Environmentalists And Wainscott Residents Band Together To Oppose Industrial Complex

Environmental advocacy groups and residents of Wainscott are banding together in opposition to a proposal for a 50-lot light industrial center in the former Wainscott Sand & Gravel sand mine, which the new coalition says instead should be purchased by the town for preservation and community uses.

The new cooperative, calling itself the Coalition to Stop The Wainscott Commercial Center, blasted the proposal as a threat to the health of Georgica Pond and a looming traffic disaster for already congested Montauk Highway and for the residential side streets in the hamlet.

“It’s hard to think of a worse place to consider the construction of a major industrial park than the location of the proposed Wainscott Commercial Center,” said Bob DeLuca, president of the community preservation advocacy organization, Group for the East End, which has joined the coalition. “Between the crushing traffic on Montauk Highway, and sensitive groundwater resources that lie beneath the site, there is no scenario where this proposal can find harmony with the longstanding planning and environmental goals for the region.”

The threat to drinking water and Georgica Pond, the headwaters of which are less than 1,000 feet from the southern portions of the former mine, should be of utmost concern, said Kevin McAllister, the founder of the Sag Harbor-based water quality advocate organization Defend H20.

“The parcel of land where the commercial center is to be constructed comprises the historic headwaters of Georgica Pond,” McAllister was quoted as saying in the release announcing the forming of the coalition. “With groundwater already compromised by past mining activities and industrial contaminants, a sprawling industrial development of this scale poses too high a risk to water quality from the increased sewage and stormwater loadings it will generate.”

The group said that traffic studies have shown that the property could generate and additional 600 vehicles per hour on local roads, many of them heavy commercial vehicles and large trucks that will inevitably find their way onto residential side streets.

“Imagine the traffic from 50 new commercial businesses entering and exiting Montauk Highway in Wainscott,” said former Town Supervisor Larry Cantwell, “an area of the highway already so far over capacity, it is rated near failure by the [State] Department of Transportation.”

The Wainscott Commercial Center proposal was brought to the East Hampton Town Planning Board by property owner John Tintle more than four years ago. Last fall, the project’s representatives presented the first draft of an exhaustive analysis of all the potential impacts the project could have on the surrounding area, and have spent the last several months addressing gaps in the information, as demanded by the Planning Board.

The project’s attorney and vice president, David Eagan, told the board last month that he expects it will be another couple of months before the last handful of points are completed and added to the analysis.

In response to the formation of the opposition, Eagan said that the property owners would welcome the town making a bid to purchase some of the land.

“The WCC strongly agrees with the coalition’s call for the East Hampton Town Board’s purchase of a substantial portion of the 70 acre site in furtherance of the Wainscott Hamlet Plan,” Eagan said in a message on Wednesday. “In fact, the Hamlet Plan’s conceptual vision for the property cannot be legally implemented without the Town’s purchase of lots for use as public park, housing, a future train station and other municipal purposes.

“The WCC has been crystal clear … of its willingness to work with the Town Board toward those purchases,” he added. “In fact, the ‘Hamlet Plan Alternative’ extensively discussed and analyzed in our DEIS specifically provides the Town Board the opportunity to purchase 20 lots to create the public park, housing and future train station envisioned by the Hamlet Plan. The WCC has even offered to grant the Town Board exclusive five-year options to purchase all or some of those twenty lots for those purposes. The WCC agrees that it is time for Town Board to engage with the WCC regarding those purchases.”

The project developers have argued that light industrial commercial lots that can house contractors’ businesses are in high demand and short supply townwide, and that such a focus has been typical of how former sand mines are redeveloped.

The project calls for 50 commercial and industrial lots on the 70-acre property. Planning Board members have noted that the project as proposed could not be approved under town code and have demanded that the developers bring them alternative layouts, including designs that hark to the sort of redevelopment of the former sand mine laid out in the Wainscott Hamlet Study.

The study recommended that a large portion of the land be preserved as open space and another portion dedicated to a mix of residential and retail business development, linking to the existing business district, and the remainder dedicated to light industrial lots.

The new coalition said that it wants to see the property purchased by the town and dedicated to open space and “municipal purposes.”

The new group lists nearly a dozen advocacy groups and a long list of Wainscott residents as its members. It has set up a new website, stopwainscottcommercialcenter.org, to lay out the objections to the project.