Suffolk County taxpayers have paid more than $3 billion for public land, much of it inaccessible to the public and functioning instead as wooded buffer zones that benefit only a handful of fortunate Long Islanders.

In the course of 40 years, Suffolk and its 10 towns have prevented development on more than 50,000 acres, pleasing environmentalists but frustrating the area’s real estate development community.

In a three-month investigation, LIBN examined the last 15 years of open space purchases in Suffolk and found several examples of questionable land deals, where hundreds of acres haven’t been utilized as intended and millions in taxpayer dollars were spent for the good of a select few.

Both sides debate the lasting effects of publicly funded open space purchases. Preservationists point to positive impacts on water quality, tourism, agriculture and opportunities for recreation, while opponents lament the loss of tax revenue, jobs and economic development and inflated land prices that resulted from removing so much property from Long Island’s limited supply.

However, land purchased with public money for the purpose of preserving open space is supposed to be open and accessible to the public, however in dozens of instances, that’s just not the case.

Open and shut

In Sept. 2007 the county partnered with the Town of East Hampton to buy 25 acres of waterfront property in Montauk from the Estate of Phyllis Weisz for $9 million. According to Scott Wilson, from East Hampton’s land acquisition and management department, “all preserved property that the town owns and manages is open to the public.” But the only way to get to that parcel of town-owned land is via Deforest Road on which there is a “No Trespassing” sign posted that also says the street is a private road. When LIBN notified him about the sign, Wilson wrote via email last

month that it’s “an erroneous sign” and he would “let the highway department know so it can be removed.” As of last Friday, the sign was still there, along with two more that read “No beach access.”

While the public is effectively kept out of the heavily wooded property it paid for, it is of great benefit to the handful of homeowners that live on Deforest Road, such as Michael Hoffman, a principal of multi-billion-dollar hedge fund firm Riverstone Holdings. Hoffman is also a former board member of The Nature Conservancy, the nonprofit preservation group that negotiated the deal and earned a healthy commission for the Weisz property.

Hoffman and his wife, Jane, own a waterfront home on 4.2 acres at the south end of Deforest Road that was recently offered for $49.95 million. Now off the market, the property known as Cottage Point had been advertised by Douglas Elliman’s Matthew Breitenbach as having endless “views and privacy” with “over 100 acres of surrounding agricultural reserve.”

Breitenbach said preserved land boosts the value of neighboring homes.

“It makes the property worth more,” he told LIBN. “You just have privacy. You have unblocked vistas.”

Another homeowner on Deforest Road is former television talk show host Dick Cavett, who sold a 75.7-acre portion of his property in 2008 for $18 million to a triumvirate of Suffolk, East Hampton and the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation. That purchase was also negotiated by The Nature Conservancy. Cavett retained nearly 20 acres of his oceanfront property, which is now mostly surrounded by land that was bought as open space for passive recreation, but is not accessible to the public.

“The Dick Cavett deal was the biggest disgrace in the history of open space acquisition,” said Desmond Ryan, executive director of the Association for a Better Long Island. “I don’t think 10 people have walked on that property that surrounds Cavett’s house.”

In many cases, plans to subdivide and build more houses prompted local governments to intervene and buy the land. The county paid $3.5 million for 9.8 acres in Bridgehampton, which it bought from 357 Brick Kiln LLC in Sept. 2006. The land is bordered on the east by a 3-acre estate owned by a retired partner in a Manhattan law firm and on the south by a subdivision of multi-million-dollar homes. The publicly owned property is landlocked and not accessible to the public.

Less than a mile to the west, the county paid $3 million for 14 acres on Little Noyac Path in Water Mill from Jerrold Schwabe in May 2006. The landlocked property is bordered by homes that sell for upward of $5 million and is not accessible to the public, but it’s a boon to its well-heeled neighbors. Just next door, a 4.5-acre building lot was recently on the market for $1.1 million. In its advertising, the property is touted as having “ultimate privacy since it borders over 30 acres of reserve land.”

Schooled in preservation

There are plenty of other examples of publicly funded open space purchases that seem to largely benefit adjacent property owners instead of the general public.

