Riverhead spent almost $60,000 to fight NYC's effort to relocate homeless migrants to the town

Riverhead paid an outside law firm nearly $60,000 in its fight to ban migrants New York City wanted to relocate there and other places statewide, according to documents disclosed Tuesday.

Town Supervisor Yvette Aguiar said the case, being litigated against one of the nation's biggest municipal law offices, required a lot of research and that the town didn't want to tie up its in-house lawyers.

More litigation is on the way focused on the migrant crisis, after dozens of lawmakers, local leaders and residents sued to block the city's use of Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn to house migrants. 

Referring to the migrant influx into the city, for which Mayor Eric Adams admitted he's struggling to find space, Aguiar said, "It's a federal crisis, and it has to be handled in a federal level." The firm, Lynn Gartner Dunne & Frigenti, which did not return a call seeking comment, billed $59,518 for about 385 hours of work.

Riverhead and about 30 other municipalities enacted orders banning the relocation of migrants to their areas. In Suffolk, the county attorney's office handled its migrant litigation against New York City, spokeswoman Marykate Guilfoyle said. She didn't know whether the hours worked were tracked.

Both cases were dropped over the last several weeks at the city's request, as were most of the 31, after a Manhattan judge ruled the city would need to fight each municipality in its county, rather than all in Manhattan. Some were dismissed.

The suit over Floyd Bennett Field, filed against the state and city in Staten Island at State Supreme Court, argues that the law prohibits the development of the field, which is federally protected property being used for recreation.

The defendants are using the field  "in contravention of state, federal and local laws," the suit says.

The migrant crisis has generated dozens of lawsuits filed both by and against New York City, covering a range of controversies. 

In the Floyd Bennett challenge, the plaintiffs include Republicans and conservative Democrats, largely from Staten Island and Brooklyn. The announcement earlier this summer that the location was being considered drew protests from local residents and others. Similar protests have been staged over sheltering migrants at a parking lot of Creedmore Psychiatric Center in Queens and on Randall's Island.

On Friday, the city announced the leasing of the field, after weeks of negotiations with the Biden administration. The rent is about $21 million a year, plus required capital improvements. Adams' office said the state would foot the bill.

The site is expected to house more than 2,000 migrants. It will be yet another of the over 200 spots the city has opened since April 2022 to shelter the influx, which as of last week topped 113,000. About half are living in shelters or hotels funded by the city.

The suit criticizes the state's and city’s “resort to means that are plainly outside the law to deal with the problem that has been put upon them, rather than acting to have the Federal Government take on responsibility [financial and logistical] for the problem of an unsecure boarder.”

Thousands of migrants, mostly from Latin America, continue to arrive weekly to the city, which is under a decades-old and unique-in-the-nation mandate to provide a bed to anyone in need. That obligation, coupled with New York’s status as a “sanctuary city” that doesn’t cooperate with federal immigration enforcers, has made the city a prime destination for migrants crossing into the United States from other countries.

Among the cases working their way through the courts: a petition by Adams' lawyers to loosen the right to shelter so that the city is obligated to care for fewer people. 

It's not just the migrant crisis that generated work for Lynn Gartner Dunne & Frigenti. They have represented Riverhead and other municipalities on Long Island in other litigation. 

Aguiar said the firm represented the town close to a dozen times within the past few years. The firm also has represented the Nassau comptroller's office in its fight to get records about tax breaks given to the Green Acres Mall, Nassau County in a discrimination case involving the police department, and Nassau in a case related to the proposed location of an air stripper in Christopher Morley Park.