Change With the Times

The innovative Community Preservation Fund began collecting revenue to preserve land in the five East End towns in 1999. It was a very different time: DVD players were just starting to overtake VHS tapes. Napster downloads were challenging the music business. PayPal, in its original form, was voted one of the 10 worst business ideas of the year. The big technological concern was the Y2K bug.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates wrote a book that year, “Business @ the Speed of Thought,” predicting, among other things, social media, smartphones and the online economy. It all came to pass very quickly — along with streaming video and music services, which now make all of the concerns of 1999 seem very distant.

The world changes at a breathtaking pace. It would be folly to set today’s priorities based on the state of play a quarter century ago. Solutions must evolve, as the problems certainly do.

Today, as the CPF closes in on $2 billion in revenue collected, an important conversation is beginning: Should the fund’s priority begin to swing, away from land preservation and toward water preservation?

In his state of the town address, East Hampton Town Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc noted that, in his town, the number of available properties for CPF purchases are dwindling. “But the need for water quality improvement is growing, if anything,” he said, suggesting that a transition in that direction might be inevitable in the coming decades. The CPF, as currently established, won’t sunset till 2050.

State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. has said he plans to ask a review committee to look at how the fund can and should be used in its second 25 years. Moving more of the money toward water quality projects is an option, though towns would have to demonstrate a need for more than the current 20 percent available for such spending, and convince voters to support the change.

It’s a significant development, and a bold undertaking. There’s no question that the CPF has been an unqualified success in its “community preservation” goal of protecting the East End from development pressures that threatened to overwhelm it. Without the CPF, the region would look very different in 2023, and it would be easy to rest on those laurels, let the revenue continue to flow in, helping to pay for previous purchases and occasionally spending a bit here and there on high-priced purchases with dwindling impact.

In reality, it’s time for a closer look. East Hampton, more than most of its neighbors, has a shrinking number of potential purchases to consider — Southampton, for example, still has plenty of farmland and open space that can be locked up. But it’s fair to say that, since 1999, the nature of “community preservation” is beginning to evolve, and while it’s crucial not to undo all the good that has been accomplished, there is a debate brewing — nationally, statewide and locally — about whether the pendulum needs to swing slightly toward more housing, affordable workforce housing, to keep the region’s economy healthy.

At the same time, there’s no question: Water quality has become a crisis. It has decimated the shellfishing industry, and the absence of progress on cleaning up the tapestry of failing septic systems flooding pollution into both groundwater and surface waters guarantees another generation of poisons wreaking havoc.

It’s testimony to just how quickly priorities change to note that, while Thiele and others were astute to view the CPF as a potential solution, when voters agreed to allow towns to devote 20 percent of revenue toward water quality projects in a 2016 referendum, it wasn’t a unanimous notion. Many were wary of tinkering with a CPF program that had done so much good and preserved so much land. Today, with the benefit of hindsight, it seems not only necessary but too frugal.

Which is what leads to the discussion now taking place. As land values remain at all-time highs, the CPF will need healthy balances in the five towns to fund new purchases, even while paying for earlier acquisitions over time. But is land preservation still the best use of that money? Would helping to fund community sewer systems — as was recently done in Westhampton Beach — and pouring money into upgrading homeowners’ septic tanks and cesspools to cleaner I/A systems do more for “community preservation” in 2023 and beyond?

Asking the question is the important first step. The world is changing fast — so much of what seemed new in 1999 is now old technology, old thinking. It’s important that our solutions change with the times, too.