East Hampton Town wants to buy 38.3 acres of the Wainscott Commercial Center, the 70.5-acre former sand mine at 104 Wainscott Northwest Road, just north of the 7-Eleven gas station in Wainscott, and it's willing to spend over $36 million to do it.
More than 80 percent of the property – 33.3 acres – will go to parks and recreation and open space purposes, with five acres set aside for “municipal purposes,” according to a public hearing notice the town board is expected to vote on Thursday night.
The public hearing on the potential acquisition will be scheduled for Oct. 15 at 6 p.m. To complete the purchase, the town’s management and stewardship plan for community preservation fund properties will also need to be amended.
To get to the $36.3 million, which represents the second largest dollar amount the town will have spent on a parcel (it dropped $56 million for 30 acres on Wainscott’s Main Street in late 2024), the town is set to use mixture of community preservation funds (86.95 percent) for the open space portion and bonds (13.05 percent) for the five-acre municipal portion.
The documents specifying this were signed Wednesday afternoon.
Plans for the parcel have been controversial in the past. Its location – at the heart of Wainscott’s commercial area north of Montauk Highway, just a couple hundred feet from the headwaters of Georgica Pond, and at the gateway to East Hampton Town – means many eyes and interests will be focused on future plans for its development.
John Tintle, who controls the property through his Wainscott Hamlet Center L.L.C. and Wainscott Commercial Center L.L.C., is holding two parcels that border the train tracks on the north end of the property.
It took years for the property to work its way through the town’s boards with a plan called the Wainscott Commercial Center, the largest commercial subdivision ever to come before the planning board, that would have seen the parcel divided into 50 commercial-industrial lots, each about an acre.
In 2023, the public panned the project at a hearing that lasted eight hours and had to be broken into two parts.
A 2019 East Hampton Town hamlet report on Wainscott, first commissioned in 2016, is sure to be exhumed and discussed at length as plans crystallize for the former sand pit.
At the time, community suggestions for redevelopment of the parcel included a shared parking lot, modest affordable housing development, green space for passive enjoyment, active recreation, a home improvement business area, a solar farm, an electric car charging station, a bus stop for the Hampton Jitney, and a future Wainscott train station.
“As one of the largest remaining tracts of land in East Hampton, the magnitude of potential environmental impacts stemming from redevelopment of the site is significant,” read the hamlet report. “At a minimum, the preparation of a detailed environmental impact statement will be required as a prerequisite for approval of a reuse or master plan. This should address physical changes to the land, impairments to Georgica Pond, impacts to on-site surface water and groundwater resources, impacts to drainage patterns and surface water runoff, impacts on air (during earthmoving and construction), and impacts on fish and wildlife habitats within the watershed.”
