Dan's Papers -November 21, 2008 - What? Southampton Saves Open Space, Then Lets It Be Developed?

A hearing held last Thursday in Southampton seems to have highlighted an open space preservation program that has gone slightly berserk.

A developer has bought 13 acres of open space that has already been preserved as farmland, and is proposing to put what appears to be a garden center on it. It is on Ocean Road in Bridgehampton, just north of the corner of Bridge Lane, and the land is not zoned for retail business.

And yet, the developer of the land - there is no other adequate way to describe who is doing this - wants to make it into a garden center. And it seems to be perfectly legal with the relaxed new rules that the Town has adopted involving agricultural uses of open space.

In the old days, land and open space were preserved - absent the purchase of it - by two methods.

One was for the Town or County to buy the development rights. A large farm would be threatened with development because it was being taxed as developable land and the farmer was not making enough to pay the real estate or inheritance taxes. So the Town would buy the "development rights," thus reducing the value of the land that remained, since it could only be used for agricultural purposes. The taxes would now be affordable. And the farmer would pocket a windfall.

The other way, especially in the case of land that was not fertile enough to be properly farmed, was to allow it to be developed, but with the homes on it clustered to one side, with a large part of it left open as a nature preserve. Nothing could be built in a preserve. It would just remain wild and unused.

The Town of Southampton, however, unlike East Hampton, has gotten it into its head to promote active farming by allowing the owners of this preserved land to do farming activities on it. Unlike "preserved" land, where the general public could just walk around through trails and generally enjoy it, preserved land that would now be farmed changes the playing field.

The original "preserve" was not just for the use of the people in the development. But if you allow farming in a preserve, suddenly you don't want outsiders coming in. This may be good for agriculture, but it is bad for the taxpayers. In an "agricultural preserve," for example, the owner of it, if he planted cabbages, might want to build high turkey wire fences to keep the deer out. This is a whole different thing than was originally intended.

In any case, here we are, in Bridgehampton, with a proposal on 13 acres that is a set of plans that says right on it "FARM PLAN."

The plan for the farm consists of rows and rows of flowers, bushes, orchards and shrubs, all for sale to the general public. There is a driveway you come up to get to where you buy your shrubs, a loading area, a parking area for 16 cars, and three new buildings where there are none now - none of which are common farm buildings. One is called a barn, but inside are a storage area and equipment and tool room on the first floor, and an office and conference room on the second floor. Another building is a greenhouse, like you might see at either a garden center or on a farm, and the third is a fake windmill. Not only a fake windmill, but a fake Dutch windmill. As I recall, the Dutch never got farther out from New Amsterdam than the Jamaica Plain and Flushing, while the English settled the East End. Nevertheless, in a land of a dozen beautiful and historic English windmills, they want to build a Dutch one. Whatever.

I should say, incidentally, that from the plans each of these three buildings, plus a fourth equipment shed, would, if built, be really stunning and beautiful 19th century reproductions. And I should also say that the pathways through the proposed "flower farm," (garden center), are as lovely as pathways through an English garden. Nevertheless, this is a residential neighborhood. And it's a long way from a farm stand on the street in front of a field of vegetables and flowers behind.

Today, this would not be a legal project in East Hampton Town. It would not even be a legal project in Southampton Town. But things have changed. And now the town wants to encourage farming in ways nobody thought of before.

I can give you lots of examples of the lengths that Southampton Town went to in the past to keep open space as open space and to strictly enforce farming as a wholesale-only business.

A big hew and cry went up years ago when Jeff White, in Sagaponack, built a greenhouse on his farm as a place to sell plants and flowers at retail. It is still there today - it is Liberty Farms on Sagg Main - but it was quite a battle before White, the farmer, finally prevailed.

One who did not prevail was Tony Tiska, who owned a big potato farm at the corner of Scuttlehole Road and Millstone in Bridgehampton. Tiska opted for the plan where you sell your development rights to the town, but then got in trouble when he leased some of his farmland to a polo club and then the polo club built stables on the leased land to house their polo ponies. The polo people put forward the somewhat lame argument that these stables were to "raise" polo ponies. But, of course, they were just keeping them there between matches and until it was time to send them back to Argentina. In the end, the stables had to be removed. And the polo club moved their operation to the Entenman Farm in Calverton.

Then there was the regulating of farm stands. The town saw, correctly, that a farm stand is a retail business. And though they wanted to encourage them, they didn't want to make farmers markets out of residential streets. Rather ridiculous, but I guess necessary, laws were passed about farm stands. It could only be a certain number of square feet. At least 70% of everything being sold had to be raised in the field behind the farm stand - not the field down the block, but behind the farm stand. And the other 30% had to be accessory stuff to what was being raised. If you raised corn, you could sell corn fritters, or cornbread. And finally, the whole thing had to be temporary enough to be removed at the end of every summer season.

Particularly interesting is the fact that, although in the old days developers were perfectly content to set aside a natural "preserve" because it enhanced the value of the home sites that abutted it, now, in addition to that, they get a "gift" of being able to run a business on this preserve and even buy and sell the preserves if what goes on there is lucrative.

A recent example, already approved, is a 13-house development on a 30-acre former farm in East Quogue.

The developer bought the property, which is not preserved, and proposed building 13 houses on the 30 acres, each on a parcel of two-and-a-half acres. But the town asked the developer to cluster the houses, and leave a large parcel as open space.

So the developer came back with a plan to build 13 houses, each on one acre, with the rest of the property, 17 acres, as open space.

The town approved it and in the old days it would have ended there. But today, under the new rules, the town then gave the developer a gift - the right to own and "farm" the open space.

And not only that, but also, if the "farm" was lucrative, to sell the property to somebody else.

We've got all sorts of "farms" these days. You can drive up the New York Thruway and as you pass through Westchester, turn off and stop at Stew Leonard's, a "farm" that is in reality just a giant shopping center, complete with hay bales and occasional banjo players and people dressed up as farm animals for the kiddies.

We've got Pumpkintown every autumn on the Montauk Highway in Southampton, with slides, jungle gyms, tame penned farm animals and wooden pirate ships you can climb around on.

And we've got real farms with cows and orchards and farm stands, where you can buy tickets to go through corn mazes.

And now, maybe we'll get a garden center on land that, for the last 10 years, neighbors have looked out to see tractors plowing it to plant potatoes, about to become an English garden center with a Dutch windmill.