After eminent domain win, what’s next for Mattituck park project?

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has effectively upheld Southold Town’s 2020 eminent domain seizure of 1.75 acres of privately owned land in Mattituck by declining to review a lower court decision, town officials are expected to begin planning for a future park or green space there early next year.  

In the wake of the high court decision, “the town can move forward [with the] planning stage to determine whether it should be a passive parcel or a more formalized park or some other use for the public good,” town attorney Paul DeChance said in an interview this week. “I think that’s something you’ll see next year — the [town] board begin to discuss and make plans to move forward.”

In 2018, Brinkmann Hardware Corp., a family-owned business with five stores on Long Island, including VanKemenade Paint in Jamesport, purchased the property at the corner of Main Road and New Suffolk Avenue with plans to build a 20,000-square-foot hardware store and an 8,000-square-foot paint store at the site. The application came under scrutiny over environmental and traffic concerns and the project was stopped by a series of six-month development moratoriums first enacted in 2019. In September 2020, town officials voted to initiate an eminent domain proceeding against property owners Ben and Hank Brinkmann in order to preserve the site for community use.

The Supreme Court’s rejection in October of the Brinkmanns’ appeal in the case marked a major milestone in a decade-long community odyssey to protect and preserve Mattituck’s commercial district from overdevelopment, an initiative that continues today but which began almost exactly 10 years ago in Mary Eisenstein’s living room.

In the fall of 2014, Ms. Eisenstein and her husband, Mel Morris, invited friends and neighbors into their home to gauge interest in launching a new community advocacy group, a gathering that would lead to the creation the following year of the Mattituck-Laurel Civic Association.

At the heart of interest in forming the new group was the concern that Mattituck, home to the most sprawling commercial district in Southold, was becoming a ripe target for big box stores that would displace local merchants.

Of particular interest was the protection of what the community considers the “gateway” to Mattituck: the corridor between New Suffolk Avenue and Main Road on one end and Love Lane on the other.

Ms. Eisenstein, who became the Mattituck-Laurel Civic Association’s first president in 2015, was a driving force in the campaign, according to friends and civic members. 

“Every hamlet has its own unique culture and character, and people felt that Mattituck was definitely more commercialized, and that there was a need to bring a little more community character to that whole entranceway — from the Long Island Railroad trestle into the area of Love Lane and along Main Road,” Ms. Eisenstein said. “The whole intersection was the focus.”

The first thing the new civic’s founding members did was educate themselves on land use regulations and review every development and environmental study of the area they could get their hands on, according to Ms. Eisenstein. 

Then they went to work.

“We went and interviewed all the stakeholders from that whole area, from New Suffolk Avenue to Love Lane, and then brought that information to our meetings and held roundtables,” she said.

The new civic group met with North Fork Community Theatre, the North Fork Environmental Council and the Mattituck Chamber of Commerce, as well as with politicians and officials at the state, county and local levels, Ms. Eisenstein said. They were concerned that Bridgehampton National Bank, which owned the property until the Brinkmanns bought it, might sell it to another commercial developer.  

“We wanted to meet with them to talk about how we could work together to hold on to that property from being developed,” Ms. Eisenstein said.

The civic association also enlisted students from the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry to tour and study the area, and devise a plan to preserve the gateway.

“There were about 18 students and what they did as part of their coursework was to put a plan together and then met with us and the whole community to propose their ideas,” Ms. Eisenstein said.

In the fall of 2017, the civic association invited the Brinkmann family to speak with community members concerned about overdevelopment, traffic safety and quality of life issues.

“We invited them in before they even bought [the property] to tell them that we didn’t think it was a good idea,” said Susan Palmer Austin, the new civic’s first vice-president.

Ms. Eisenstein said the meeting was a pivotal one for the young organization.

“There was a galvanization. People were able to have a voice … We had protocols and procedures in place so that we would be taken seriously [and] we had a structure in place so that the group was well organized.”

The civic association members learned how to navigate the State Environmental Quality Review process, which weighs input from residents along with environmental, economic and community impacts and monitors progress as projects move through the Planning Board review process. By 2018, group members had gathered or generated enough information and documentation to organize their findings into a formal study.

A small group of local architects, Ms. Eisenstein said, “took all that information, synthesized it and put together a plan for next steps.”

In 2018, after the Brinkmanns purchased the property for $700,000, Suffolk County and Southold Town partnered to make an offer to buy the land from them and preserve it as a park. When that initiative proved unsuccessful, the eminent domain process, which included compensating the Brinkmanns for the seizure of the property, began in 2020 and ended in October.

Ms. Eisenstein was at home when she received a text about the Supreme Court’s decision, and said she felt like she could finally exhale.

“When you spend a lot of time and energy learning, informing and paying attention to what the community wanted … it was like I could take a breath, a deep breath,” she said. “Having a community be informed and educated and be able to have an outlet to give voice to what they wanted was the whole circle for me.” 

Trained as a professional facilitator, Ms. Eisenstein has decades of experience as a mediator and communications consultant, working with corporations and nonprofits.

The success and growth of the Mattituck-Laurel Civic Association led Ms. Eisenstein to develop similar coalitions throughout Southold Town, and nearly every hamlet now has its own civic group. She served as a member of the Southold Planning Board for four years after being selected by the Town Board in 2018, and helped ignite interest in the “dark sky” movement, a campaign to reduce light pollution, which led to the formation of the North Fork Dark Sky Coalition.

Not everyone agrees with the court decisions upholding the town’s right to seize the Brinkmanns’ property, and Ms. Eisenstein said she can understand that perspective.

“Property rights are steeped in the American DNA,” she said. “To ignore that would be folly.” 

But after years of studies, coursework and self-education, she learned about the “history of land use, and so I began to see the tools communities use to shape their community as equally important as property rights.”

She said that underlying all of her preservation efforts was the fear of following in the footsteps of other communities in Nassau County and even western Suffolk County by increasing density to a degree that destroys a community’s character.

“Look up-island and think about that density. People want to have open space. They want to have farmland and agriculture. They want to enjoy the beauty of nature, and that’s why people come out to the East End,” she said. 

“So both property rights and community character are equally important in the design and shaping of a community,” she said, adding, “And no one wants a duplication of what’s up-island here in Southold.”