A finding of ‘qualified and eligible’ requires much more than hopes and dreams

One last step lies just ahead for the Riverhead Town/Calverton Aviation & Technology deal on the sale of the rest of the old Grumman site that’s now called EPCAL. Over 1600 acres and a cool $40 million — actually a shamefully low price — hang in the balance. And it’s all up to the Town Board, any three of their five votes, to make it happen.

CAT lurks in the wings, the latest in partner changes than at a country square dance. Among them, they still partner with Luminati, the corporate extension of a guy skilled in razzmatazz, who lies low these days, having been so discredited that his latest partners all but disown him. And they can’t.

They cannot deny him because he has a nice long lease on the 10,000-foot runway and its taxiways are his as well. That the town gave him a runway license agreement is just another in a litany of bad decisions. And Luminati still has a central role in the development plan, such as it is, attached to the contract for this EPCAL sale.

The town has one thing to do before its final vote: get done with the “qualified and eligible” hearing, a process that the EPCAL’s designation as an “Urban Renewal Area,” makes necessary. Except for written comments from the public, which anyone can hand into the town clerk by April 6, the hearing is closed. The community can be heard and should submit their comments, even if it’s a simple, handwritten letter.

Then, on a date they will set, the town board will vote on the real question, the one that decides if the sale happens: whether the town finds this CAT/Luminati crew qualified and eligible. It is plain and simple why the Riverhead Town Board has no choice but to find them NOT qualified and NOT eligible.

For starters, these buyers, as a collective group, have zero credibility. Something as basic as runway rent payments from Luminati have been a problem. Then an unknown rocket engine-testing company has moved in with no word to the town or the fire departments about their use and storage of highly volatile fuel. Is this dangerous behavior, this renegade mentality, meant for EPCAL? Actually, it is our good fortune to have an early glimpse into the way they do business.

And what confidence can we have in a crew of would-be buyers who have left in their wake a trail of contentious court cases, bringing them on or fighting them off, to this day. They battle former partners and municipalities who were as blind as these buyers hope we will be now. Or they have walked away from projects best described as false starts, in Germany, Niagara Falls, or Nevada, or Maryland, many times, as reported in Bloomberg News, after worn-down municipalities could not meet their huge and insatiably growing demands for public money.

Are we to jump into a deal of this magnitude with a newly formed group, barely acquainted with each other, but all in it together? The town rightly demands certified financial statements about all of them. But they drag their feet. Are they afraid to open up about their finances with each other as well as with us? They’re too new a group to have ready financial statements about their relationship with each other when you think of it. Do we really need this?

Then consider how little we know of their plans for the property, even at this late stage. The development plan that we have in writing from them is a challenge to read and says precious little. Notice the pie-in-the-sky promises by CAT member Luminati Aerospace, all in this prolonged time that they and their town board dancing partners have tied up the property. Their reliance on start-up companies, each with barely any record of performance, is a risk of theirs that they hope to make ours. That’s imprudent risk — a senseless gamble. Let’s find these wannabes a way to the SB Incubator right at the EPCAL site. They don’t need what amounts to be the rest of the EPCAL acreage.

And what confidence can we have in a developer of shopping malls who throws a couple of million on the table in the form of a “benefit” – who shamelessly offers the town a blatant payoff to install new turf and lights in a couple of our parks. In return, the buyers obnoxiously demand not merely the town board’s approval, but their unanimous, 5-0 vote. Really!

Think of this unseemly pay-to-play at $500K per vote. Did they come up with this strategy in that closed NYC meeting, hidden till after the fact from even the town’s special attorneys (who were dismayed upon learning of it) with one of the board members, herself up until recently a strident opponent of the sale, whose vote they now count on? Should the rest of our elected officials do business with such operators?

And for those who have voiced serene assurance of all the tax revenue and jobs that will flow from this sale for a song, take note: these buyers have revealed one feature of their plan with defined clarity, and that is to secure every possible tax break and exemption they can get. Our town’s clueless IDA, who never met a tax deal they didn’t like, and whose staff salaries depend on fees paid to the IDA by developers, will be at the buyers’ beck and call, and all the rest of the town’s property owners will shake their heads and pay, and pay, and pay.

And when you cradle the tender notion of all the career level jobs, ask about the ones created there so far, the hefty salaried jobs held by their now-gone “dream team.”

Consider, finally, the casual attitude the buyers have displayed in the hearings about runway repair, to cost at least $15 million according to one of them. Yet the other partners, the money guys, have agreed to only $1 million for fixing the property’s major asset. Their engineers didn’t bother to inspect the runways the two times they were out here, and had little in the Q&E hearings to report, except about themselves in their 40-page brochure. Is it that the buyer cares little about EPCAL except for one feature – they get some of the best industrial land in the region for the yard sale price of $26,000 per acre?

And so to the Riverhead Town Board, it’s in your hands to save us from this mysterious, just-assembled group. We have seen enough to know they sorely lack qualification and eligibility. No need to wait for another melodrama to unfold. Get the property back on the market, and connect with some established buyers who have a solid record of job creation, some of whom have already sought to make offers to the town, but whose interest was long hidden from you.