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Paul Brennan’s roots on Long Island’s East End run long and deep.
The son of a second-generation Bridgehampton potato farmer, Brennan descends from one of the families who founded Southampton, in 1640. Growing up there in the 1950s and ‘60s, on some 100 acres across from what is now the Wölffer Estate vineyard, he often accompanied his maternal grandfather, a dairy farmer, and his uncle, a butcher, on deliveries and other business around the area’s agricultural community.

“I remember you could actually stand flat-footed on the ground and see all the way from our farm right down to the ocean,” recalled Brennan, a real estate industry veteran who joined Douglas Elliman in 1999. “That’s how flat and open the area was.”
In the years that followed, that memorable vista, along with many other remnants of the East End’s agricultural past, would be lost to real estate development in the Hamptons and the decline in family farming. But thanks to a collective effort in which Brennan played a key role, much of what makes the region uniquely beautiful—and the property uniquely valuable—has been protected from excessive development.
Led by a coalition of farmers, environmentalists, community and business leaders and legislators, that effort resulted in the creation of the Peconic Bay Region Community Preservation Fund, which was signed into law on June 22, 1998, by then-New York Governor George Pataki. In the 25 years since, the CPF has collected more than $2 billion in revenues via a two-percent tax on real estate transactions in five Suffolk County towns—East Hampton, Riverhead, Shelter Island, Southampton and Southold—which has enabled them to purchase and preserve more than 10,000 acres of farmland, open space and ecologically fragile tracts of land.
For Brennan, who ran point on rallying support from the real estate community, the success of the CPF is especially poignant. Just as he fondly recalls the pastoral scenery of his youth, he also remembers the heartbreak of returning home in 1978 after two years in Australia, where he played two seasons of pro basketball for the Bankstown Bruins, to find a dramatically changed landscape.
“I hated how big pieces of farmland were being cut up and then sold off into several small lots,” he recalled.
Although his father had wanted him to follow in his footsteps, Brennan didn’t see a future in farming. As he prepared to hang up his high-tops and leave basketball behind, he sought the advice of Allan Schneider, the realtor who had helped his father sell part of the farm years earlier. Schneider urged Brennan to give real estate a go and invited him to join his firm.
After nearly a decade with Allan Schneider Associates, Brennan went on to cofound the firm Braverman Newbold Brennan in 1988. (The firm was ultimately purchased by Sotheby’s International Real Estate in 1997, shortly before Elliman’s then-CEO, Dottie Herman, persuaded Brennan to join the brokerage.)
Over the years, Brennan noted that the ethos of the East End real estate community had begun to shift away from heedless development toward preserving quality of life and local character. Although previous efforts to establish a preservation fund in the 1980s had stalled, by the mid ‘90s, the stars had aligned.
Joining a coalition led by State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. of Sag Harbor, who drafted the CPF legislation, and environmental advocate Kevin McDonald, then with the Group for South Fork, Brennan helped to persuade his real estate colleagues that unchecked development would be ruinous.
As McDonald recently told Sag Harbor Express, the campaign was “one of the most exhilarating, grassroots, public risings in support of a better future that I have ever seen,” and the resulting fund “a gift the public gave itself and future generations.” Indeed, voters have since renewed that gift repeatedly, extending the expiration date three times, from 2010 to 2020 to the current end date of Dec. 31, 2050.
By enabling community leaders to have a seat at the table and outbid developers, the CPF has been an unqualified success in preserving the quality of life and the community character of the East End—the two key parameters that matter most to Brennan. Whether or not it continues to meet that mission, he adds, will depend on constant vigilance from the community and greater transparency in how the fund is administered.
“They’ve been saying for the last 10 years that the fund has raised millions, and they’ve saved about 10,000 acres—but $2 billion? – that’s a lot of money,” said Brennan, noting that the $11.2 million approved for the purchase of John Steinbeck’s Sag Harbor home may not be the best use of the fund. “There should be an accounting of where that money’s been spent. I’d like to know what those 10,000 acres were—and why we don’t have 20,000 acres if the fund has now reached $2 billion.”
Still, Brennan said, knowing so intimately what has been lost makes him all the more thankful for what remains, particularly on his regular walks near his home in Sagaponack.
“I live on Parsonage Lane in Sagaponack and I walk to Town Line Road and turn right to the ocean. I turn left and walk along the beach for a mile and turn left onto Beach Lane and left again onto Wainscott Main Street. It’s a remnant of the way the Hamptons were and I just take it all in. I have such gratitude to the amount of property that’s been saved!”

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