Breakaway Effort on Long Island Remindful of Valley Struggle

The Long Island of fishing villages, potato farms and celebrity homes has had it up to here with the Long Island of tract housing, mall culture and Joey Buttafuoco.

The eastern end of Long Island, which includes the exclusive Hamptons, is pressing to secede from its more suburbanized, low-rent neighbors to the west. Proponents cite environmental concerns; cynics call it snobbery.

“Maybe it’s the only way to save what’s left of the Long Island I knew as a child,” said singer-songwriter Billy Joel, a pro-secessionist who lives in the East End community of Amagansett but grew up in working-class Hicksville, closer to New York City.

Or maybe it’s the only way rich people can protect their multimillion-dollar homes while looking down their noses at the rest of Long Island.

“Yeah, I do think of it as an insult,” said Cindy DelaRosa, who works at a beauty shop in decidedly glitz-free Commack. “They want to just do what they want to do, and it’s not right.”

For nearly 20 years, residents in the East End towns of East Hampton, Southampton, Southold, Shelter Island and Riverhead have considered breaking away from Suffolk County and forming their own slice of Long Island, to be called Peconic County.

What’s left of Suffolk County would serve as a barrier between them and heavily developed Nassau County, which abuts New York City and provides a stream of tales of suburban lust, like the saga of Buttafuoco and Amy Fisher.

In some ways it is a dispute that resembles the San Fernando Valley’s efforts to break away from the city of Los Angeles, but New York State Assemblyman Fred Thiele, a leader of the breakaway movement, presents it as a way to save the area’s rural character.

“Little back roads and the quaintness are fast disappearing,” said Paul Parash, who has owned the Zip ‘n’ Soda luncheonette in Southampton for 40 years. “We are reaching a point now where we could begin losing our landscape.”

Voters approved a nonbinding secession referendum on Nov. 5. The next step is petitioning the Legislature for a binding vote. A similar petition in the late 1970s died in the Legislature, and there are serious hurdles this time, too--just as there are in the Valley vs. L.A. case.

Suffolk County officials have warned that secession would push up taxes in the new county, which would consist of half the land area but only 110,000 of Suffolk’s 1.3 million residents, most of whom are concentrated in the western towns of Babylon, Brookhaven, Huntington, Islip and Smithtown.

Thiele asserted that the East End, with 8% of Suffolk’s population, pays 24 percent of its property taxes and 12% of its sales taxes. Only about half of it comes back, he said. “If we had our own county,” Thiele said, “that money would stay here.”

Forty percent of the property owners on the East End are part-time residents who don’t need certain county services--another cost-saving factor, he said.

Secession opponents say those wealthy homeowners, behind their neatly manicured hedges, care only about enjoying a bit of uncrowded paradise just a helicopter hop from Manhattan. The homeowners don’t disagree.

“I bought a place out here because it is serene and the best of nature,” said Houston Rockets owner Leslie Alexander, who is building a million-dollar oceanfront home in Southampton. “I would like to keep it that way.”

Tom Halsey, a farmer whose family settled in Southampton in 1639, worries that blue-collar residents will be pushed out if the East End secedes.

“I’m glad that there are people who can afford those luxuries to keep land open because they like the view, but we also have to protect our senior citizens and young, who can’t afford to pay that kind of money,” he said.

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Eastern Long Island Wants Out

The New York suburb of Long Island has been beset with its own secession controversy. Eastern Long Islanders, whose wealthy ranks include the likes of singer Billy Joel, want to break away from western Long Island, whose lower-income residents include Joey Buttafuoco.