One Hamptonite’s Solar Is Another’s Battery Fire

Clean-energy advocates and their media mouthpieces continue to tout electrification goals that rely on significant battery-storage components. And advances in this field and related solar-energy continue to show promise. But in fact, the proposed battery compounds are highly controversial in many residential communities. Episodic fires at these sites raise alarms, and can entail significant repair costs even where no lives were in imminent danger, as per today’s account in Newsday of the fallout from a May incident in New York’s East Hampton town. Earlier this year, residents of Hampton Bays, a middle-class hamlet of the adjoining town of Southampton, rose in protest of a planned lithium-battery site that officials were nearly ready to greenlight. The town has subsequently backed off. In the Hamptons, as in many affluent areas, alternative-energy activists have been pushing for “Community Choice Aggregation” plans that allow ratepayers to opt out of the local utility’s service (often fossil-fuel based) in favor of what is usually a localized solar source. Such sustainability options can entail reliance on batteries, while it’s increasingly apparent that many neighbors will have a problem with just where they are stored. Chalk this up as another reason the attainment of “net zero” carbon-energy targets is far from cheap or easy.

https://www.newsday.com/long-island/environment/east-hampton-battery-storage-facility-fire-yskzij3q

Ambitious Riverhead Is Back to Square One

With significant development off the table on the twin forks of New York’s Long Island, because of water, sewer, road and political limitations, only the town of Riverhead, where the forks separate, offers an outlet for meaningful growth touching the area. Historically a railroad and agricultural hub, Riverhead fell behind as wealth and glamour reached the two forks in the last 50 years, serving mainly as a commercial highway corridor for big-box, outlet and strip-center retail that was precluded from the consumer-heavy forks. But in its western hamlet of Calverton, the town’s ambitions for loftier employment prospects were focused on Epcal, the latest proposal in a 25-year quest to fill a large, abandoned Navy-Grumman Corp. parcel. This “enterprise park,” to be developed by an arm of Canada’s Triple Five Group, held the promise of unspecified technology jobs but met fierce community resistance born of suspicions it would primarily be a warehouse depot with cargo planes using the former air base. (Truck-heavy warehouses are rising in much of inland Suffolk County, to supply rich customers amid choking traffic snarls, and airport proposals are a longstanding rub on or near the twin forks.) So, yesterday, as this culminating article in Newsday recounts, the five-year push for Epcal came a cropper, with Riverhead officials pulling the plug. If the town is going to find an identity-defining project that overcomes the affluent allergy to change and disruption that characterizes today’s eastern Long Island, it will have to conjure up another one.

https://www.newsday.com/long-island/towns/riverhead-industrial-development-agency-calverton-aviation-and-technology-ktogcgh8

Come 2024, the Kitchen Table Issues Reemerge

When wide attention refocuses on the economy, the political importance of GDP, inflation, income stress and grievous inequality will return to the fore. It won’t be any clearer which way all the data are cutting.

There’s no question that “Bidenomics” made many people better off, at least until price increases worked through the system.  The lower quintiles of income-earners did particularly well by virtue of wage increases and pandemic subsidies. The monetary stimulus—lots of lending and low interest rates—also helped them, but led to a boom in financial assets that primarily enriched the better off.

Now the economy has returned to a more normal footing, with elevated if diminished levels of price inflation. Early indications are that the economically marginal, particularly those with high debt levels or low work-force participation, will be suffering most in this stretch. However, if a true recession results, the investor class could see a squeeze in its holdings that actually reduces inequality, as has happened in previous downturns. (Higher interest payments favor these savers but reduce the value of their bonds and often their real estate.)

The surprising thing politically is that, with virtually all the good short-term effects already having been felt by President Biden’s “ordinary Joes,” support for Bidenomics appears low. Consumer confidence measures are down and other polling suggests that the stumbling Republicans actually get higher marks on the economy. This will make the attempt to have a “soft landing” (and not a recession from tighter money) over the next year all the more necessary for the White House.

