The Sag Harbor School Board should thank its lucky stars for the outcome of the November 3 vote, which paves the way for the purchase of five lots on Marsden Street, across from Pierson Middle-High School, considering how the district badly mishandled what could have been an easy sell.
Instead, the district has sown suspicion of and even hostility toward a project with the potential to benefit the school’s students, and the community around them. And they still have to go back to what might be a poisoned well.
The local real estate market doesn’t reward hesitation, so it’s defensible that the district needed to move quickly to get voter approval for a plan to use around $3.3 million in capital funds, already in hand. Southampton Town is willing to consider pitching in $6 million in Community Preservation Fund revenue. That would lock down 5 acres of space for a much needed athletic field complex — in every way an improvement on the current situation for the school’s sports programs.
If CPF money is used, it means the first hybrid facility between the town and a school district, creating space that could be both a point of pride for the school and a recreational option, not just for the neighborhood around the school but for Southampton Town residents.
The vote result, 638-521, is hardly a mandate — instead, it shows just how deeply divided Sag Harbor is over this project. Why, if it’s such a good idea, such a good bargain to boot? Because district officials clearly envision the space to be used for an artificial turf field, and that’s not a project that has the community’s full support. Not long ago, nine out of 10 voters rejected a similar idea on school property.
So instead of addressing that up front, school officials tried very hard to divert the conversation, to push the purchase through over objections, to drag it over the finish line. Which they did. But those questions have not gone away.
To be fair, the school district can justify its focus on pushing simply to get the properties purchased first, then turn the conversation to what goes there. Rare is the chance for a school to add neighboring lots to its campus, and the conversation about what comes next is still in the future, a debate still to be had.
Still, sidestepping the hard questions just makes them loom larger now. And the questions are legitimate, and they really must be answered before any project moves forward at the site.
The school district has to address parents’ concerns about whether an artificial turf field really is in the student-athletes’ best interests, no matter that the athletes themselves seem passionately in favor.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission has found no dangers for children playing on artificial turf; the Environmental Protection Agency’s preliminary conclusion agrees, though the EPA is in the midst of a wider study. The nagging concern is the use of PFAS chemicals, a “contaminant of emerging concern,” according to the EPA, in the manufacture of the backing, the blades of artificial grass and the crumbs used to simulate a natural surface. Even when the crumbs are something more natural, like cork, plastic remains the primary component of a field.
Even if playing on the surface is safe for kids, there is the added question, especially at this site, about the effects of runoff and the potential for “forever chemicals” to get into the water supply. It may well be that the actual risk is benign, or that it can easily be mitigated. That will be something school district officials must prove, to the satisfaction of parents and property owners.
Finally, there are questions for Southampton Town to answer. This would be yet another contortion of the CPF’s mandate: buying land on which to build a purely synthetic “field,” for use by a school district. Creating new recreational spaces is part of the CPF’s goal. But is this a new precedent? And where do school facilities fall in the list of priorities for CPF purchases moving forward? Should town taxpayers really shoulder some two-thirds of the acquisition costs for a district’s new athletic facility?
The push for the successful November 3 vote has made all these questions essential to resolve, and quickly. This time the school district must take time to raise everyone’s comfort level, not just enough votes to sign a sales contract. That could be tougher now, precisely because of the push so far.
