Group For The East End Celebrates 50 Years Of Advocacy

Most visitors to the East End must first travel through western Long Island, and the stark contrast between the two — protected, natural spaces juxtaposed with dense suburbia — is both unavoidable and unforgettable.

It is by no accident that the urban sprawl, strip malls and tract housing did not spread from New York City to the eastern reaches of Long Island — and it’s the reason the wetlands, fertile farmlands, and long, sandy beaches that remain are still intact.

In the early 1970s, a coalition of environmental groups stepped forward. And chief among them was the Group for the East End.

“Once you have that experience, you really do start to look at the place a little differently, and you realize how quickly things can fall apart,” Bob DeLuca, president of Group for the East End, said of the pilgrimage across Long Island from west to east, adding, “It’s a sandbox here, so you could develop the thing wall to wall.”

Fighting for the protection of the local environment through advocacy, conservation and education, the Group’s work over the last five decades has aided some of the most critical victories in the region, from the Peconic Bay Community Preservation Fund to the Long Island Pine Barrens Protection Act, as well as smaller wins that are, in part, responsible for what the East End looks like today.

“They are really a watchdog on all of those individual applications and really keep the public involved,” said State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. “To me, the efforts to protect our community character on the East End wouldn’t nearly be as successful as they’ve been without the influence of the Group.”

To mark its 50th anniversary, the organization will celebrate during its “Swing into Summer” gala on June 11 at The Bridge in Bridgehampton, a benefit that will raise funds to help the nonprofit continue to fight for the protection of land, water and wildlife, educate the next generation of stewards of the environment, and continually remind the public of the sensitivity that underlies the beauty of the East End.

“I’m not so sure that I ever believed that you would have to just keep going back to the message that we were saying 30 years ago,” DeLuca said. “But it’s different people, it’s a different time. People forget.

“So that’s a big challenge going forward — to resurrect the memories of why we did what we did, and how it worked — so people have the inspiration to stay with it in the future.”

In 1972, two big-picture issues and one local issue converged on Long Island at the same time, creating a fever pitch among environmentalists.

First was the potential expansion of Sunrise Highway to Amagansett, following the extension of the Long Island Expressway, and the second were two nuclear power plant proposals in Jamesport. But it was the Bridgehampton Commons shopping center that pushed the activists over the edge, DeLuca explained, and inspired them to organize — as the Group for America’s South Fork.

Among them were blue-collar workers and local business owners — like farmer Lee Foster and banker Donald Petrie — and baymen and second-home owners, including cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder and art collector Garrick Stevenson.

“There was a confluence of understanding that the pieces that were being put in place, this area could not defend against,” DeLuca said. “The first thing that those early founders did was they said, ‘Look, we need a professional.’”

The organization brought on Ian Marceau, who had helmed the Town of Huntington’s Department of Environmental Protection, as its first executive director, who quickly established himself as “quite the firebrand,” DeLuca said.

“He had a little bit of Dick Amper in him,” he said with a laugh, referring to the feisty executive director of the Long Island Pine Barrens Society. “He shook the tree and he got people talking and thinking, and he took a lot of lumps for it.”

But simultaneous to that, he helped the Group secure a $150,000 grant from the Whitehall Foundation to conduct a study that inventoried and mapped wetlands, forests, agricultural lands and other natural resources, which became one of the first environmental planning tools on the South Fork.

Through the late 1970s, at the Group’s insistence, Suffolk County purchased land surrounding Poxabogue Pond for preservation, one of a series of purchases that today covers the Long Pond Greenbelt, and its water quality laboratory received FDA accreditation, allowing it to collect data that county and state officials used to determine which waters were safe for shell fishing.

In the early to mid 1980s, after linking land development to the quality of drinking water below it, the Group fought successfully to reduce housing density by nearly half across the South Fork — a move that was, for its day, groundbreaking, DeLuca said.

“It may have had the largest, single overall impact on the region prior to the Community Preservation Fund,” he said. “And, as you can imagine, that was a really tough, tough battle.”

During the Group’s earliest days, the political apparatus on the East End was pro-development, pro-property rights and pro-status quo, explained Kevin McDonald, who worked for the organization from 1982 to 2004 and is now with The Nature Conservancy.

There was nothing trendy about standing up for the environment, he said, and the local officials made no attempt to hide their contempt toward the Group.

