East Hampton Buys The Rights To Farm For Food Only

East Hampton Town officials have proposed the first use of Community Preservation Fund revenues to purchase the “rights” to a variety of uses beyond just residential development off a parcel of Wainscott farmland—a move that will legally bind the property to food production in perpetuity.

The town has reached an agreement with Wainscott farmer Peter Dankowski to pay $4 million to purchase all of the remaining legal uses of his 29.5 acres of farmland in southern Wainscott other than growing row-crop produce.

The proposed deal will be the subject of a public hearing before the Town Board on Thursday, July 20.

The deal is the first time East Hampton will use CPF money to ensure that a property already preserved from residential development is forever used only as a food-producing farm.

“What we’ve learned over the years is that the development rights acquisition program, which was a terrific success by and large, left a lot of rights on the table, and, unfortunately … we’ve seen a lot of prime agricultural soils go fallow or be used for other purposes, like lawns and other things, or in some cases overdeveloped with buildings and tree farms and nurseries and a host of other uses,” Supervisor Larry Cantwell said.

“When the farmland preservation program was first discussed, and people voted for it overwhelmingly, more than once … people assumed that when the development rights were purchased that they were going to be farms forever—and that’s not what’s happened in many cases.

“We’re buying all the rights to that property, except the right to use it for food crops,” the supervisor continued. “Two acres could be used for flowers—that’s it. There could be no new buildings built on it, which is currently allowed.”

Henry and Paul Dankowski had sold the development rights to the property in 1980, for about $17,000 an acre.

For decades, the county and East End townships have been purchasing development rights on thousands of acres of farmlands and woodlands. But even with the housing development rights removed, many of the properties ended up being developed as horse farms—an accepted agricultural use—with cavernous barns built as accessory structures, or fields converted to lawns to expand the holdings of a neighboring estate.

In 2012, television personality Matt Lauer constructed a horse farm on 40 acres of Water Mill land that Southampton Town had paid $3.6 million to “preserve” from development in 2006. The farm, off Deerfield Road, boasts more than 50,000 square feet of buildings.

The demand driven by horse farms and wealthy neighbors’ lust for open vistas has driven the price of preserved land to as much as $300,000 an acre.

Southampton Town began using the so-called “enhanced rights” approach to farmland preservation in 2015 at the urging of the Peconic Land Trust, and has used it to purchase additional rights off of more than a dozen parcels of farmland in the last few years. The package of rights and covenants Southampton uses typically drive the value of the land down to just $25,000 an acre—a price affordable to other farmers who are looking to start their own farm or expand the space they have to grow crops.

East Hampton Town, at the urging of its own farmer-led Agricultural Advisory Committee, has yet to adopt a formal approach to land preservation that seeks to preserve farmland only for food crops. But town officials said last week that Mr. Dankowski came to them with the deal.

“That family has farmed row crops on that property for generations,” Councilman Peter Van Scoyoc said at a meeting of the Town Board on Thursday, July 6. “He wants to ensure that the property is maintained and used in the way the family maintained it and used it.”

The deal drew some criticism from Ilissa Meyer for excluding equine uses, which were declared by a court in the late 1990s to be an agricultural use legal on “preserved” land. But board members said that the deal was not a broad codifying of the enhanced rights purchases. All purchases using CPF money are 100-percent voluntary for the landowners, who may choose what rights to sell and not to sell as they see fit.

“This is a farmer who wanted to sell those rights to the town,” Mr. Cantwell said. “Every property will be different in the future.”