In his 23 years working as a planner for Southold Town, Mark Terry was integrally involved with major planning initiatives ranging from the town’s 2006 subdivision code to its Local Waterfront Revitalization Plan to its Comprehensive Plan, Community Housing Plan and Zoning Update.
And now, he’s gearing up for another chapter in his life, just as the North Fork’s longterm planning initiatives are being put to the test. We sat down to talk with him in late winter about how Southold’s decades of long-term planning may play out in the upcoming years.
A Childhood in the Wetlands
Mr. Terry, who retired from Southold Town last August and is now starting his own land use consulting firm, M. Terry Consulting, has long been enamored with the natural world.
A descendant of one of Southold’s founding families, he spent his childhood in the bayman’s paradise of Lazy Point, near Napeague on the South Fork.
“I was in nature all the time — clamming, fishing in Napeague Harbor and walking all the roads, going down creeks just to find where they begin,” said Mr. Terry in an early March interview with The Beacon. “You’re somewhat a product of your environment, and it always instilled in me an interest in animals and habitats.”
He would spend winters in Florida after his parents were divorced, where he also found solace in the marshes of the Everglades state.
He would later live right on the salt marsh at Louse Point on Accabonac Harbor in Springs, where he ran kayak tours for several years.
“I love wetlands. I love how they are the kidneys of the uplands,” he said, adding that a professor at Suffolk County Community College’s Eastern Campus encouraged him to travel while he was young and see the way the environment is managed in different areas.
After working on projects in the Florida everglades for many years, including management of the invasive Meluka tree, Mr. Terry returned home to be near his family and the place he grew up.
Subdivisions in the Spotlight
Mr. Terry was hired as a Southold Town planner in 2002, when Valerie Scopaz was Planning Director, and had served as acting head of the Planning Department for a brief period.
At the time, Southold was wary of the eastward march of suburban sprawl that characterizes much of Long Island, and in the early aughts the town instated a moratorium on subdivisions while drafting a new code that has incentivized conservation in Southold ever since.
That work will soon be put to the test in a very public way, as Southold Town begins public outreach explaining its conservation subdivision code ahead of the consideration of two massive conservation subdivisions in Cutchogue, proposed by Stefan Soloviev’s Crossroads Atlantic LLC.
The town is working with the North Fork Civics coalition on an April 9 public forum on subdivisions at 6:30 p.m. at the Mattituck Park District headquarters at Veterans Beach (11280 Peconic Bay Boulevard in Mattituck).
Mr. Terry remembers how it all started.
“We had a lot of input from a lot of people — a Blue Ribbon commission, with benchmarks on what to preserve,” said Mr. Terry. “There was a target that everybody wanted to establish.”
Out of those efforts, two different types of conservation subdivisions came to be.
In a 75/75 subdivision, at least 75 percent of the buildable land is permanently preserved and the number of lots is reduced by at least 75 percent from what would otherwise be allowed. In an 80/60 conservation subdivision, at least 80 percent of the buildable lands would be preserved, and the number of lots would be reduced by 60 percent.
The subdivision code, Mr. Terry said, includes incentives to push people toward considering conservation subdivisions, including expedited processing and not requiring a yield plan, which can be expensive.
“If you’re doing a conservation subdivision, you have to basically sell or gift your development rights,” he said. “I always thought that people coming in for conservation subdivisions should be heralded, because even though they’re getting paid for their property, they’re selling it to the town — at not such a high price —because they want to do the right thing. They have a sense of responsibility to the land.”
While units set aside for affordable housing are required in a standard subdivision in Southold, they are not required in conservation subdivisions, though Southold’s Zoning Update Advisory Committee is considering ways to requiring affordable housing in conservation subdivisions in the future.
Mr. Terry said this wasn’t considered at the time the subdivision code was drafted.
“People were coming in with four or five lots. There weren’t really very large conservation subdivisions in the past,” he said. “There was a lot of contemplation about how big a conservation subdivision could be.”
That is changing now, with Soloviev’s Colusa Conservation Subdivision, to the east of Bridge Lane, slated to include 47 housing lots and the Cole Harbor subdivision on the north side of Oregon Road slated to include 13. Both are 75/75 subdivisions.
The Tuthill family in Orient is also in the process of attempting to do an 80/60 conservation subdivision of 112 acres there.
“You’re not going to be able to save every parcel, 100 percent,” said Mr. Terry. “So you just have to enter the mitigation mindset — what buffers could we implement? What are the areas with the highest and best ecological functions on the property? You circle them up, and you try to avoid that in your lot placement.”