As the federal budget deficit begins to worry policymakers again (thanks to its burgeoning size and the higher interest payments on it), satisfying the various constituencies for subsidies or handouts becomes more difficult.  Also the gathering expense of tighter limits on fossil-fuel use—on top of the alt-energy spending under the “Inflation Reduction Act”—means that the real cost of living will remain high. The U.S. is yet to experience a general productivity payoff from a gamut of technological innovations. Thus, even a soft economic landing will feel hard to many. Biden continues to unilaterally waive student debt payments but so far has only found ways to spare of minority of borrowers.

Meantime, international considerations weigh– not just the costs of munitions and other war-fighting assistance to U.S. proxies, but also the brittleness that accompanies the tighter monetary reins. Washington can expect  to be importuned by many disadvantaged governments abroad to loosen the checks on inflation even as they seem to be partially working in America. The past week’s Wall Street Journal article takes notice of this.

Some of these macroeconomic  issues were acute in the 2022 midterm elections, yet Biden’s fellow Democrats did well. Will the same luck—or more accurately, the same ability to tag Republican opponents as unacceptable–hold for 2024? Even with low unemployment, conditions will be tougher for many, and other rubs such as border security have grown worse in the public mind.  If indeed it “is the economy, stupid” again in the election campaign now under way, the party in executive power may once more answer for that. –October 15, 2023

NY Breakup Plan: Shades of ‘Peconic’

In states dominated by one party, especially when that dominance emanates from a giant metropolitan area, you get periodic efforts to break up the state so as to allow the dissident regions to have their own way. Often this is about ideology, although it can also reflect urban vs. rural concerns. California sees this. And New York does, too, with a renewed such effort the topic of the article below at a political website. The NY scheme would separate all of Long Island into a governing region. With that part of the state recently evolving back into being a Republican stronghold, there’s a partisan cast here. But Long Islanders know that “home rule” historically has had other implications. On the eastern half, in Suffolk County, various pushes for secession of the farthest reaches into a “Peconic County” occurred for decades prior to the Millennium. Initially these were prompted by a Suffolk governing structure that favored the western towns, though all were still heavily agricultural. After that was reformed, fear of a development wave sweeping east into the picturesque two forks (including “the Hamptons”) led to new activity into the 1980s and ’90s. The bid for Peconic County finally was quelled by the state allowing enactment of a real estate transfer tax, beginning in 1999, in the Peconic areas to fund open-space preservation. The Suffolk strife may have ended, but the desire to keep governments closer is always an active one.

https://nystateofpolitics.com/state-of-politics/new-york/politics/2023/10/10/proponents-of-dividing-new-york-believe-movement-has-momentum

‘Moonbeam’ as an American Master

My adult life coincided with Jerry Brown’s political career, so I was interested in the PBS American Masters documentary that aired last night. Some reactions: 1) A politician is an unusual inclusion in Masters, as opposed to the American Experience show. I wonder what explains this.* 2) This documentary, at 90 minutes, has less drag than the customary 120 minutes, at Experience. 3) For that or other reasons, two significant omissions occur. First, in describing Brown’s decline in popularity during his “first second term” as California governor (1979-1983) the filmmakers do not mention the reaction to “Jerry’s judges” and their leftward bent on criminal and other cases. This was symbolized by Rose Bird, whom he appointed state chief justice. She and two associates justices ultimately were removed from the bench in an extraordinary election in 1986, part of a popular revolt that gripped California during that decade. Second, in stressing his maverick (or “Moonbeam”) tendencies, the film overlooks his alliance with public-employee unions, particularly during his latter terms as governor (2011-19) and including, most notably, the prison guards. This concession to a key element in the recent one-party Democrat dominance in the state is a notable part of the Jerry Brown saga. (I noted that a labor group helped fund the production.) “TV” documentaries lack a real-time feedback function, which would have been useful here. –Sept. 16, 2023

* Subsequently, I read in the LA Times that Masters is devoting this season to “thought leaders.”

