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Matt Parsons
Matt Parsons is a marine biologist and enthusiastic bayman who is running for Southampton Town Trustee on the Democratic Party line to be a part of “managing these 26,000 acres that are absolutely priceless,” referring to the bottomlands under the Trustees’ stewardship.
The East Quogue resident runs a business where he builds coral-reef habitats for aquariums and describes himself as a 10-month bayman — “It’s just so danged cold in January and February” — who graduated from New York University and met his wife while scuba diving at the Ponquogue Bridge.
If elected, Parsons said he’d focus his efforts on ramping up the population of filter feeders in local bays, oysters especially, and would love to see a shell-recycling program kick off in the Town of Southampton. He’s also focused on working to encourage the development of new bulkheading panels that could be hung outside of the new “state of the art vinyl bulkheading” that would be a sort of environmental panel that would attract barnacles and oysters by providing habitat between the high and low water marks.
“We could be doing so much more for the bays — there’s so much opportunity that we’re missing,” Parsons said. He’s looking forward, if elected, to working with the Town Board on shared interests and says of the strained relations between the respective boards, “it seems like we could have smoother sailing moving forward in January.”
Parsons was hounding his dad at an early age to take him fishing and clamming in Moriches Bay and as a college student worked with the Cornell Cooperative Extension on eelgrass restoration projects in local waters. He worked at the National Marine Fisheries Service for about 10 years, through 2015, at the federal regulator’s commercial fisheries observation program, working on boats from Maine to Virginia.
“That’s where my life was supposed to go — the sea was calling me and I went,” he said.
He started scalloping locally around 2009 and recalled 2017 as “the last good year” for pursuing the bivalves. There’s no scallop fishery this year, but Parson says he keeps tabs on choice scalloping grounds he had previously dialed in.
He speaks in almost reverential tone about his life as a bayman and connection to the sea.
“This is where my soul is,” he said. “There are amazing secrets revealed the more time you spend out there — it’s magic.”
