Greenbelt Addition

Southampton Town's announcement on Tuesday that it would join forces with Suffolk County to preserve most of the former Bridgehampton Winery property in a deal negotiated through the Nature Conservancy is welcome.

A proposal by JOG Associates, the property's owner, to squeeze a nine-hole golf course and eight houses onto the land would have overburdened the 74-acre tract and caused irreparable harm to the woods and ponds where the tiger salamander, an endangered species, lives and breeds.

Although the wooded portion of the property has long been eyed for public acquisition, the preservation of the property has been delayed because government has been loath to use open-space funds to buy the fields that make up the western half of the land, citing disturbances caused first by crop farming and later by grapevines.

But the town, which will use funds from the open-space tax voters approved a year ago, has seen the wisdom of buying the fields, too, which include Black Pond and other wetlands, instead of losing the opportunity. The owner will retain the winery buildings and two adjacent house lots.

The 69 acres to be acquired will augment the roughly 500 acres that have been protected in the Long Pond Greenbelt. Although the greenbelt is large, access to its trails, as a recently released draft management study acknowledges, is limited.

This purchase provides the opportunity to create a trail head, or perhaps even a nature center, and to allow the public to enjoy its public land.