In 2007 the county partnered with East Hampton to buy 71 acres from the private Ross School for $7.8 million. The property, located just north of the East Hampton Airport, has no signage or parking area that would give it access to the public. A year earlier, the county bought a 20.5-acre parcel in Nissequogue from the Knox School for $4.7 million. The land, which has frontage on Stony Brook Harbor, serves as a buffer between the tony private academy and a subdivision of million-dollar homes. There is no parking permitted along Long Beach Road, which is the only way to access the now publicly owned property, used mostly by neighboring homeowners to walk their dogs.

Parked places

In some cases, the county spent millions of taxpayer dollars to buy property specifically earmarked for active recreation, yet the parcels either have no recreational facilities or are not even accessible to the public.

In 2011 Suffolk paid $17.4 million for a 302-acre former private shooting preserve off Sound Avenue in Riverhead. Called the North Fork Preserve, 175.34 acres of the property was purchased for “active recreation” while 126.66 acres was tapped for passive recreation. When LIBN visited the site on a Sunday in July, there was nobody on the property. The only “active recreation” found were two dilapidated and unusable tennis courts overgrown with weeds and bushes.

In 2005 the county paid $1.8 million to Blumenfeld Development Group for 5.2 acres in Commack. The landlocked parcel is behind a Pep Boys store on Jericho Turnpike and bordered by several commercial properties on Commack Road and a subdivision of homes on Rachel Avenue to the west. The land was purchased under Suffolk’s Greenways Active Parkland program, but there is no parking area or public access to the fenced-off site, only some litter and construction debris on its perimeter.

When asked about the property, Town of Huntington spokesman A.J. Carter said the town is ultimately responsible for making the improvements to turn it into a park.

“It’s still on the drawing board. Other priorities are ahead of it,” he said. “It’s not in the works right now.”

In 2003, Suffolk spent $900,000 for 1.63 acres of waterfront property on Unqua Place in Amityville under the same Greenways Active Parkland program. The land sits across from the Unqua Corinthian Yacht Club. But instead of becoming a public park as was intended 13 years ago, the weed-choked property is not accessible to the public and has become a dumping ground for trash.

When it comes to open space bought expressly for parkland, preservationists say there is often a delay between the purchase and establishing its intended purpose.

Randall Parsons, land conservation specialist for The Nature Conservancy in East Hampton, called it a “catch-up factor” where big properties like the North Fork Preserve become available and municipalities have to determine if they’re going to be developed or protected.

“They came in at the critical moment and committed that property to open space and recreation, but then they have to play catch-up for actually getting them into use. That’s fairly common,” Parsons said. “You’ll find in Suffolk County that the land is protected and then the infrastructure or the trails or the recreational facilities, the staff and all that lags based on the budget and based on the demand in the community.”

The bucks stop here

In the meantime, many of the open space properties targeted as parks are essentially warehoused and off the tax rolls, awaiting more public dollars to turn them into usable assets. But like all the other land bought through open space programs through the last 40 years, the acquisitions have at least accomplished their main objective: stopping development.

Much of the funding for buying open space comes from the county’s quarter-cent sales tax first established in 1986 and the 2 percent real estate transfer tax imposed since 1999 in its five East End towns (Riverhead, East Hampton, Southampton, Southold and Shelter Island). A referendum to extend the East End program to 2050 is on November’s ballot.

It’s been an expensive effort. While the actual open space buys and purchase of development rights in Suffolk comes to about $1.5 billion, the interest on bond money borrowed for the programs pushes the total to more than $3.2 billion.

But Long Island economist Martin Cantor says the real cost of the Island’s open space purchases over the last 40 years equates to more than $8.2 billion in economic activity that’s been lost forever, more than $25,000 per Suffolk household.

Cantor’s findings contradict an often-referenced report from the Trust for Public Land on the economic benefits and fiscal impact of parks and open space, which calculated $2.7 billion of annual economic activity from open space. That report included yearly savings on medical costs by surmising that more Long Islanders will exercise on the acquired lands.