Mr. Terry said a subdivision that has gotten a lot of recent attention for its high-priced sale to LLCs tied to billionaire Mark Rowan, Cove Beach in East Marion, was finalized before the town’s conservation subdivision code came into place.
“It’s fairly old, and there were a limited number of lots,” he said. “And there was already a lot of preservation of property there. But the subdivision is there, it’s in stone. It’s already done.”
The subdivision, which already has an access road with cul-de-sacs, gas, water and underground electric and Belgian block curbs, includes 13 waterfront building lots and two lots that have been preserved as open space, while much of the other property reportedly purchased by Rowan’s LLCs is already preserved.
“Those guys — they’re gonna want exclusivity. They’re going to want privacy and they’re going to want just very nicely built homes,” said Mr. Terry. “But Cove Beach is done.”
Greenport — the North Fork’s City
Mr. Terry has just begun to work as a consultant to the Village of Greenport, which has received a grant to update its Local Waterfront Revitalization Plan. The village is also weighing code changes to make it easier to build affordable housing downtown.
“There’s a lot of excitement in Greenport to see what the next steps are going to be with commercial property,” he said. “It’s not unique to Greenport. It is based on a nationwide problem about the erosion of Main Street, and trying to figure out what to sell to be competitive with the warehouses and the box stores. Five years ago, there weren’t all these massive warehouses around us. People have to be really careful in how they enter retail these days.”
He said the work ahead for the village is “going to be about coming up with a mixture of uses for Main Street. Take a building and try to figure out the mainstay uses, and where, realistically, there is housing. You could have trade uses and retail uses in the same building, and then if one vanishes for a while, you have all the other ones pulling their weight.”
One of the first projects on his plate in Greenport is to make it easier for homeowners to convert existing accessory structures to be rented out on an affordable basis.
For a small seaside village like Greenport, a Local Waterfront Revitalization Plan (LWRP) can serve like a Comprehensive Plan — laying out goals for future development. Mr. Terry, who in his role at Southold Town had been the only certified LWRP coordinator in New York State, said he’s looking forward to taking on that role in Greenport.
“A lot of it is natural resource management, adapting to where we built historically and the new stressors on the land here, along with water quality,” he said. “All that needs to be wrapped into a comprehensive document.”
“Greenport was a shining star with its LWRP program, early on,” he said. “They prioritized access to the waterfront, and built Mitchell Park, and were obtaining [grant] money to keep it going. That stuff is just a good investment, not only for the residents, but for the tourist economy.”
Cove Beach in East Marion (The surveyor’s stake is the end of the subdivision)
“People are Choosing the North Fork”
Mr. Terry says he sees many parallels between the village’s LWRP work and other major planning initiatives, like Southold Town’s Community Housing Plan and Comprehensive Plan.
“I like identifying short and long term priorities, and then identifying the funding for all the priorities,” he said. “That’s going through the process of just checking off the short-term priorities that can be done, even if it’s answering someone in the public who needs help with something — a sign, a speed limit, a parking area. When you address those short-term priorities, you can make a better quality of life for people.”
While there has been much public fretting about the way the North Fork is changing, Mr. Terry thinks planners here have been able to keep what’s special about this place intact.
“The North Fork has its challenges, and it’s always good to talk about these things,” he said. “But there have been leaps and bounds in preserving the North Fork and planning the North Fork. One of the reasons people think it’s such a desirable place to live is because it is this way.”
“People who could live anywhere in the world are choosing the North Fork. And that’s a testament to us,” he said. “I think it’s a testament to all the great things that have occurred on the North Fork, going back to its extraordinary scenic beauty in the artist colonies, back in the late 1800s, and going through to the 1940s. It was and it should be celebrated.”
“I think that the fear of overdevelopment, that the sky is falling, is a little bit oversold,” he added. “There are so many checks and balances in the systems that are designed to mitigate the impacts.”
Workforce & Housing are a Must
The bigger challenge, he thinks, is going to be creating housing for people who grew up here and who want to work here, and creating jobs that will pay well enough to keep them here.
“The Community Housing Fund was a catalyst that’s going to help, but having been in housing for so long, trying to get units on the ground, it seemed the framework was not there,” he said. “When people would come in and want to build housing, we’d try to help them out, but there would always be hurdles.”
[Southold Town’s] new Community Housing Plan “really speeds out all those short and long-term goals,” he said. “Now they just need to implement it.”
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