Some cosmetic changes are coming to Danfords after this season. Photo by Julianne Mosher
After announcing earlier this month that Rhode Island-based hospitality management firm, TPG Hotels, Resorts & Marinas had bought Port Jefferson’s Danfords, many have been wondering what this means for the iconic hotel, spa and restaurant in the heart of the village.
Robert Leven, chief investment officer of Procaccianti Companies, the overseeing group of TPG, said that because the transaction happened in the midst of its busy season, nothing is going to change just yet.
“We haven’t made a lot of changes at this point,” he said. “We just stepped in to get our systems set up and try to get everybody on board successfully. I think it’s been reasonably smooth, and it’s been going well.”
According to Leven, TPG began talking to The Crest Group in February 2021 to take over Danfords, The Waterview at Port Jefferson Country Club and The Club steakhouse.
“The deal took a long time to get done,” he said, due to the size of the transaction and all the entities included.
While Leven can’t speak for The Crest Group, he said that the COVID-19 pandemic hit the hotel industry hard.
“When this is not your core business, and particularly an operation like this, which is hotels, significant food and beverage, a spa, a country club, a marina, there a lot of things going on here,” he said. “I just think it was a lot for them to stay on top of and with the combination of the pandemic, it probably made them say, ‘OK, you know, maybe now’s the time for us to go in another direction.’”
But the new owners are excited for what they can bring.
Rob Leven
Danfords is one of three acquisitions within the last nine months in TPG’s newly launched Marina platform. TPG has also acquired two Rhode Island businesses: Dutch Harbor Boat Yard in Jamestown this June; and Champlin’s Marina & Resort on Block Island in December 2020. The latter is currently undergoing extensive renovations as part of a comprehensive property improvement plan.
Leven said that TPG is planning on giving the Port Jefferson resort a facelift, as well. First on the list of to-dos include upgrading scenery outside with new plants and flowers, and improving other parts of the hotel’s exterior.
“What we’re really going to be focused on is guest rooms and doing a pretty significant upgrade and redo of them,” he said. “We hope to modernize them, freshen them up and bring it sort of to current design standards to elevate the product. … It’ll be a pretty significant transformation from what exists there now.”
Their goal is that people are getting an appropriate product for what they’re paying.
Leven added that while capital had been spent previously on the public areas and in the restaurant side of the resort, he believes the guest rooms had “kind of lacked the attention.”
But because of the transaction finalizing in the middle of their busy season, the upgrades to its 92 guest rooms and suites won’t start until the off-season, to be completed next year.
That being said, the food and beverage side of the resort, including WAVE restaurant at Danfords, The Club and The Waterview, will also stay the same for at least the next year.
“We’re doing some things like analyzing the menus and some of the processes in the food and beverage operation to see where we can do things differently or better,” Leven said.
TPG Hotels, Resorts & Marinas — a Rhode Island-based hospitality group with hotels and resorts across the country — announced last week that it acquired Port Jefferson’s Danfords Hotel, Marina & Spa, located on the harbor in the village.
Originally established in 1986 as Danfords Inn, it boasts 92 guest rooms and suites. Its marina features more than 100 slips and over 1,000 feet of side to tie with the capacity to accommodate vessels up to 250 feet in length. Hotel stayers and locals visit its onsite restaurant and lounge, WAVE.
Some of the buildings on the property date back to the 1800s, when Port Jefferson was a bustling shipbuilding community.
“Danfords Hotel, Marina & Spa in Port Jefferson is a remarkable destination located in one of the highest barriers-to-entry markets in all of North America,” said Robert Leven, chief investment officer of Procaccianti Companies, in a statement. “Danfords is a perfect fit as we accelerate the growth of our recently launched marina platform. We have several more acquisitions in the pipeline and intend to have a significant concentration of East Coast marina properties by the end of 2021.”
The transaction is one of three acquisitions in the last seven months in TPG’s newly launched marina platform. In Rhode Island, TPG acquired both Dutch Harbor Boat Yard in Jamestown this June, and Champlin’s Hotel, Resort and Marina on Block Island in December 2020. The latter property is currently undergoing extensive renovations as part of a comprehensive improvement plan.
“It is not common to find the perfect buyer, but in this case we have achieved success,” Enrico Scarda, managing partner of The Crest Group, said in a statement.
Additionally, as part of the transaction, TPG will also manage catering operations at The Waterview restaurant located at the Port Jefferson Country Club.
TPG will embark on a property improvement plan at Danfords, including resortwide modernization, which includes the lodging and slip reservation systems and a full renovation of the resort’s guest rooms.
Additional renovations and improvements are also planned for the marina facilities.
The Crest Group was unable to further comment by press time.
