Woman Finds That Land She’s Owned In The Pine Barrens Since 1986 May Not Be Hers After All

For 35 years, Addie Mattei has been paying taxes on 1.1 acres that she owns in the Pine Barrens in Westhampton — or, at least, she thought she owned it. The land may actually have another owner, who may or may not have a better claim to it, and clearing up the matter could potentially cost more in legal fees than the property is worth.

On a county tax map, Ms. Mattei’s property is on the west side of Humbert Street and between Juliet Street to the north and Geneva Street to the south, but these streets, drafted more than a century ago, only exist on paper in a subdivision identified as Clover Tract. What created a problem for the Lake Grove resident is that a second map, cutting up the same land a different way, conflicts with the Clover Tract subdivision, meaning someone else could claim ownership.

The county map notes, “Parcels on this sheet overlap other parcels,” something that was only brought to Ms. Mattei’s attention in 2019, when she offered to sell the land to developer and attorney Joe Gazza.

“Your land is double assessed, i.e. two people are paying taxes and claiming ownership of the same land,” Mr. Gazza wrote to Ms. Mattei, adding that he confirmed as much with the Suffolk County Real Property Tax Service Agency.

“Who has the better title (ownership) I don’t know,” his letter continued. “It will take a court action to find out and that costs more than the land is worth.”

Ms. Mattei, now 82 years old, said she has reached out to government officials on the town, county and federal level in search of a resolution — to no avail.

“I really thought I had something of value, and I am very upset,” she said. “If nothing else, why shouldn’t I get taxes paid back with interest?”

She related that her late husband, home builder Julius Mattei, was battling cancer when he transferred ownership of the property to her in 1986, and he died in 1990. She is not sure how long he owned the property before putting it under her name, but said it was a minimum of 10 years.

The parcel is classified as a “scrub property” and is in the Central Pine Barrens Core Preservation Area, so it can never be developed. However, under Southampton Town’s Transfer of Development Rights program established in 1979, it has some value to a developer. Attached to the land is at least a fraction of a Pine Barrens credit, which a developer can use to build with greater density elsewhere in exchange for preserving the land for perpetuity.

In 2008, Ms. Mattei came close to selling it. The prospective buyer gave her $500 upon signing a contract agreeing to a purchase price of $60,000, contingent on there being a clear title to the property and a transfer of “1.1 Southampton Pine Barrens Credits” that could be applied elsewhere in the Riverhead School District.

But then Ms. Mattei never heard from the buyer again. “He disappeared,” she said.

She didn’t pursue selling it again until 2019, when she reached out to Mr. Gazza, who she had been told might be interested in buying in the Pine Barrens.

Since somebody appeared willing to pay $60,000 at one point, she thought it would be worth more now, especially considering the state of the Hamptons real estate market, she said.

Learning that it may be worth much less, and that it is impossible to sell it without a clear title, were significant disappointments.

“Why am I going to go seek an attorney if I’m going to be throwing, you know, good money after bad?” Ms. Mattei said.

In an interview, Mr. Gazza said going to court to determine the best owner of the land will cost $10,000 just to walk in the door, while an acre in the Pine Barrens is worth about $4,000.

“You’re not going to spend $10,000 figuring out whether your land is worth $4,000 or nothing,” he said.

Mr. Gazza said the Pine Barrens is a vast expanse of land that was predominately chopped up between 1905 and 1915. “A lot of that land was practically worthless, and it was bought up by New York City developers,” he explained. Those developers created “T-square maps,” drafting streets, lots and blocks, he said.

“They sold these lots to people all over the United States, and they sold them at a time when the real estate market was hot,” he said. “Like it’s hot in Southampton now, well, it was hot in 1910.”

But people eventually found out that the lots were inaccessible, in the middle of the woods, and couldn’t be developed, he continued. When the Depression hit in 1930 and people fell on hard times, the owners stopped paying the taxes and the county seized most of the lots.

“In the early 1960s, the County of Suffolk started selling these lots at tax lien sales, and people started buying them again,” Mr. Gazza said. “The cycle started all over again.”

Some of the buyers stopped paying taxes and lost them to the county, and others sold to people like himself who wanted the development rights, he said.

“But there were some maps that were not good maps, and the developer might have drawn a map on top of a map,” he said. “… They are called double-assessed maps.”

Mr. Gazza said Clover Tract, south of Sunrise Highway and north of Gabreski Airport, is landlocked in the middle of the Pine Barrens forest with no roads or utilities, and “one of those areas where there’s a dispute as to who owns the land underneath the map.”

The Suffolk County Real Property Tax Service Agency has gotten better at identifying potentially overlapping subdivisions and problematic maps, but does not make a decision over who the real owner is, he said. That would be work for a surveyor or title company.

“The sad part about this whole thing is that the county knows about these double assessments, and they let it continue, because they collect taxes from two different people on the same land,” Mr. Gazza said. “And it just adds to the tax revenue, and they just keep getting tax money, and it’s not right but that’s the way the county works. That’s government.”

Lisa Goree, the Southampton Town assessor, said last week that while this issue has arisen in the past, it is not prevalent and she can’t remember a case in the last five years. When it has come up, and if her office discovers that land is, in fact, being double assessed, the taxes will be canceled on the parcel that overlays preexisting parcels, she explained, and that way the owner can get a refund of overpayment of taxes.

Ms. Goree said she has asked her mapper to confirm whether the land is in an overlay.

“New York State, we’re ‘first in time, first in right,’” said Suffolk County Comptroller John Kennedy last month. “Back in the bad old days, there were land barons that would sell the same piece of property multiple times and if the second purchaser got to the county clerk and recorded the deed first, then presumably that was true owner.”

He also pointed to another scenario: “The only way to file a new subdivision when you have property that’s previously been subdivided is to abandon that prior map,” he said, and if the abandonment was not done right, then there can be multiple maps. “But multiple maps doesn’t necessarily equate to multiple owners,” he added.

He suggested that a remedy may have to come through legislation, possibly at the Southampton Town Board level or at the State Legislature.

“It’s elemental,” he said. “A piece of dirt can only generate one assessment.”

The most recent annual tax bill that Ms. Mattei received was for only $129.98. She said that it is a nominal amount but noted that the cost is cumulative over the decades that she and her late husband paid the taxes, and it’s money that could have been invested elsewhere.