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Bideawee is poised to sell a long sliver of Pine Barrens turf to the town.
As it voted recently to accept a trail easement on 145 acres of Westhampton property now owned by Bideawee Inc., the Southampton Town Board took a big step down the conservation path to a $1.5 million purchase of prime Central Pine Barrens open space.
On August 8, the board agreed to Bideawee’s site plan, hammered out with the Planning Board, that set the final contours of the easement, which will guarantee public access to a 111-acre tract the town targeted for purchase two years ago.
The long, thin rectangle of land runs south-to-north from Old Country Road to Sunrise Highway along the eastern edge of a Bideawee campus that includes an animal adoption center, a veterinary clinic and a pet cemetery. Those facilities will remain owned by Bideawee.
Leslie Granger, the president and CEO of Bideawee, said the trail easement was designed to ensure that the public, “our longtime neighbors and visitors alike, has access to the preserved land we are selling.”
“The impending sale of this land to the Town of Southampton,” she said, “will allow for public access and for Bideawee to enhance our facilities and services.”
The sale, said Granger, will also help capitalize Bideawee’s “long-term renovation plan to reimagine Bideawee’s three campuses in Manhattan, Wantagh and Westhampton.” The “restoration, renovation, and beautification” of those campuses was a driver behind Bideawee’s decision to offload the vacant acreage in Westhampton when it put it up for sale, officially, in 2021.
Rumblings were already afoot in 2019 that Bideawee was looking to sell acreage it would eventually concede was underused, and a ripe target for preservation, given its proximate location to a stand of rare dwarf pines.
The Town Board voted in 2021 to authorize the purchase of the 111-acre plot as open space through the Community Preservation Fund.
As an added bonus, when the anticipated $1.5 million CPF purchase is finalized, the town will be refunded 28.5 development-rights credits it issued to Bideawee in exchange for an earlier pledge from the nonprofit that it would not develop the 111 acres. Those credits would now be deposited in the town’s development credit account and directed to development in the Westhampton Beach School District.
As for the animals under their care, the impending 111-acre sale, said Granger, “will not affect our Westhampton facility” or any of the services it offers. “We will continue to provide the same top-quality services for the deserving animals in our care.”
The trail easement vote popped up on the Town Board agenda in early August just as the board was voting on a suite of new animal-oriented town code additions and changes that sought to address, among other issues, a growing concern over feral cat colonies in Southampton.
A new animal welfare fund will direct fines and fees associated with animal-related code violations at Southampton Town Justice Court to a fund dedicated to spay-and-neuter programs and other outreach efforts directed mostly at feral cats and loose dogs. For its part, Bideawee has, since 2019, taken a lead role in ramping up feral-cat outreach locally and in New York City, where feral-cat colonies are referred to by Bideawee as “communities.”
