Just over 16 acres on the Peconic River on West Main Street will be preserved as parkland following the approval by the Suffolk County Legislature, which authorized the purchase for $1.14 million in a unanimous vote Tuesday.
The acquisition is being made under the New Suffolk County Drinking Water Protection Program, which is funded by a quarter-percent sales tax.
“If we didn’t preserve 16 acres on the Peconic River when we could, then shame on us,” said Legis. Al Krupski (D-Cutchogue), who, with the county executive, sponsored the resolution.
“It will provide storm resiliency,” Krupski said in a phone interview today. “It is a good acquisition,” he said.
As a condition of the purchase, the county required the Town of Riverhead to improve and maintain the site as a passive recreation park facility.
The town prepared a concept plan showing a parking area, a half-mile elevated boardwalk, two bird-watching stations and a pre-fabricated restroom. The plan would require the town to clear large portions of the site of existing invasive species growing there — Japanese knotweed and phragmites.
The town estimated the total cost of all improvements, including removal of invasive plants, would range from just under $1.1 million to about $1.6 million. The concept plan included everything the town could foresee eventually doing with the site, but the town is not obligated to do any of them.
There is no deadline for the town to undertake any improvements, Krupski said.
The town board was divided on partnering with the county to acquire the property, with former council members James Wooten and Jodi Giglio voting against it and former supervisor Laura Jens-Smith, and council members Tim Hubbard and Catherine Kent in support. Giglio said there were other parcels of higher priority for preservation in the town — and on the river — and said the choice to preserve the property in question was “political.”
The site, a former duck farm, is owned by former South Jamesport resident Larry Simms of Pittsburgh, who was an organizer of the civic group Save Main Road and was appointed to the Riverhead Industrial Development Agency board — again, over the objection of Wooten and Giglio.
Simms took title to the property — actually three separate lots — in 2017 from his wife, who paid a total $718,900 for the land in May 2007.
The site is located within the state-designated Wild, Scenic and Recreational Rivers Act zone, which imposes significant land use restrictions and subjects it to regulation by the State Department of Environmental Conservation. Giglio argued that the regulatory restrictions meant “de facto it’s already preserved.”
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