Southampton Town eyes plan to centralize offices in Hampton Bays campus

Southampton Town plans to create a new municipal office complex in Hampton Bays, where it hopes to move most operations over the next few decades.

Town officials and consultants are developing a master plan to guide the creation of new office buildings at the town’s Jackson Avenue property off Sunrise Highway in the hamlet. The goal is to eventually relocate most front-facing operations there from the town hall on Hampton Road in Southampton Village, according to preliminary plans discussed by town officials.

Hampton Bays is closer to the geographic center of town than Southampton Village. Moving the facilities west could also help the town retain and hire employees who live west, town engineer Thomas Houghton said during a recent work session.

“I'd love to see everybody at a central place, and it's going to help communication [and] working with each other,” Houghton said.

Jackson Avenue is currently the site of the town's justice court and police department headquarters, which have outgrown their existing facilities, town officials said. Under the plan, Southampton Town would construct separate buildings first for the justice court and police department.

The justice court operates out of modular units that do not comply with state court safety standards, Justice Court Director Selena Berbig said in an email to Newsday. The court has been there since 2008, she said.

“The problem is that to ensure the safety of the public and staff, we are limited in the number of cases that can be calendared on any given day,” Berbig said. “This is because we only have so much room to accommodate a set number of people.”

Representatives from Arcadis, the engineering and design firm hired to create the master plan, addressed the concept during a recent work session on Zoom.

Plans also show a potential two-story office building, the repurposing of the single-story police headquarters into office space, and new maintenance and small office buildings north of the main campus.

The town owns 109 acres off Jackson Avenue, which includes existing facilities and Red Creek Park. It is also negotiating the purchase of an adjacent 31-acre property for a new sewage treatment plant.

The expanded campus could be built in phases over the next decade or longer, said Phil Colleran, the principal-in-charge at Arcadis, and could eventually house all public-facing town departments.

Councilwoman Cyndi McNamara said she is concerned that moving all services west would hurt residents who live in the eastern part of town. “We're basically saying it's too hard to function here as a business,” she added.

Councilman Bill Pell said consolidating buildings in Hampton Bays “opens up a lot of options,” including satellite offices farther west and the sale of smaller town office buildings around town.

The master plan provides “a really gradual way of achieving this in just one piece at a time,” Houghton said. A plan in the early 2000s to simultaneously move all town offices to Jackson Avenue “never got off the ground,” he added.