An attorney for a group opposed to a renewed lease for the Maidstone Gun Club in Wainscott, which has been closed since the imposition of a temporary restraining order in November 2022, asserted that East Hampton Town has executed that lease with the club while the town attorney said Tuesday that is not the case but that the parties remain in active negotiations.
The gun club’s former, 30-year lease, for which it paid the town $100 per year for 97 acres of parkland adjacent to East Hampton Airport, expired in October 2023. The club had previously exercised an option to renew the lease for an additional term. But on several occasions over the last 20-plus years, multiple Merchants Path property owners reported finding bullets lodged in their houses. Several of them sued the club and the town, demanding the club be closed, and a judge granted a temporary restraining order barring the use of all the club’s facilities until further notice.
A September 2025 stipulation of settlement between the club and seven Wainscott property owners who had successfully sought a temporary restraining order outlined terms under which the club could reopen. The document, however, was not signed by New York State Supreme Court Justice Christopher Modelewski, and the status of a settlement between the parties remains undetermined.
In an April 15 letter to Supervisor Kathee Burke-Gonzalez, William Demarest III of the Rupp Pfalzgraf firm, on behalf of a group of Wainscott residents named Citizens for Proper Use of Public Land, wrote that “we understand from correspondence between the Town of East Hampton and the Federal Aviation Administration that the town has been negotiating a renewed lease with the Maidstone Gun Club.” Further, he wrote, “our client has heard statements from the Gun Club that it has already executed a proposed lease.”
The letter notes that New York General Municipal Law requires a public hearing before the town can execute a lease. Moreover, “the renewal of the lease is subject to the town determining that the land is surplus land not needed for other municipal use.”
A renewed lease would represent a “terrible, criminal misuse of land,” Barry Raebeck of Citizens for Proper Use of Public Land and a member of the Wainscott Citizens Advisory Committee said last week. “Now they want to start again with a nominal fee” as part of a renewed lease, he said, “when we can’t even find a place for affordable housing. How about a solar farm, instead of hitting people with bullets?”
While several houses have been struck by bullets, no people have been injured by guns allegedly fired from the club. Some of the club’s proponents assert that any bullets that hit houses must have come from people shooting illegally in the woods surrounding the airport property, but the Police Department concluded in an investigation made public in January 2023 that bullets had in fact been deflected from the club’s outdoor rifle range and passed through barricades intended to stop them.
The club has proposed additional safety protocols to be included in any lease extension. Jacob Turner, the town attorney, said in an August 2025 statement to The Star that the town board had negotiated “important provisions” in connection with a lease renewal, including the permanent closure of its rifle range and a requirement that the club will “regularly reclaim lead and also remediate lead” when required by the State Department of Environmental Conservation or federal Environmental Protection Agency.
Primary among Citizens for Proper Use of Public Land’s concerns, Mr. Demarest wrote to the supervisor, “is the safety of continuing these shooting ranges in proximity to current and new residential development.” Additional concerns include “the alienation or misuse of public lands, the impact of the gun club on potential development of additional residential housing for the town, environmental contamination associated with a shooting range in the Water Recharge Overlay District, and failure to obtain full fair market value or potential violation of other F.A.A. requirements.”
On the latter point, the letter continues, “we understand that the F.A.A. has determined that the lease must comply with the F.A.A.’s fair market value policy requirements.” Citizens for Proper Use of Public Land is concerned, Mr. Demarest wrote, “by the town’s continued arguments to the F.A.A. for a community purpose exception” to the fair market value requirement “despite the fact that the gun club is clearly a private entity that prohibits use by the general public and lacks a clear community-focused beneficial purpose.”
“Their solution,” Mr. Raebeck said of the club and the town at the Wainscott Citizens Advisory Committee’s April 11 virtual meeting, “is to close one range and leave open three others that all aim in the same direction. . . . It’s really kind of bizarre.” The club is not secure, he said, further complaining about a renewed lease that he called “completely under fair market value.”
Neither Walter Johnson, president of the gun club, nor Frederick Johs, an attorney representing the club, responded to calls seeking comment.
“We have not remotely dropped this issue,” Mr. Raebeck told the citizens advisory committee, “and we will be contesting it as fully as possible.”
