped Mountain West Conference, which because of other realignments is less of a Mountain West grouping but is still way west of DeKalb, IL. This will mean lots of air travel for the Huskies, including sometimes to Hawaii (a conference member). That will increase costs. Northern Illinois hopes that the Mountain West will get a TV contract that will help pay the freight, but perhaps more important, the new conference is a better opening to the College Football Playoff, the lollapalooza that leads to the national championship. Yet a berth in that spectacle is still a longshot, even if the Huskies win nearly all of their games.

Curiously, cable TV money cuts two ways in the case of Northern Illinois. Its current Midwest regional conference features an unusual schedule in the latter half of each fall, with many games played on Tuesday and Wednesday nights. This is in order to get live coverage on the ESPN sports networks, in a feature called “MACtion.” It does give these usually obscure programs more national attention than they’d get on a busy weekend, but doesn’t suit alumni who might drive 65 miles from Chicago to see a home game on Saturday but aren’t likely to do it midweek. (Likewise for the student body–attendance at these games is minimal.) The new arrangement could sit better with this important constituency.

So many factors are at play in the new world of College Football Inc. that the coursework in Sports Management, an ever-more popular major for the matriculants who wear the team uniforms, should get all the richer. Just like lots of those players themselves. –July 9, 2025