In August 1972, Theodore Hulse, then the supervisor of Southampton Town, was quoted in The New York Times as saying, “If they’re going to say that everything we’ve done so far has been wrong, then they won’t get any cooperation from us. If, on the other hand, they want to be constructive and assist us in finding out what we don’t know and need to know, we’d be happy to work with them.”

McDonald and his co-workers were regularly called communists — “when it was actually an insult,” he said — and after particularly contentious public hearings for a development or preservation strategy, it wasn’t unusual for them to be followed home. He was just 25.

“The subtle message was, ‘We know where you live,’” he said. “I tell this to the young people I work with now: None of you will be followed home, I hope. The public openly, conspicuously cares about the environment today, and it’s politically necessary in this day and age to be good on the environment if you want to run for public office, certainly on Long Island.”

Over the next two decades, the Group led over 40 civic, business and environmental organizations in support of local bond proposals to protect open space and farmland across the East End, and orchestrated New York’s first land preservation effort supported by three levels of government — when the state, Suffolk County and East Hampton Town purchased 560 acres of land in Hither Woods, which was vital to the protection of drinking water.

It helped East Hampton Town embark on a revolutionary pilot program for residential recycling, founded the South Fork Groundwater Task Force, and partnered with Springs School to develop a South Fork-based environmental education curriculum for local schools, which they introduced in 1985.

The Group fought in court to prevent the development of a 1,500-acre parcel in the Suffolk County Pine Barrens. The county then negotiated the purchase of the Hampton Hills property, which ultimately became the cornerstone of the Pine Barrens preservation campaign. And, to finish what it started, the organization’s efforts finally led to the rejection of the proposal to build two nuclear reactors on the North Fork.

“The almost open hostility toward environmental progress softened a bit,” DeLuca said, “and when the scallops collapsed in ’86, ’87, that kind of woke people up.”

In the mid-1980s, two forces of nature stormed into the Group’s then-Bridgehampton office looking for answers. The first brown tide wave had just wiped out the Peconic Bay scallops, and Jean Lane of Sag Harbor and Jean Mariner of Southold had sounded a rallying call.

“They said, ‘All right, look, this scallop thing is out of control and this bay is gonna die — what are you guys doing about it?’” DeLuca said. “And we sat down, and we came up with this idea.”

What came next was the first water quality study ever done for the Peconic Estuary — dubbed the Brown Tide Comprehensive Assessment and Management Plan — which became the nomination document that secured the Group’s spot in the National Estuary Program.

“We were one of the last estuaries to get into that program and, subsequently, there’s been millions of dollars of federal funding, as well as state funding, attached to it,” DeLuca said. “The Peconic Estuary Program is not as sexy maybe as some of the things that you think about, but it really is a bulwark for figuring out how to manage this water body on a regional basis.”

This was one of the issues that got the Group thinking about their vision: how they were working, and where, and why. And through that line of questioning, DeLuca — who became president in 1992 — and his staff realized that the East End was one ecological region, and it was time for them to expand.

“You couldn’t really draw a line down the middle of it and say, ‘Okay, we’re just gonna look after the south side here,’” DeLuca said. “We got more and more interested in looking at the regional implications of growth and development, and how all of this was connected, with respect to the long-term sustainability.”

Between 1980 and 1999, millions of dollars were raised for land protection through individual bond proposals, which served as the genesis for the Peconic Bay Community Preservation Fund, the single most effective tool, or weapon, to compete in the real estate market against what have become astronomical rising property values, DeLuca said.

“Government, in its best of efforts, without this fund could not ever be competitive in that market,” he said, adding, “I credit Kevin McDonald as one of the understated heroes of that fight, pulling together the coalition that eventually brought that forward. It’s hard to believe today, but there were lots of people who didn’t like that idea.”

Whispers of creating the CPF crescendoed by the mid-1980s, McDonald said, and the idea was “savagely attacked by the same characters — the established political infrastructure, the Realtors and developers — who wanted all of the land to themselves to develop.”

But in 1999, a coalition of over 150 civic, environmental, real estate, banking and farming interests convinced the State Legislature to approve the bill, which gave the East End towns a new tool to raise money to protect open space.

“It was an overnight success that just took 13 or 14 years to pass,” McDonald said.

Funded by a 2 percent real estate transfer tax, a stable, recurring revenue stream was created solely for the protection of open space. Following a similar but rejected proposal in Brookhaven Town, this marked the first time that conservation efforts competed with real estate interests in the open market — and won.

