Suffolk 'failed to comply' with law on sportsmen's club lease, analysis finds

Suffolk County "failed to comply" with state law by granting an exclusive lease for 262 wooded acres to a sportsmen's club before conducting a fair-market value assessment, an analysis by Suffolk Comptroller John Kennedy found.

In a letter to the executive director of Suffolk’s auditing service, Kennedy concluded that the lease, which was also approved by the county legislature four years before it expired, was likely granted to the Peconic River Sportsman's Club “for less than fair-market value.” The first-year price, he noted, amounts to 11 cents an acre per day.

A spokeswoman for Suffolk County didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. 

The letter notes that state law authorizes the county to lease the property specifically for fair market value for the purpose of “maintaining, operating and managing the property as open or green space and buffer area.” A fair market value assessment is also a condition of a resolution passed by the legislature in approving the lease, Kennedy noted.

“However, we found no evidence that a fair-market analysis or appraisal was performed by the county or that fair market value was established by any other means,” Kennedy wrote. Additionally, he wrote, the county resolution and resulting lease contained “no valid justification for the establishment of the rental fees" paid by the club. 

Kennedy’s own analysis showed the new lease, which is set to take effect in May 2025, has an annual rental fee for the first year of $10,469, a figure that increases 3% a year. That initial amount corresponds to $872 a month for the 262 acres, he found, or 11 cents a day per acre.

“We conclude that the county failed to comply with the requirements of New York State Law," Kennedy wrote, and "puts into question the validity” of the legislative resolution approving it.

In addition, Kennedy wrote, “it is also quite possible that the county is leasing the subject property for less than fair market value.” Newsday last year filed a Freedom of Information Law request for any records of a fair market assessment of the property by the county but records keepers found no documents responsive to the request.

John Armentano, an attorney for the Peconic River Sportsman's Club, noted that more than half the leased property is water or wetland, and located in the core pine barrens "with very limited or no development potential. However, the Peconic River Sportsman's Club is committed to paying fair-market value for the use of the property." 

Newsday first reported about objections to the county’s renewed lease agreement with the sportsmen’s club in October. The lease bars visitors to the property without the consent of the club, conditions that don’t take effect until 2025. The woodland is fenced and signs say the property is off limits. It includes a near mile-long stretch of the Peconic River that non-club members and their visitors haven’t seen for more than a quarter century.

Conservationist John Turner of Setauket first raised questions about lack of access at county hearings on the lease resolution last year. On Wednesday he called the comptroller’s finding a “fatal flaw” in the agreement.

“If ever the county needed a justification to get out of a lease, the comptroller just provided it,” Turner said. “Sweetheart deals can stink and this one does.”

Turner said Suffolk residents have been denied unfettered access to the property and the comptroller's finding suggests that “taxpayers have not been made financially whole by the relationship, as required by law.”

By Mark Harrington

mark.harrington@newsday.comMHarringtonNews

Mark Harrington, a Newsday reporter since 1999, covers energy, wineries, Indian affairs and fisheries.