The Belle Terre village board. File photo by Kyle Barr
With two trustee seats and the mayoral position up for election in the Village of Belle Terre, three individuals have thrown their hats into the ring along with the three incumbents.
This year, incumbent Mayor Bob Sandak is joined by Deputy Mayor Sheila Knapp and Trustee Jacquelyn Gernaey. Opposing them are newcomers Enrico Scarda, who’s running for mayor, along with trustee candidates Peter Colucci and Lou Bove.
The mayoral race has already started to heat up in anticipation for the Sept. 15 voting date. Ballots can be cast at the Belle Terre Village Hall from 12 to 9 p.m.
Mayor
Enrico Scarda
Enrico Scarda
Scarda, the president and founder of the Crest Group development agency, said he is running to help bolster local property values and update how the village communicates with residents.
“We’re all getting up in age and want to sell our homes to downsize, and I believe we could do much better with property values than our [competing villages],” Scarda said. “The village has the opportunity here to get an attorney who has experience in the community for free.”
The Crest Group owns multiple properties around the Port Jeff area, including Danford’s Hotel & Marina and The Waterview at the Port Jefferson Country Club. Scarda is a 20-year resident of the village, having moved there with his wife to help raise his three children. With his two sons having already graduated from college they are helping him run the business, and with his daughter also graduating soon as well, he said he has more time to spend caring about local issues.
The village, he said, could do better with its communications efforts, including buffing up its website. He suggested Belle Terre should create a ticket system for things like road repair that can be submitted electronically, such as he has in his business. The village would give updates through the system for when a ticket has been accepted and when a project is complete.
He added there could be small additions that would make the beach program more attractive, including more renovations to the beach pavilion.
All these small changes, he said, would go to making the village more attractive, and thereby increasing everyone’s property values.
His home on Seaside Drive is only one of several Sound-facing homes which are facing issues with eroding bluffs. Scarda said though he has already received permits from the New York Department of Environmental Conservation to begin revetment of those bluffs, the village should work with all property owners along that road to shore up the bluffs, especially because fixing one residents’ bluffs will still leave an issue for others all along the shore. It’s not to benefit him or any one person but creating some kind of initiative to do bluff repair would go a long way.
“If one home falls into the sound, the property values of the rest of the village are going to go down,” he said. “If we all did the work at the same time, we could protect that bluff, we would all be safe.”
Similar houses in Belle Terre compared to Old Field are going for a worse rate than their counterparts, he claimed, saying it’s because of small things that are leaving the village in the past.
Other issues for the candidate include safety, as he calls for more cameras including one by the village gate. He also said the village should do more to beautify the roads, including repair and garbage pickup.
Overall, he said his experience would make him a great pick to lead Belle Terre.
“The village is getting an experienced developer who has built communities as large as Belle Terre from the ground up,” he said.
Bob Sandak
Four-year Mayor Sandak has been a village official since he became trustee in 2004. He came on as trustee during Vincent Bove’s 25-year reign, and originally ran unopposed in 2016.
Sandak said he and fellow trustees have already made many strides since the time he’s sat on the board. The mayor is a former school administrator, having worked in districts such as Hicksville, Half Hollow Hills and William Floyd at times overseeing millions of dollars’ worth in construction along with other administrative tasks over 38 years. He said this work has translated well into administrating a small village like Belle Terre.
“We’ve tried to pass codes that make this a nice place to live for everybody,” he said. “Noise is something we deal with — there’s no construction on Saturday and Sunday — we try to make it a nice place to live.”
The village, he said, has done well in creating public/private partnerships to create municipal projects that are partly funded by both residents and Belle Terre. These include the restoration of the gatehouse and entrance wall, the design and construction of the children’s playground, the installation of the walking/cycling track, the reconstruction of the “Circle” at the end of Cliff Road, and most recently the reconstruction of the bathhouse pavilion at Knapp Beach. The latter was originally built in the 1930s and needed to be made handicap accessible. That project, which he said started in concept around two years ago, was done with volunteered architectural designs by a resident and donations from the community.
The community also donated their time and money to help construct kayak and canoe racks at Knapp Beach. These proved so popular that the village plans to help construct additional racks in the future, along with some mats that people may walk down onto the beach.
In the future, Sandak said Belle Terre needs to be readier to handle potential storms. He said he wants to propose the community center should be turned into a shelter for residents, especially those who lose power in a storm. This would require backup generators for people to use the location as a refuge.
“We’ve really noticed a real change in weather patterns — we’ve been hit by nor’easters — they really batter us,” he said. “It leads to a lot of road reconstruction.”
