Long Island’s East Is Far from Red

Republican Ed Romaine’s victory in an unusually high-profile race for Suffolk County executive in New York has thus far obscured what was a stark triumph for Democrats on the eastern reaches of Long Island in yesterday’s election.

Democrats swept landslide wins in East Hampton town, seem to have scored a surprise trifecta in more competitive Southampton town and appear to have fought to a standoff in Southold town on the more GOP-leaning North Fork.

The gains made in Southampton, where the parties have traded power in recent decades, are most significant. A highly energized Democrat operation succeeded in retaining the key supervisor post by a solid margin for Maria Moore, mayor of Westhampton Beach, against town councilwoman Cynthia McNamara, previously a potent vote getter. Even more telling, the wave apparently brought in young legislative staffer Michael Iasilli to the town council, displacing Republican Richard Martel, a popular figure from the sizable hamlet of Hampton Bays. Iaselli leads Martel by 219 votes with only a small number of absentee ballots outstanding.

Another candidate on the Democrat line, Bill Pell, easily finished first in the Southampton council race, assuring the party of continued dominance of the town government. Pell, however, is a trustee of the town wetlands with a broader support base–it is Iaselli’s bid that is the bigger measure of Democrat strength, along with the new supervisor Moore.

Southampton was historically a GOP stronghold, although that began to change in the late 1990s and early 2000s as anti-development sentiment and a rising population of cosmopolitan newcomers affected the politics. The parties have traded off council dominance, with stronger personalities in each holding sway, while Republicans have kept hold of the trustee spots. That much appears to have remained true on Tuesday, with wins of 3 of 5 seats.

East Hampton’s transition was earlier and more abrupt. In a 1983 election, the council turned sharply to the Democrats after early battles over land use and preservation. It has remained so for nearly all of the 40 years since, even as the town’s trustee positions were more a partisan mix till recently. Nowadays, and clearly this week, Republicans are not even in the game there–they even lost a town justice post that had been their last redoubt.

The GOP’s problems in many affluent suburbs, outside the South especially, have grown obvious. The party’s resurgence lately in much of Long Island, fueled by antagonism toward criminal-justice and immigration policies of urban Democrats, has been one of the great contrarian stories. As the battleground becomes more local in the most gilded and environmentally-conscious precincts to the east, however, the issues are different and the outcomes more akin to those of today’s U.S. Northeast. –Nov 8, 2023

Colorado v. Airbnb: A New Front

Politicians are happy to find unpopular business sectors to hit with tax increases or other costly impositions. Cable-TV franchises would be one example–holders aren’t liked and they don’t have the lobbying heft that, say, despised insurance companies do. Lately, another soft target has been found: short-term housing rentals. The rise of this practice, identified with online services Airbnb and Vrbo but practiced by corporate landlords as well as homeowners, has buffeted the hospitality industry while also offering wider choices for travelers. But that means there’s a disparate group of beneficiaries (those offering square footage and those renting it, neither tightly organized) and at least two concentrated sources of opposition: competing hotel operators (plus their unions) and the neighbors of such rentals, who don’t like the churn of visitors. So the local political equation thus seems clear, and the result is open season on the “Airbnbs.” Various jurisdictions, including now the giant city of New York, have curbed such availability. In another twist, noted this week in the Colorado Sun, a governor is seeking to quadruple the property tax on owners who make a habit of renting out. However, in a state with many beds on offer to budget-conscious or chalet-seeking skiers, the move provoked more resistance than the political equation suggests. Watch this space, so to speak.

Short-term rental owners show up in force to oppose Colorado lawmakers’ plan to tax their homes at a much higher rate

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

Update: Two and a half years later, this project is still bouncing around the courts and planning circles. Most locals now can barely recall the heyday of the plant in the early 1980s when it employed a few thousand. Those paychecks financed homes in surrounding hamlets like Manorville, Ridge and Wading River. They have mostly missed the East End boom. –Mar. 9, 2026

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