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Sag Harbor Express / Editorials / 2118957

A Smart Move

Editorial Board on Mar 21, 2023

Last week, the Sag Harbor School District announced that it would move forward with plans to purchase five parcels on Marsden Street on its own, without the financial support — and ensuing complications — of Southampton Town’s Community Preservation Fund.

It’s a smart move and, frankly, the direction the school district probably should have headed from the beginning.

Purchasing the Marsden Street properties will cost $9.3 million. The district would have to seek approval for borrowing $6 million in a bond referendum; the balance already was approved by district voters in November 2022 and is available in a reserve account.

The school district had initially hoped that $6 million would be covered by the town through its CPF, a dedicated fund for preservation of historic properties, open space and recreational facilities. While it would have been a precedent-setting use of CPF monies — the fund has never been used for a purchase for an individual school district — that financial support, understandably, would come with several caveats. And with opposition already mounting against proposed plans for athletic facilities on the parcels, town officials appeared to be wavering in their support.

Perhaps most critical, if the district had moved forward with the town, it would have been forced to build athletic facilities that do not truly meet its needs, according to administrators, parents and even student athletes.

The Sag Harbor School District has relied on the use of fields at the privately managed Mashashimuet Park for as long as anyone can remember. It had initially been in talks with the park board about bonding to upgrade facilities there before those plans were scrapped when the Marsden plan came to light. One of the biggest complaints by some parents and athletes was that without an artificial turf field, some programs, like field hockey, did not have comparable facilities to neighboring school districts. There is no artificial turf field at Mashashimuet Park, nor, the park board made clear, is one welcome there.

At Mashashimuet Park, the natural turf fields are regulated — meaning that the park does not allow just anyone to use those facilities, particularly during school sports seasons. If the town had helped the district buy the Marsden Street properties, just like the Mashashimuet Park board, it was unwilling to allow an artificial turf field to be built. On top of that, it would have required that those fields at Marsden Street be open to the public when the school wasn’t using them. The result, most likely, would have been worn-out fields not appropriate for varsity play, defeating many of the reasons behind this development.

While there were last-minute talks about using the town’s CPF to instead create a passive park on Marsden Street and instead buy development rights at Mashashimuet Park to upgrade facilities, that plan also is fraught with challenges. First and foremost, it is hard to understand what development rights are being purchased on property that has been dedicated as parkland since its founding and is managed, as previously noted, privately, by a board that is not publicly elected. When it comes to buying development rights at Mashashimuet Park, this feels like a real stretch by the Town Board.

There is no doubt value in the Sag Harbor School District expanding its footprint at Pierson Middle-High School, and the Marsden properties being on the market offer an unprecedented opportunity that cannot be ignored. It will now be incumbent on the administration and School Board to craft a proposal that the entire school district is willing to come out and vote to support. Which was the right way to do it all along.

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