In terms of property values, the Belle Terre mayor said the noticeable loss in property values was due to a large number of people who inherited their homes from longtime residents all started putting homes on the market at once, many of whom had not been fixed up since the 1960s. To his knowledge, there are only four houses up for sale in the community, and he expects property values to increase up to levels comparable with similarly sized villages on the North Shore.
Sandak also agreed that erosion around homes on the edge of the Sound was a major issue, though he said he had two years ago proposed to property owners a special taxation area that could help pay back a bond that would be used to fix the erosion issues, but only two of 11 homeowners were interested in that.
“We certainly want to try and help stop the erosion there,” he said.
Trustees
Sheila Knapp
Sheila Knapp
Knapp, who has spent a lifetime amongst the Belle Terre community, said she is running again to continue to make the village live up to her memories of spending time there as a child.
“A year before I was born my parents bought our home in Belle Terre. It was the most wonderful place to grow up,” she said in an email response to questions. “The beach, the friends, the belonging to a community that was like family … I want everybody to love this place as I do.”
Knapp has been beach commissioner since 1977, trustee since 1997 and deputy mayor since 2004. She said the best part of the village is the natural beauty and peacefulness, and that every board she has served on has had the goal “to keep everybody’s quality of life here at it’s best.”
Close to 70 years ago, when Harbor Hills Country Club was built, she said her father got the land for what is now the current beach, which she has long worked to take care of. Otherwise, she said the village has passed noise and construction ordinances to keep the village serene on the weekends. She said the new wall along the beach parking lot is a “dream come true” and their recently installed cell tower has allowed more reception range throughout the village.
The 43-year beach commissioner said that in the future she would continue on with Belle Terre’s current trajectory.
“Things are not broken here,” she said. “We improved communication and do our best to keep residents informed with the website, meetings, emails and letters. All of the trustees and mayor publish our private phone numbers. We want to be accessible.”
Peter Colucci
Peter Colucci
Colucci, who has lived in Belle Terre along with his wife for 12 years, said he is running because he deeply cares about the community and believes he can improve several aspects of the village.
Two things he’s running on are security and modernizing the village’s communication systems. In 2017 he and his wife were victims of a home invasion and burglary where police at the time said the perpetrators got away with several hundred thousand dollars in cash and jewelry.
“I would like to see modernization in all areas,” Colucci said in an email response to questions. “Simple things are easily done such as upgrading security cameras and increasing communication to all residents especially during times of weather-related emergencies.”
He said he would like to continue with current efforts to keep the beauty and quaintness of the village going, but he said he would also look forward to working on a plan to alleviate the issues with Anchorage Road, where people park all along the road making it dangerous for both cars and pedestrians looking to access McAllister County Park.
Jacquelyn Gernaey
Jacquelyn Gernaey
Gernaey, who has been on the board of trustees for six years after she was originally appointed to the board, said the best part of being on a board like that in Belle Terre is that “trustees really don’t have a personal agenda, and I like being part of a group that can make changes for the village not personally focused.”
The trustee has lived in the village for 25 years, originally hailing from Kings Park. She said she came to love the community feel of Belle Terre, especially since it emphasized keeping trees and nature serene.
As the fiscal officer in the village, Gernaey said one of the big issues she said is that village residents will be losing out in taxes due to the settlement over the Long Island Power Authority power plant tax certiorari case. Over a 10-year glide path, LIPA’s property taxes will decline, which will necessitate village residents pay more in Port Jefferson School District taxes over time.
“We want to continue to get state grants, something we’ve been very successful in doing,” she said, adding they have gotten several hundred thousand for roads from the state and $800,000 in FEMA aid for storm damage.
In addition, she said she wants to keep the pressure on Suffolk County to remediate the parking issues with McAllister Park on Anchorage Road. She said they have been working with more county park officers to deter any more parking along that road.
Erosion issues for houses along the sound are also a major issue. While the village has received a small $100,000 grant towards stabilizing the beach, the issue may be in the near future the whole cliff could start to go, making the homes along the bluff structurally unsound.
“In the last since we applied, we lost 30 feet,” she said. “That’s something we’re really working on.”
As a founder and CEO of two companies, one a human resource outsourcing company and a small business consulting firm, she jokingly said “she certainly doesn’t need this to keep me busy,” but that “she was always taught to give back.”
“We work hard for the village — all about the village, not about us,” she said.
Lou Bove
Bove is the president and CEO of East Setauket-based contractor Bove Industries and is now seeking a seat on the Belle Terre village board.
The candidate did not return several requests for comment through his company. If he does respond in time for the election, his comments will be put on the website version of this article at tbrnewsmedia.com.
Stormwater runoff coming from Route 25A headed toward Mill Pond after a heavy rainfall. Photo by Rob Schwartz
Two Centerport civic groups will join together this weekend to protest against proposed developments they fear could negatively impact the environment if left unchecked.