Preservationists like Parsons and Richard Amper, the executive director of the Pine Barrens Society, assert that residential development costs taxpayers more because of increased demands for public services and extra burdens on area school districts.

“Deer don’t go to school,” Amper says.

Cantor counters that open space costs property tax and sales tax dollars, does little to advance the local economy, costs municipal budgets to maintain and adds little to the tourism efforts that are fueled more by the local business climate.

“Who on Long Island doesn’t want to preserve open space?” Cantor asked. “The issues are, ‘Does the preservation of open space meet the standards advanced by advocates and do taxpayers get the bang for their tax dollars that are used to buy open space, since much of the open space acquired is not available for use by the very taxpayers that have purchased it?’”

County officials say that land is purchased for conversation for reasons other than to provide the public with hiking trails and/or actively used parkland.

For example, many of the parcels the county has purchased in whole or part were purchased for their “ecological/environmental significance specifically as it relates to protecting our drinking water,” Amy Keyes, government liaison officer for Suffolk’s Department of Economic Development and Planning, said via email.

Former Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy, who headed county government from 2004 to 2011 when more than a half-billion dollars was spent on open space buys, defended the program, but acknowledged there were some abuses and land that should have never been purchased.

“Overall it was a good program that we’re better off for having had, but without question there were some clunkers along the way,” said Levy, founder of Common Sense Strategies, a business consulting firm. “There were cases where the county was buying land from fire departments and schools simply because those other entities were going to sell it off and someone was going to develop it. So legislators would shoot in and say, ‘I’ll save the day and prevent anything from being built there.’ It didn’t mean that it was environmentally significant; it just meant that a legislator wanted to assuage a complaint from a local neighbor.”

Parsons, however, says the purchase of open space is vital to squash development and helps to keep Long Island’s population growth in check.

“You’re probably going to have some examples of where the programs didn’t work, or are not working perfectly and it’s good that you point them out,” Parsons said. “I think they should be

pointed out. But overall I think it’s a great public investment.”

Political movement

Cliff Sondock, president of the Land Use Institute and a principal in Spiegel Associates, a Jericho-based real estate development firm, said open space programs are spurred by a “political movement” to stop development.

“Open space preservation sounds very environmentally altruistic, but often the only ones that benefit are the homeowners next door,” Sondock said.

“The real crime is it’s done with good intent, but it has very harmful consequences. It’s anti-growth and anti-change.”

More than a dozen years ago, Sondock’s firm had applied to the Town of Brookhaven to build 144 single-family homes in Coram, as the previous zoning had allowed. The homes would have been clustered and the town would have ended up with 70 acres of open space. Instead, the county paid $14.5 million for the company’s 163 acres and it remains undeveloped.

Several Long Island developers have used clustering to provide open space to the public at no cost to taxpayers.

“The beauty of that is by clustering and allowing height and density in sewered areas, it will give you the yield that you need,” Ryan said. “It allows you to continue to create the jobs and it gives you the rate-ables for the tax base.”

Levy said clustering should have been used more, but environmental “extremists” fought many of those projects and legislators didn’t want to risk being branded as anti-environment.

“The majority of the environmental advocates are really wonderful people who have done a magnificent job for Suffolk County, but you have one or two extremists who have really misled the public and they put the fear of God into legislators and too many cow-towed to them,” Levy said. “Some of these guys are political terrorists, major bomb throwers. And they just flat out lied. They mislead the public as to the conditions in their area and disturb the balance you need between economy and protection.”

Trumped-up trickle-down?

While critics of publicly funded open space acquisitions cite their under-utilization and inaccessibility, preservationists say the biggest reason for preventing development is to protect the Island’s drinking water. In fact, the quarter-cent sales tax, which paid for many of the land buys, is officially known as the Drinking Water Protection Program.

Richard Amper, one of the area’s foremost open space advocates, said referendums on continuing the drinking water tax have been overwhelmingly approved by voters.

“The public supports land preservation mostly to protect water quality, not for new parks or recreation,” Amper said. “It’s the water they’re investing in.”