Jerry Brown: The Disrupter – Watch the documentary now

16 Lucky Homeowners Coming to East Hampton

The trickle of new “affordable” or workforce housing on the South Fork of Long Island continues–16 units (with a name!) being built in East Hampton, as this article from the local Star explains. This project predates the imposition of a new transfer tax on million-dollar–meaning nearly all–home purchases. That levy will raise maybe $50 million a year toward affordability measures, as I noted in a post in early 2022 on the history of such housing efforts in the Hamptons. The tax was approved last November in all of the East End towns on Long Island, so there is at least general political will to have more intensive home development…somewhere in the towns. So as market prices in this luxury enclave continue to rise, a few service workers or other favored parties will slip in. But this will be the biggest local issue of the next 10 years, just as efforts to protect the area’s waters from septic and other contaminants dominated the previous decade.

New Town Housing to Be Christened ‘Cantwell Court’ | The East Hampton Star

The Local Columnist as Media Signal

Back when the newsrooms of daily papers were shy about advancing a political agenda, one good clue about the outlook of ranking editors could be read from their primary local columnist. As those winds blew, so sailed the top news brass. At the New York Times, little such divining has been needed for quite a while; nonetheless, it’s notable that progressive Ginia Bellafante occupies this role each weekend. Her latest is a timely example. Dismissing expressed sentiment that sometimes-violent disorder has risen in New York City, she cites the familiar FBI stats on major crimes (declining since the pandemic) and then harkens to the early 1980s, when similar (misplaced?) fears gripped Gotham. Bernard Goetz was hailed in some quarters, at least initially, as a subway “vigilante” for shooting four would-be muggers. Bellafante then writes: “Three months ago, Daniel Penny’s chokehold killing of Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old homeless Black man he encountered on the subway, drew comparisons with the actions taken by Goetz, so many years ago. The aftermath, however, was very different. Many were outraged by the ex-Marine’s response.” She does not say that the “encounter” followed the deranged Neely’s loud and perhaps threatening rants inside the subway car (see earlier “disorder”). She implies that New Yorkers overall had shunned Penny; in fact, “many” there and elsewhere have rallied to his cause after the (progressive) Manhattan DA charged him with manslaughter. A legal defense fund is said to have collected $3 million. Regardless of whether Penny, like Goetz, will eventually face punishment for a perceived overreaction, the local columnist for the Times has betrayed a certain view of civic insecurity that is representative of her newsroom but not necessarily a majority in her metropolitan area. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/04/nyregion/new-york-crime-bernhard-goetz.html

When Suffolk County Got Its Foothold on Open Space

A big contributor to the preservation of open space on eastern Long Island during the critical early boom years of luxury development—1967 to 1999—was the Suffolk County, N.Y., parks department. It was no coincidence that this happened then: the parks authority had only recently been created.  It is a reflection of the era that was ending in the mid-1960s that Suffolk was without a parks agency. So much of the vast non-village stretches of the East End were just wooded acreage or bayfront–there for the using–that formal recreation planning was an afterthought.

This transitional period concluded with creation of the Community Preservation Fund in 1999, from a property-transaction tax that allowed East End localities to buy public space routinely. Before that, special initiatives or land donations were required except where New York State had corralled park space under master planner Robert Moses. The localities had looked after their fisheries and waterfowl areas, and by the 1970s Suffolk County took an active role in farmland preservation, but through mid-century the backwoods were an organized retreat primarily for hunting groups and scouting organizations (see below). It took a changed emphasis to reset the area’s future.

Today, nearly 60 years after Suffolk County opened its parks department, it has some 50,000 acres of recreational open-space under its management alone. (Thousands more acres on the East End are held by other public agencies and nonprofits.) Suffolk’s government may have more such land in its hands than any county in the U.S.

Suffolk Parks kicked into gear after the passage of a New York state parks bond issue in 1960, which led to funding at the county level for several big “active” parks (campgrounds and other hardscape). These were around significant water bodies in the rapidly populating western half of the county as well as three in the eastern—Sears-Bellows in Hampton Bays, Indian Island in Riverhead and Cedar Point in East Hampton town. (The state, decades before, had created that type of park at Hither Hills near Montauk, and at Wildwood, in Wading River.)

