“All those in favor?” Riverhead IDA Vice Chairperson Lori Ann Pipczynski asked after making a motion to deny the application of Triple Five’s affiliate, Calverton Aviation and Technology. The mega-mall developer was seeking financial assistance from the agency worth tens of millions of dollars in tax exemptions for a proposed $245 million first-phase development at the Calverton Enterprise Park.
As Pipczynski and IDA board members Lee Mendelson and Douglas Williams, a somber and poker-faced trio, quietly responded in the affirmative, the crowd packed to overflowing in the old Town Hall meeting room erupted into shouts of “Aye!” “Aye!” and broke out in cheers and applause.
Then — as if by some bizarre cosmic coincidence, at 5:55 p.m. — Pipczynski declared the resolution adopted.
They had come bearing paper signs to convey their message the IDA board, knowing there would be no public comment period before the vote on the resolution, as is the Riverhead IDA’s practice.
WALK AWAY IDA! DON’T LET US DOWN! DO THE RIGHT THING! UNANIMOUS NO! THIS IS A BAD DEAL! NO CARGO AIRPORT!
They entered the room not knowing what the outcome would be, since the IDA posted a resolution on its website Friday night that didn’t provide any hints. As Riverhead IDA Vice Chairperson Lori Ann Pipczynski put it, reading from a prepared statement, the resolution, authored by the agency’s lawyer, contained only “unspecified findings and alternative actions.”
The tension in the room was palpable as the three IDA board members present recessed the meeting and left the meeting room to enter into a closed-door session to speak with the agency’s attorney.
After 38 minutes, they returned to their seats on the dais and Pipczynski began reading a long written statement, that over the course of some 15 minutes, detailed all the reasons why the agency could not and would not agree to provide financial assistance to the developer.
Six minutes into her statement, after discussing the lack of detail provided about the project by the applicant, Pipczynski said, “Unless the agency is advised as to what specifically is being proposed, the agency is unable to further the process, much less approve the application.”
The room erupted. Pipcyznski and Mendelson pounded the dais to quell the crowd’s cheers, whistles and applause. They obviously knew there would be much more information to put on the record to support the conclusion they’d reached. The crowd quickly fell silent, and Pipczynski continued.
When it was over, and the last cheers had died down, the crowd’s relief and joy filled the air as the room emptied and residents filed out.
“I think the IDA did a good professional job,” EPCAL Watch coordinator John McAuliff of Riverhead said in an interview after the meeting. “I had actually expected this would be the conclusion, because it’s hard, given everything that had been said, to understand how they could come to another conclusion,”McAuliff said. “But the problem is, their process is so closed, that nobody could know for sure. And that created the anxiety on our part.”
Greater Calverton Civic Association President Toqui Terchun was elated. “Complete and utter happiness” was how she described her feelings after the IDA announced its decision.
“There’s still one more step,” Terchun noted, referring to the town’s 2018 contract of sale with Calverton Aviation and Technology. A contract amendment signed by the parties in March 2022 gives the Town Board the right to now declare the contract null and void. “But we couldn’t get to that step without what happened tonight,” Terchun said.
Rex Farr, founder of EPCAL Watch and former president of the Greater Calverton Civic Association, said in a phone interview last night he believes the contract will be canceled by the Town Board. Farr credited residents vocal opposition with exerting enough pressure on elected officials to ensure they cancel the contract.
Southampton Town Council Member Tommy John Schiavone, who has attended meetings and information sessions in Riverhead about the development plans for EPCAL to voice opposition to any air cargo uses at the site, was on hand for last night’s meeting. He was beaming as he exited the building.
“We’re happy that the IDA looked at all of the issues and came to the right decision,” Schiavone said. The proposal, he said, “was a maneuver that was going to alter the entire East End of Long Island, irreparably and forever.”
Democratic supervisor candidate Angela De Vito, who, like the current Democratic slate and past Democratic tickets, has made opposition to the CAT deal a centerpiece of her campaign, saw deceitfulness on the part of her opponent and the Republican Party in the IDA’s decision and the process that led up to it.