Centerport Harbor Civic Association will join with members of the Bald Eagles of Centerport, NY Facebook group to rally at the intersection of Route 25A and Little Neck Road Saturday, Feb. 9, from 10 to 11 a.m., to draw attention to the potential environmental and traffic impacts of several developments in progress.
“No one is looking at the overall picture of the area,” Rob Schwartz, of Centerport, said. “There’s a large amount of construction and it’s a concern for the community.”
Schwartz, founder of the Bald Eagles of Centerport Facebook group, said he’s seen firsthand stormwater runoff from Route 25A making its way into Mill Pond. He voiced concerns over whether the property owners of Water’s Edge, formerly The Thatched Cottage, are following all necessary precautions to ensure materials from the construction do not wind up in water. He fears if pollutants make their way into the harbor, it could cause extensive harm or death to native fish and wildlife.
A gap in the silt fencing by the site of the former Thatched Cottage in January. Photo by Rob Schwartz
“They are not doing what they should be doing to protect the wetlands,” Schwartz said. “The pictures show that.”
As a photographer, he’s posted numerous photos and videos via social media of rainbow-hued pools of water along Mill Pond’s banks alleging it’s a clear indicator of contamination.
Enrico Scarda, managing partner of The Crest Group constructing Water’s Edge, said Centerport residents’ outcries of contamination are unfounded.
“We have taken every safety precaution possible to not only safeguard the pond, but any impact our construction would have on the environment and its surrounding area,” he said.
Scarda said his company, in full cooperation with New York State Department of Environmental Conservation guidelines, has sealed all manhole covers on the property and installed silt fencing with hay bales in an effort to prevent stormwater runoff from entering the pond.
“It’s the waterfront location that we are attracted to, we want to make sure it stays safe,” he said.
The concerns of Centerport’s residents of the harbor’s contamination have not fallen on deaf ears. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s regional office received a complaint Jan. 30 regarding Centerport Harbor, complaining of issues with ongoing construction at the former Thatched Cottage site, EPA spokesman David Kluesner said. Those complaints were forward to the Town of Huntington for further investigation.
Lauren Lembo, spokeswoman for the Town of Huntington, said DEC staff and the harbormaster checked the site Jan. 24, shortly after a day-long downpour and found no signs of a spill. She said town employees later investigated the matter to find the silt curtain required along the bulkhead, while present, was improperly installed and immediate corrective action was taken.
“Our building department has been made aware, and maritime services will continue to make routine inspections regarding stormwater control measures and any improper discharges into Mill Pond,” Lembo said.
Suffolk County’s Division of Environmental Quality routinely tests the water quality of the pond, as part of the Huntington-Northport Harbor complex, on a bimonthly basis, according to spokeswoman Grace Kelly-McGovern.
Suffolk Legislator William “Doc” Spencer (D-Centerport) said he’s had several constituents reach out to him with concerns over the former Thatched Cottage property and runoff into Mill Pond, and has requested that the county takes additional water samples.
“I want to make sure we are addressing true concerns and not getting into rumors,” Spencer said. “It’s near the water and there’s construction going on. Are there pollution concerns? It’s reasonable.”
“It’s the waterfront location that we are attracted to, we want to make sure it stays safe.”
— Enrico Scarda
Employees of Suffolk’s Division of Environmental Quality visited the site Feb. 1, Kelly-McGovern said, to collect water samples from Mill Pond directly behind the former Thatched Cottage. The water will be analyzed by the county’s Public & Environmental Health Laboratory for a number of chemicals and contaminants including pesticides, metals including lead, fecal coliform bacteria, inorganic compounds, nitrogen and phosphorus. The results may take up to six weeks.
Kelly-McGovern said the “rainbow opalescence” seen by Centerport residents in the photos can be produced by microbes as a result of breaking down organic matter such as fish, leaves and plants.
“It’s a relatively common wetland phenomenon,” she said.
Schwartz said he and others would still like to see additional environmental protection measures, such as a floating boom to limit the spread of any possible debris or floating contaminates.
In addition to the environmental concerns, Tom Knight of Centerport Harbor Civic Association said the rally will voice opposition to the proposed 7-Eleven he fears will create significantly more traffic on the corner of Route 25A and Little Neck Road. The intersection is a steep angle and prone to causing accidents, Knight said.
The proposed 7-Eleven is currently in the process of a drafting an environmental impact statement, which has yet to be completed and submitted to the Town of Huntington.
“I can’t stop progress, but I can ask them to make it safe,” Schwartz said. “I’ve lived here for 30 years, I love this town, and I don’t want to see it ruined.”
Bob Sandak
