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East Hampton Town has unveiled its lease proposal for a Pantigo Road parcel that would be the home of a new emergency room facility run by Stony Brook Southampton Hospital and Stony Brook University Hospital.
The town would lease 4.5 acres it owns at 400 Pantigo Place in East Hampton, currently home to two baseball fields used by local Little Leagues, to the Southampton Hospital Association for 50 years with an option for the association to extend the lease up to 99 years.
The lease agreement will charge the association just $20 a year for the land, according to town officials, but the association will be asked to pay some $1.5 million for the construction of new Little League ball fields at another location.
The lease proposal will be the subject of a public hearing on January 18 at Town Hall.
“The board is very proud of this,” Supervisor Larry Cantwell said on December 21. “To me, the opportunity to have Southampton Hospital establish a 24-hour-a-day, 365-day-a-year emergency room facility that is fully equipped and staffed would be one of the most important things that could be done in this community in terms of furthering emergency medical care. I hope the public will come out and support it.”
Hospital management has said that constructing the planned 54,000-square-foot emergency room is expected to cost between $35 million and $45 million. Stony Brook Southampton Hospital has already received a $10 million grant from New York State toward creating the facility, but most of the rest of the funding is expected to have to come from private donations.
Stony Brook Southampton Hospital Chief Administrative Officer Robert Chaloner, who lives in East Hampton, told the Town Board earlier this year that the hospital sees about 17,000 visits per year by East Hampton Town residents.
Building the facility at Pantigo Road would cut the travel time of an ambulance from Montauk from 58 minutes to 26 minutes.
27east on Dec 27, 2017