Southampton Town Will Move To Ban Docks on Peconic Bay Shoreline

Southampton Town lawmakers threw their support behind a proposal to prohibit the construction of private docks along the shoreline of Peconic Bay, seeking to head off a proliferation of docks in an area that once would have been folly to even consider building a dock on.

There is currently only one dock along all of the town’s 12 miles of shoreline on Great Peconic and Little Peconic bays. It was built in 2024 off a Mullen Hill Lane property, in defiance of code violations and a stop-work order issued by the town. The town has taken the property owner, Michael Capasso, to court, demanding the dock be removed.

But two other property owners have now filed applications for docks elsewhere along the Little Peconic Bay shoreline, and town planners asked the Town Board this week if they thought a flat ban on all docks in the bay was appropriate. The answer was a resounding “yes.”

“It changes the water flow, it changes how the winds hit the shoreline, it changes the viewshed,” Councilman Bill Pell said at the Town Board’s work session. “And all it takes is one cold winter and the ice comes and you’ll have debris all over the bays. If it was a thing to do, there would’ve been docks there already.”

Pell said the ban should apply only to shorelines on the open bay and not inside creeks and harbors.

For decades, building docks along the open expanses of the Peconics was inconceivable, because winter ice floes would batter them to smithereens. But the bay has not frozen over in a decade, and the town’s planning administrator, Janice Scherer, pointed out to the board that the sort of folks who live along the bayfront now has changed also.

“There were just little seasonal cottages there, but now it’s big homes, and we’re getting proposals for 100-foot docks,” she said.

“And once one person has one, their neighbors want to have them, then it changes the whole landscape of the Peconic Bay because you would have this proliferation of docks,” Assistant Town Attorney Kelly Doyle added.

Doyle noted that the Town of Southold has already adopted a prohibition on private docks on its Peconic shorelines.

She also said that New York State, which owns the bottomlands of the Peconics, has written to the town saying that it objects to more docks being permitted — even though the State Department of Environmental Conservation had issued a permit for the Capasso dock.

“So the state said OK to the first one, and now they are against it?” Supervisor Maria Moore asked. Doyle said she thinks the state saw “the writing on the wall” about a coming wave of dock applications.

Board members urged the town attorneys to draft the legislation so the town can get it on the books this winter.