Significantly, that was a model not to be followed in most later county parks on the island’s South Fork. Rather, as development there accelerated into the 1970s and particularly the 1980s, a different approach to parkland took hold, featuring parcel preservation with only light or passive usage.  This typically means minimal parking lots and garbage collection, and often no lighting or plumbing.  Such “carry in, carry out” recreation offered better protection for surface and ground waters, which were seen to be threatened by the surrounding construction activity.

An early major example was Montauk County Park, on the former Indian Field near Big Reed Pond and Gin (bay) Beach. Led by deputy parks commissioner Edward V. Ecker (a past East Hampton supervisor), Suffolk County moved to create the big reserve in 1971.  First it had to resolve ambitions in some quarters for an expansion of the adjoining Montauk Airport operation—ultimately it was kept as a mostly quiet strip.  (The park later went through a period renamed for Theodore Roosevelt, whose Rough Riders had convalesced at the site in 1898, but under community pressure had the Montauk moniker restored.)

Numerous county, state and town preservations in the succeeding three decades hewed to this natural approach. A variation occurred at Shinnecock East County Park, at the tip of what is now called Meadow Lane as it reaches the Shinnecock Inlet in Southampton. There, according to retired Suffolk Parks official Bill Sickles, an informal and increasingly chaotic camping tradition on what was a public-works area for “inlet stabilization” was transformed by the county into a popular RV-only paved lot that doesn’t include public restrooms or other shared facilities.

The result from that ‘60s-onward push is a county that, for all the frequent contemporary complaints about traffic, McMansions and lost rusticity, is laced with green on any map. Especially is this true in its eastern half. Had actions not been taken when they were, the East End would be a less desirable—and, yes, cheaper—place to live.

As an aside, another distinguishing characteristic of Suffolk County parks is that until lately they have rarely been named after public officials, even those who were involved in creating them. (The current county executive is cited on the sign boards at park entrances.) There were a few exceptions: the Lee Koppelman preserve at Montauk’s Hither Woods (he was a county planning chief who was involved in negotiations to acquire the property from a developer); a nearby bay-beach spot named for the aforementioned Edward Ecker; and the Stephen Meschutt  Beach Park where the Shinnecock Canal empties into Peconic Bay (he was a Southampton town supervisor).  But two of Suffolk County’s most avid champions of parks and open space during the critical years described here, county executives John V.N. Klein and Peter Cohalan (who ousted Klein, on an unrelated issue), are not commemorated in this way. Their roles, like many of the legacy preserves they championed, remain understated. –7/24/23

The Scouts as Preservation Pioneers

Prior to the formation of local public parks departments, scouting organizations established prime campgrounds on the East End. Probably the most notable was the Suffolk Boy Scouts parcel at Baiting Hollow, in western Riverhead town. That facility waxed and waned over the 20th century, but is still in active use. (A nearby retreat for the Nassau County scouts, the John Schiff reservation—nee Camp Wauwepex—was established about the same time, in the 1920s, but has been shrunken and less utilized since the 1970s.) In 1959 the Suffolk scouts acquired another grounds, Camp Wilderness in Yaphank, until finances demanded a sale in 1972 to the county, which opened Suffolk’s Cathedral Pines Park on the site.  The Girl Scouts of Nassau, meanwhile, maintained Camp Tekawitha in upper Hampton Bays from 1939 until it fell into disuse and was bought by the town of Southampton in 2006 for what is now Squiretown Park. Earlier, the girl-scout Camp Barstow at Miller Place was obtained by the county for what is now Cordwood Landing Park. But Camp Blue Bay on Gardiners Bay in East Hampton, opened in 1946, remains busy with girl campers.   –Thanks to Mayra Scanlon of Southampton’s Rogers Library for research assistance