“This is basically orchestrated political influence here,” De Vito said in an interview last night. She cited the town supervisor recently sending two letters to the IDA board demanding a decision on the CAT application.
“They did the right thing,” De Vito said of the IDA board. “But they were pressured into doing it now, before the election. They saw the trend going against them,” she said of the Republicans. “To me, this has been orchestrated in a way that tries to influence the voters of Riverhead to vote a different way.”
Former supervisor Laura Jens-Smith, now the chairperson of the Riverhead Town Democratic Committee, has been opposed to the deal since before Triple Five was involved. She campaigned on the issue against then-incumbent supervisor Sean Walter in November 2017 and won.
By the time Jens-Smith took office in January 2018 — in a two-member minority on a Town Board that remained controlled by Republicans, the contract with Calverton Aviation & Technology was already approved by a lame-duck Riverhead Town Board.
Then council member James Wooten, now a Republican candidate for Riverhead Town clerk, and term-limited incumbent council member John Dunleavy joined Walter at the last Town Board meeting of the year in December 2017 in a 3-2 vote to approve the CAT contract.
Hubbard and then council member Jodi Giglio, now a member of the State Assembly, voted against the resolution approving the contract.
But after the conclusion of the Town Board’s examination of CAT’s qualifications and eligibility to buy the property and complete the development spelled out in the contract, both Hubbard and Giglio joined Wooten to find the company “qualified and eligible” for purposes of the State’s Urban Renewal Law — applicable because the EPCAL site is a town-designated Urban Renewal Area.
The qualified and eligible — often referred to as “Q&E” for short — vote was delayed by an investigation by the town’s Board of Ethics into one or more complaints filed against Giglio, who had taken a private meeting with Triple Five executives in their Manhattan offices while the Q&E public hearing was ongoing. The result of that investigation and any decision made by the ethics board was not made public, except that Giglio was reportedly found not to have violated the town’s ethics code and therefore did not have to recuse herself from the vote.
Jens-Smith, in an interview after Monday’s IDA meeting, laid the blame on Hubbard for the contract with CAT still being in play.
Hubbard cast the deciding vote to find CAT qualified and eligible, Jens-Smith said. She noted he voted that way even though CAT declined to provide the financial statements required by the Town Board’s adopted qualified and eligible rules.
“We asked multiple times for updated financial statements. We had our own financial administrator come in, who said that the statements they provided us were not adequate to judge their ability to pay for this project. And we actually even hired an outside attorney to vet them on this,” Jens-Smith said. “And Tim Hubbard each and every time did not did not act on it and accepted the the the lackluster financial documents that they gave us — letters, basically, and one of them was even like a letter from their mother that they provided to an attorney that the Town Board couldn’t even see,” she said. “And Tim continued to hang on and let this project move forward.”
Hubbard said today he thought it “amazing” his opponent viewed the IDA action as “a huge conspiracy.”
“I watched it on Zoom, with bated breath, just like everybody else in that Town Board room and on Zoom,” Hubbard said in a phone interview.
Hubbard said he was watching the Zoom video in the kitchen with his wife and they were “giving each other high-fives when the IDA board voted.”
He said he made the best decision in 2018 with the information that was then available to the Town Board, including the advice of the town’s outside lawyers who told the board at the time the company had provide sufficient assurances of their financial wherewithal to support a qualified and eligible determination.
“Since then, a lot has changed,” Hubbard said, referring to news of Triple Five’s legal and financial woes, which have been well-documented in publicly available government filings, including court records.
“Looking back, if I knew then what I know now, would I have made a different decision? Absolutely,” Hubbard said.
Editor’s note: Supervisor Yvette Aguiar has called a special meeting of the Town Board Tuesday afternoon at 4 o’clock to take up a resolution declaring the November 2018 contract with CAT null and void. See story.
Check back again for further coverage.
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