Southampton Town cleans up area adjacent to Grangebel Park walkway

“Sunlight is said to be the best disinfectant,” as Justice Louis Brandeis famously said, and that’s exactly what Southampton Town officials are hoping to achieve by opening up an overgrown area adjacent to Grangebel Park.

A dirt footpath cuts through a break in the brush and weeds on the north side of Nugent Drive, between County Road 51 and Peconic Avenue. The dirt path leads to a walkway in Grangebel Park that Riverhead Town officials would like to see utilized by people who work at the county center complex to visit the park and downtown Riverhead.

But the overgrown patch of trees proved to be a tucked-away haven for loitering and drinking — and perhaps even camping by homeless people. And the evidence of that activity was everywhere: dozens of discarded beer cans and bottles strewn about the weeds, along with plastic cups, food wrappers, articles of clothing, even human feces.

“Not exactly an inviting entrance to Grangebel Park and downtown Riverhead,” Supervisor Sean Walter said last Thursday. “People who want to take a lunchtime stroll through the park had to walk past that and would not feel comfortable walking past this.”

Walter, who said he’d reached out to Southampton Town in an effort to get the area cleaned up, asked County Legislator Jay Schneiderman to meet him at the site to observe conditions there. Schneiderman brought Suffolk County parks commissioner Greg Dawson with him to discuss what might be done.

But it turns out the small plot of land was transferred from the county to the town earlier this year, as part of a land swap between the two entities made to facilitate improvements to the Route 24 traffic circle.

Schneiderman, who is running for Southampton town supervisor this year, reached out to Southampton Councilman Brad Bender and learned the town had already hired a contractor to do the work.

Coastal Landscape Contractors of Hampton Bays was at work there Tuesday morning, picking up garbage and cutting back brush. A crew foreman said they’d filled 17 large plastic trash bags with garbage by 10 a.m.

In addition to cleaning up the trash, the contractor was to “take out some of the undergrowth, limb up trees and open up the sightline from the road,” Bender said Friday. The hope is the area will be less attractive as a hangout for loitering and drinking and “who knows what else,” he said.

The work was paid for out of Southampton’s “blight mitigation fund,” money set aside for such projects from all justice court fines, Bender said.

“One percent of what we collect from all our fines are put into the blight mitigation fund,” Bender said. The fund, established in 2012, currently has about $45,000 in it, he said.

Southampton Town plans to make some improvements to the area, once the county’s work on Nugent Drive and the traffic circle is completed.

“We’re looking to improve the walkway to Grangebel Park and perhaps put in a footpath and a couple of benches on town-owned property along the traffic circle,” Bender said.

Walter said he’d like to see the county put a marked crosswalk on Nugent Drive leading to the path — and the park. There are currently no marked crosswalks in the area, though there are sidewalks along Nugent Drive, a four-land divided highway and County Road 51, which leads to the county center complex in Riverside.

There should be more connectivity between the park, downtown Riverhead and the county center complex, he said.

Over the past two decades, Riverhead pumped millions of dollars in federal, state and county grant monies into Grangebel Park, improving walkways, building new bulkheading, a new spillway and fish passage, and installing new benches, tables and even a small performance stage. It added a children’s playground next to the community garden, and restored and reopened the comfort station. The work was completed in 2011.

“It’s a beautiful place,” the supervisor said, but it’s still underutilized. Riverhead police have regular foot patrols in the park. Cleaning up the areas adjacent to the park will help, he said.

The town is working on getting the park’s walkways replaced, the supervisor said. The plastic grids holding small gravel in the walkways buckled and came up throughout the park after SuperStorm Sandy left the park underwater in 2012. Riverhead officials have been negotiating with the Federal Emergency Management Administration and the state Department of Environmental Conservation on how to best replace the defective walkway materials and how to pay for the work.