At Montauk Chamber, A New Generation Joins With The Old To Chart A Course For The Future

In 18 years as the president of the Montauk Chamber of Commerce, hotelier Paul Monte has largely broken the mold for the role, and for chambers of commerce in general, from solely business to advocating for a community.

Under his leadership, the Montauk Chamber has reached beyond the typical role of chambers as a sandbox for business owners to spitball ways to drum up business, decorate downtowns and organize occasional special events intended to attract customers. The Montauk Chamber has done those things, of course, but Monte has also led the organization into a position as a public advocate not just for Montauk’s businesses but also for the broader Montauk community.

Since early in his days as the chamber’s president in 2004, Monte, the former longtime general manager and CEO of the Gurney’s Inn, Resort and Spa in Hither Hills, has inserted himself and Montauk’s interests into the halls of town and regional government, onto committees and before boards that shrink and stretch the bubble in which Montauk businesses must operate, as political forces pushed and pull at its limits.

So as Monte, 64, looks to start dialing back his role with the chamber, identifying an heir apparent to take up the role was a particular challenge. Finding the proverbial “young blood” has been a struggle for civic organizations across every spectrum — from school boards to fire departments to Little Leagues — as “free time” has steadily been whittled away by modern life from those with young families and growing businesses.

But Montauk is perhaps uniquely positioned, in that over the last decade it has birthed a generation of young, entrepreneurial locals who have embraced — or helped create — the “new Montauk” brand that has exploded the popularity of the hamlet, transforming it from a fishing village and affordable summer vacation spot into a chic summer destination of new-money billionaires and the hippest of New York City’s well-heeled youth.

Enter, Leo Daunt.

The 29-year-old, third-generation hotel owner, who took over running his family’s 23-room downtown business two years ago — and this year shepherded it through a major upscale renovation and acquisition of the cafe across the street — has stepped into a co-president role alongside Monte this winter, and is the heir apparent to succeed him next year.

Spirited and intent on furthering the already extensive efforts of the Montauk Chamber to build shoulder-season business — Daunt’s Albatross being one of only a smattering of local hotels that remains open throughout the winter, and the young proprietor being an avowed “huge fan of Christmas” — Daunt says that he has admired Monte’s work both leading the chamber’s aggressive efforts to create new draws to Montauk’s downtown as well as in positioning the chamber as a player in town policy-making.

Daunt served on the town’s Business Recovery Committee, which was formed in the early months of the pandemic to help the Town Board steer policies that would help business weather the chaotic world of doing business in the era of social distancing. During the pandemic, the chamber pressed the town to mindfully step back on a variety of regulations, like allowing businesses to use outdoor spaces and public sidewalks liberally, and pushing the town to set up a dedicated testing site in the hamlet.

And Monte says that he sees Daunt, who grew up in his grandfather’s hotel, as having just the right understanding of where Montauk came from to be able to guide it smartly to wherever it is headed.

“One of the things that was important to me was seeing that Leo understands the importance of the past in Montauk,” Monte said during a conversation in the chamber’s offices this week. “We all want to be part of the future, but you need to know where you’ve been in order to know where you want to go.”

Daunt is quick to insist that as much as Montauk has changed in the last decade and will clearly continue changing in the decade to come, keeping the vestiges of what it has always been will be the key to maintaining its popularity and growing the business opportunities.

“We talk a lot about the authenticity of Montauk and how important that is,” Daunt said. “If we’re hiring a PR company, we need to decide how we want that company to represent Montauk. Who are we speaking to? Are we speaking just to the people that come for the Surf Lodge, or are we speaking to the families that have been coming for years, or to the fishermen?

“Brand awareness of Montauk has grown a lot, and that’s been good for business and gives us an opportunity, especially in the offseason, when we can say, ‘Hey, rates are lower and look how beautiful it is in Montauk still.’”

The explosion of Montauk’s popularity has not been without its growing pains. Midway through the last decade, the party scene got out of hand as some new business owners shed concern for their surroundings in favor of windfall profits. With the surge in popularity among the super-wealthy has come gargantuan investments in business — some eying profits, others popularity — that have been both transformative but also hamstringing.

Too many of Montauk’s new business owners have little interest in running a year-round business 120 miles from New York City. “A lot of these new investment group owners, they want to be here for three or four months, and then they shut down for the winter,” Monte lamented. “We want to get more people out here in the offseason. But there’s even less of it open than there was in the past. The mom-and-pops would stretch it out, because this was their life — they were here anyway, their kids were in school here.”

Convincing more businesses to stay open in the shoulder seasons will be a top priority for the chamber in the immediate future, Daunt said. It’s promising, both said, that some of the ventures owned by the hamlet’s youngest businesspeople have already set bar at long seasons if not year round, and have joined the chamber of commerce’s board. “We do have a good group of young businesspeople on the board now,” he said. “It’s a good mix and everyone gets along very well.”

“There’s some people that have been involved for a long time and have that institutional knowledge and the wisdom that comes with that,” Monte added, “and then some new people come in who have lots of great new ideas, and that’s necessary to keep the organization evolving and growing and staying strong.”

As the chamber president, Monte says, a key lesson he hopes to present to his successors is that he has labored to ensure that the group embraced an approach to business growth and advocacy for its members that was sensitive to the desires of the residents of the once-quiet community where residential neighborhoods and business districts often blend together and heads have butted, particularly over noise and the human detritus of raucous party scenes spilled out into backyards — sometimes literally.

“There has always been this battle on the East End of commerce versus residential interests and I have tried very hard to balance that in our approach,” Monte said this week. “We represent the business community, but we try not to be overly aggressive. We try to think of it as, how do we benefit our members and also our community, and respecting the environment, and all the things that come along with that.

“It’s important to protect people’s livelihoods but you can’t do it at the expense of the rest of the community.”