The main goal of the billions spent on open space programs, Amper says, is to rein in development.

“We should have spent more protecting land because there are immeasurable problems that come from overdevelopment,” he said. “Developers are perfectly entitled to develop, but government let them go too far and Long Islanders are paying for it, both environmentally and economically.”

Enacted in 1993, the Pine Barrens Act prevented development on more than 54,000 acres in Brookhaven, Southampton and Riverhead, most of which has already been bought by the county and towns. Amper said fewer than 1,000 acres of the Pine Barrens core preservation area remains in private hands and more needs to be purchased by the government.

Randall Parsons of The Nature Conservancy argues that buying open space to prevent development keeps property taxes low, because it reduces the demand for public services, while protecting the Island’s sole-source aquifer water supply.

“Open space recharges clean groundwater and drinking water and that water ends up in the bays and harbors through underground migration or runoff,” Parsons said. “So open space also helps to keep the harbors and the bays clean and it helps to keep the groundwater and drinking water clean.”

H2M engineer Paul Ponturo says Long Island was late to the party in realizing the connection of development to water quality, which has encouraged and accelerated the county’s open space acquisition campaign in the last 30 years.

“The issue is the quality of water being recharged. Land use impacts that quality,” Ponturo said. “Long Island officials did not develop a metric to understand land-use impacts until the 1970s and 1980s.”

But Ponturo also acknowledges that deep groundwater recharge areas are primarily located in the center of the Island, while a good chunk of the open space purchased by the county is located further east. In the last 15 years, there have been more than 10,000 acres of open space and farm development rights bought on the East End, while land and development rights buys in Brookhaven and the county’s four western towns totaled around 4,200 acres.

For those opposed to sterilizing so much land, the water quality protection excuse just doesn’t fly.

“Lee Koppelman made it very clear years ago,” said Desmond Ryan, an advocate for developers. “If you’re going to acquire open space to protect the aquifer, you have to do it in 100-acre bites, not these little nibbles that have been going on all over the place.”

And if water quality is the main objective, many ask why more of the billions spent on buying open space wasn’t used to build sewers.

Preservationists say it’s cheaper to protect the land and the water by stopping development than to build and maintain sewers, and there’s the quality of life to consider.

“If you’re just going to say we can be New York City all the way out Long Island, we can have very high population density and we’ll just treat the effluent, what happens to the economy for resorts and what happens to the fishing industry and what happens to the farms?” Parsons said. “So I don’t think it’s an either-or. I do think that the open space and farmland programs have been essential to Suffolk’s economy and to its quality of life. I do think there are some areas that need sewers where the development was unwise at the time and didn’t get adequate review, but we need both.”

When the county attempted to use some $30 million from its drinking water protection program for sewer projects, the Pine Barrens Society sued and in 2014 the state appellate court ruled against Suffolk using the funds. The Pine Barrens Society has gone back to court to force the county to return the money.

Meanwhile, Steve Levy, the former county executive, maintains that environmental zealots oversold what buying open space would do to protect groundwater.

“That’s especially disconcerting today when we see present county officials calling for a tax on your water bill to the tune of hundreds of dollars a year to preserve groundwater, when we’ve already put in more than a billion dollars to do this,” Levy said.

The tariff Levy’s referring to is being pitched by current Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone and would force county households to pay an additional $1 per every 1,000 gallons of water used in the hopes of raising an estimated $75 million a year toward upgrading septic systems.

Over the last few months, LIBN visited several parcels that were bought for open space and water protection and found many used as dumping areas for yard waste and other trash.

At one of those, known as the Overton Preserve in Coram, the Town of Brookhaven paid $8.8 million in 2007 to protect an 81-acre parcel as open space. However LIBN found that the town had been leasing the land to a paintball company that used it as an obstacle-filled battlefield for several years.

Ponturo said that keeping these properties adequately secured from misuse and illegal dumping is one of the major management challenges when it comes to open space purchases.

“It would be desirable for the government to be a little more honest to make it clearer as to what the benefits are to water quality acquisitions,” he said.