DeSantis and the Shareholder Torts

Stock investors are familiar with the tort lawyers who seek them out for class-action suits whenever there’s a big disappointment or drop in share prices. Usually the pests go away, sometimes because they are paid by the target companies to do so. Ron DeSantis’s latest tilt at “woke” business practices reminded me of them. As governor, he has summoned Florida’s investment authority to review its pension holdings in AB InBev, possibly for legal action. The company’s sales and stock price have fallen after a young marketing executive tried to broaden the image of its Bud Light beer by “inclusive” promotions, notably with a transsexual influencer on social media. This has proven to be one of the most bone-headed moves in modern product positioning, as a mass boycott by traditional buyers ensued, and although InBev has not apologized for it, you can be confident that this is not a company eager to do further woke outreach. But that’s not stopping DeSantis, who earlier used a Florida state cudgel against the Walt Disney Co. for its political gestures. Like the tort lawyers, DeSantis is looking for at least a minor payoff, in the form of needed support for his foundering campaign for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. Good luck. Some plaintiff lawyers have made successful Republican bids around the U.S., but not many. Most of the party rank and file, even today in these MAGA times, would rather keep politicians out of commerce and have professionals manage the pension accounts.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/21/desantis-orders-probe-into-bud-light-dylan-mulvaney-deal.html

Making a Hash of Legal Cannabis

“Recreational” marijuana sales are legal now in nearly half the U.S. states, but the effort has gotten ahead of itself on the retail front–or at least, ahead of the regulation still imposed on it.

The rollout of shops for legitimized selling of weed, which memorably suffered in early-adopting California, is continuing to give New York fits. Attempts there, as elsewhere, to give license preference to individuals or groups thought to have been unjustly penalized during the years of prohibition have tied up the opening of such shops. Affected also are the state’s now-legal marijuana growers. (They are to sell their crops through the blessed stores.) Meantime, a profusion of illicit “convenience” storefronts since legalization, offering drug paraphernalia and often cannabis as well, has confounded the authorities even as Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Eric Adams promise Eliot Ness-like crackdowns on the proprietors and their landlords. Libertarians laugh and stoners smirk at the contrast in market readiness between the formal and informal sectors.

In Oregon, however, a different dynamic has evidently been undoing the experiment. That state made it relatively easy to open a weed store, out of the same intent to ease the barriers for victims of past social injustice to get a piece of the new action. The result was lots of legal shops, but too many of them to profitably share in the market. There are still hurdles to “safe” dope dealing, mind you, starting with the tax (up to 20% in parts of Oregon) that must be imposed on the consumer. No wonder the margins on transactions aren’t enough to cover assorted costs for some in the competitive field—particularly when the base “street” price is set by the skulking guy on the corner.

To be sure, the states have laden the weed industry with many of the constraints put on other vice sectors, such as forbidding sale near protected locations such as schools, even in tight urban areas. Localities add to the restrictions, such that on Long Island, for instance, only a handful of new licensees have found spots, even though the state aids them in site acquisition through its misnamed Dormitory Authority.

But it is the federal government that is really gumming up the works, by not joining in the legalization wave. This most powerfully pains the entrepreneurs by effectively keeping them from nationally-chartered banks and therefore card or phone transactions. When you are a cash-only business, it limits your market–and increases your security risks. (There’s an additional wrinkle: IRS expense deductions common to other businesses are not allowed.)

So, no wonder there’s renewed pressure to get the Biden administration to act on removal of marijuana as a Schedule 1 narcotic. Ben Kovler, a national player in the cannabis business, placed a full-page ad—depicted here–in last Sunday’s New York Times and Washington Post editions making this pitch. He framed the 1970 Controlled Substances Act, a key part of the old drug war, as a concerted attack by Richard Nixon on people of color and Vietnam peace protesters. (You can’t underestimate Nixon, but Kovler does overlook the Congress that enacted it, majority Democrat.)

Maybe a green light from Washington D.C. would finally turn Main St. marijuana into a viable enterprise. Demand exists for the product–that we know from decades of thriving “dealerships.” And there’s a whiff of weed on many Manhattan blocks these days, so the smokes (as well as the chews) are getting to market, for better or worse. If the industry really were allowed to function in a more normal way, we’d at least reach what economists call a market equilibrium. Would that suit the feds and the states? Or is the high here from market manipulation?