At a Glance

Plum Island, a unique wilderness sanctuary, may be auctioned off to private developers by the federal government.The island once served as a military installation and hosts an animal disease research center. Because the island is largely uninhabited, wildlife has been drawn there. Environmentalists and other officials are fighting to save the wildlife refuge.

Plum Island, one of the coastal Northeast’s most unusual wildernesses,is on the cusp of being auctioned off to private developers by the federal government.

However, environmentalists, state representatives and other local officials are fighting to save the wildlife sanctuary, which has been long shrouded in mystery due to its proximity to a secretive animal disease testing facility. A judge ruled in January that a lawsuit blocking the sale could move forward.

“Plum Island is unique in the world,” Louise Harrison, an outreach coordinator for conservation group Save the Sound,told weather.com. “We need to do everything we can to keep it from being developed.”

Plum Island is located approximately a mile and a half off Long Island and was originally used as a military installation, strategically built to protect New York City and designed to look like a village from the ocean side. It was used during the Spanish-American War and World Wars; itlater became a facility for biological and agricultural defense research. It was given to the Department of Agriculture in 1954 for the purpose of studying infectious animal diseases before ownership was transferred to the United States Department of Homeland Security in 2002.

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While 20 percent of the island is dedicated to the disease center, the rest is uninhabited. The sensitive nature of the facility’s research made the island off-limits to the public and incidentally created anatural habitatteeming with wildlife such as sea turtles and marine mammals.

“Wildlife is concentrated there because it’s an undisturbed place, where animals don’t have to deal with human disturbance, and plants too,” Harrison said. “It has the second highest number of rare plants in New York State…”

Harrison also noted that a quarter of North America’s bird species, including rare and endangered ones, could be found on the 840-acre island. It was designated by the National Audubon Society as an Important Bird Area in 1997.

It’s unclear how polluted the island remains from the secretive animal disease work, according to Amy Folk, town historian of nearby Southold.

“I know they are working on doing clean-ups on the island," she said in an email to weather.com. "And I know the Army before they left razed buildings and left a lot of debris in various parts of the island. I understand some of the beaches had heaps of bathroom fixtures, which were eventually cleaned up. Most of what I have heard are concerns about any waste that has been built up over the years by the lab.”

After decades of use and with the facility reaching the end of its operational life, government officials decided to move the site’s responsibilities to Kansas. Congress then passed a provision in a 2008 law that tasked the U.S. General Services Administration and the Department of Homeland Security with auctioning off the island to the buyer with the highest price, according to a .

The island has attracted curiosity from a few potential buyers, including President Donald Trump, who has expressed interest in purchasing the pristine island for commercial purposes.

"It would be a really beautiful, world-class golf course," Trump . "It would be a low-key and beautiful use for the area."

“Somewhere along the line, somebody in Congress decided they should sell Plum Island and use the receipts from the sale to build this new facility (in Kansas),” Bob DeLuca, president of Group for the East End, which is a plaintiff in the lawsuit to stop the sale, told weather.com in a phone interview. “As it happened over time, the money became available to build the facility in Kansas, and that facility is under construction. So the idea that we needed to sell the island because we needed the money to build is not accurate anymore.”

Southold’s Town Board to adopt local zoning for Plum Island, preventing residential development.

Despite this action, DeLuca said he feared that an aggressive developer who wanted to build out the island could “commit substantial resources to breaking the zoning that was put in place by the town.”

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Many birds that nest in nearby Great Gull Island, which is owned by the American Museum of Natural History, fly back and forth between the two islands. However, the museum has remained mum on where it stands on preserving the island.

“It is not something we have an official stance on at the moment,” museum spokesperson Kendra Snyder told weather.com.

A bill to save the island, called the Plum Island Preservation Act, was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in 2017. However, legislation in the U.S. Senate has been stuck in committee.

"We're hopeful but the mood in Congress right now, a lot of it is [focused on] getting rid of federal properties," Harrison said. "It's a great concern. We have our champions in New York and Connecticut but how much do the guys who have chairmanships on various committees care about New Yorkers and Connecticut? They don’t see us in the majority right now. Their view of public land is different out West than it is in the Northeast."

U.S. District Judge Denis Hurley ruled that local environmental groups had standing to sue the government to stop the sale.

"The fact that plaintiffs have no ongoing right to access Plum Island does not impede their ability to bird-watch or animal-watch on the island," Hurley wrote, . "...To boat along the coast of the island, to fish in the island’s waters, to enjoy the scenic vista of the island from the land or surrounding sea, or to traverse the Island itself with permission for the foregoing purposes.”

Government agencies involved in the lawsuit had no comment.

DeLuca said the Plum Island saga has been a bit of a civics lesson in government dysfunction.

“It’s like on this toxic autopilot,” he added. “Where a bill gets passed, it limps along, everybody kinda realizes it’s probably not such a good idea, we have to come up with something else. And they’re getting closer and closer to the finish line where everybody is going, ‘this is not such a good idea!’”

Video courtesy of Visionaries, see full program at