“The Community Preservation Fund was transformational,” Suffolk County Legislator Bridget Fleming said. “It’s that level of commitment and that level of knowledge and understanding that has made our community the unique place that it is, specifically because there is such careful protection and passionate commitment to our natural resources.”

In 2016, new legislation was passed that extended the fund through 2050 and allowed towns to allocate up to 20 percent of their annual CPF revenue for water quality improvement measures. To date, the CPF has raised more than $2 billion.

“It was a pretty big deal,” DeLuca said of getting the CPF across the finish line. “I will say, though, in all honesty, I think it was more exhaustion for the first two weeks, and then it sunk in that we had gotten this thing. And then we get back to work.”

To address the interconnection of environmental issues across the region, in 2000, the Group for the South Fork — by that time, it had slightly shortened its name — officially expanded as the Group for the East End, in order to include Riverhead, Shelter Island and Southold, where it opened an office.

Over the next 20 years, the organization continued to monitor every major land use board across the region, identifying key issues and initiatives — from installing new osprey poles on the North Fork and co-founding the Long Island Clean Water Partnership to hosting beach cleanups and supporting government proposals to ban balloons, plastic bags and plastic straws, and restrict gas-powered leaf blowers.

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the grassroots organization didn’t slow down, DeLuca reported, describing the small staff as scrappy and agile as ever.

“The downside of scrappy is there’s probably 200 times the amount of stuff that we are doing that we could be doing,” he said. “You’re always stretched, no matter how well you’re doing.”

For the Group today, wastewater management is a top initiative, as well as securing a long-term funding stream to help Suffolk County residents replace antiquated septic systems. Conservation will always be a critical issue, from advocating for Plum Island’s designation as a national monument, as part of its overall conservation plan, to pushing for the protection of a 600-acre parcel of undeveloped land in the Pine Barrens, to helping preserve shorelines and direct coastal planning.

“It’s kind of an arms race, and I think when you start looking at the region, there’s a lot going on,” DeLuca said. “We always do feel we’re kind of running with one foot on a banana peel. At the same time, if you don’t mind a little adrenaline, you can show up where you need.”

The organization continues to monitor and collect data on osprey and horseshoe crab populations, build and improve trails from Peconic Bay to Long Island Sound, and expand children’s environmental programming in public and private schools. To date, the Group has educated more than 90,000 students over the last 35 years.

“That’s where it begins, with the young kids,” explained Dai Dayton, president of Friends for the Long Pond Greenbelt, which hosts educational hikes and programs. “They can come out into nature and when they enjoy it, which they will, they’ll fight for it. They’ll see what there is and they won’t want to lose it.”

That education component extends to elected officials, as well, according to Southampton Town Board member John Bouvier. “I would miss it if we didn’t have those voices — I think it’s really important,” he said, adding, “We need organizations like Group for the East End to help inform policy-makers to understand the ramifications of a decision that may seem not so important at one point, but really has greater influence than one might realize.”

Several years ago, Diane Hewett picked up a brochure that said, “If Group for the East End wasn’t here, this place would be just any place” — a sentiment she believes wholeheartedly, she said.

And so, when the organization recently asked the owner of DCH Graphics to design a new logo as part of its rebranding effort, finding inspiration wasn’t a reach. Ultimately, three key elements — a leaf, water droplet and wave — came together to form a bird in flight. It evokes a sense of motion, of flying and watching over the East End, she said, just as the Group does.

“As more people come to the area and the pressure for development continues, the Group’s work is more important than ever,” Hewett said. “They have had so many environmental victories because of their wise and balanced leadership. They have a wealth of knowledge and are true stewards of the East End.

“We can definitely say that the Group, whether you’ve heard of them or not, has played a key role in the East End still being defined more by its beaches and bays, rather than by strip malls and parking lots.”

Over the next 15 years, DeLuca predicts that the era of open land will be over, replaced by the next generation of environmental activity that will focus on sustainability, lowering the carbon footprint, and lessening the collective impact of individual actions — “which means it’s gonna get much closer to home for people,” he said.

“Don’t kill the goose that laid the golden egg. Don’t overdevelop the place. Don’t destroy its resources,” he said. “We still don’t have urban infrastructure here. We still are dependent upon what’s beneath our feet.”