Fire Station Coming To Northwest Woods In East Hampton

Residents of the Northwest Woods section of East Hampton most likely can expect some relief from oppressive homeowner’s insurance bills now that the East Hampton Fire Department is preparing to construct a new substation off Stephen Hands Path, near the intersection with Old Northwest Road.

East Hampton Village and the Town Board are negotiating a lease of 0.6 acre of town-owned property between Old Northwest Road and Bull Path for the village-owned fire department to construct a 3,800-square-foot, one-story fire truck and ambulance garage.

The village submitted plans for the fire substation to the East Hampton Town Planning Board last week and hopes to have the new firehouse open by early next year.

The new firehouse would have four bays for vehicles and a small office with a bathroom but would not have any permanent staff on site, Village Administrator Becky Molinaro said this week. The cost of construction is estimated to be around $1.3 million.

Residents of parts of northernmost Northwest Woods have long been burdened with extremely high homeowner’s insurance premiums—as much as $10,000 a year in some cases—or can’t get it at all, simply because there is no firehouse within five miles of their homes.

“There are a number of homes in the Northwest Fire Protection District that have difficulty obtaining homeowner’s insurance, or pay very high premiums because they don’t live close enough to a firehouse,” Ms. Molinaro said. “To help those homeowners out, the village and town have been trying to provide a substation there for a long time.”

The town and village have been in negotiations to construct the East Hampton Fire Department substation on the 16-acre Bull Path property, a former town dumping site, for many years. “This has been going on for a long, long time, but we’re going to get it done now,” Town Supervisor Larry Cantwell said on Monday. “It’s something that is just very badly needed out there.”

Ms. Molinaro said that while the plans are finally going forward, the two municipalities still have not settled on a fee for the lease of the property.

The town had also issued approvals for some 5,700 solar energy panels to be constructed on about 7 acres of the Bull Path property, along with another 3,000 on the south-facing slopes of the former landfill pile at the town transfer station on Springs-Fireplace Road. But the company that was approved to construct the panels, SunEdison, went bankrupt and has yet to resurrect the plans that LIPA had advanced as among the first steps in a push for more renewable energy.

The village recently received approvals from the State Department of Environmental Conservation, after a year of review of the proposal, and the Suffolk County Department of Health to construct the station on the property. The layout and design of the building, which sketches in the application show to be little more than a metal-sided barn with four vehicle bays, will have to be approved by the Town Planning Board and Architectural Review Board.

East Hampton Town pays the village some $2.5 million a year for the East Hampton Fire District to cover the areas of the town on the fringes of the village and out into the far-flung neighborhoods of Northwest and northern Wainscott.