Southold Town’s nearly two-year-old moratorium on considering applications for new hotels may expire this June, as the town begins to prioritize adopting aspects of its zoning update piece by piece.
Community housing, an update to the town’s 2022 big house law and a tree clearing code have also emerged as priorities.
The hotel moratorium, in place since June of 2024, ends June 18, 2026, in the midst of the town’s new enforcement efforts against illegal short-term rentals.
The town announced the new enforcement efforts last week in advance of a new lottery system allowing a limited number of short-term rentals. Public hearings on that code, which could go into effect as early as next year, are expected later this year.
Southold Planning Director Heather Lanza told the Town Board at its May 5 work session that the new short-term rental regulations will “result in a significant decrease in available transient rental units, something on the order of a 60 to 70 percent decrease,” leaving 600 or 700 fewer transient rental units throughout town.
“To fill that gap and support our tourist industry and local businesses, we’ll need more hotel rooms,” said Ms. Lanza. “A continued moratorium isn’t something we’re recommending.”
One major hotel project, at the former Capital One Bank headquarters on the Main Road just west of downtown Mattituck, has already received an exemption from the moratorium.
Ms. Lanza said the Planning Department has done “quite a bit of work” on developing its code updates regarding hotels over the past few years, as part of the zoning update process.
The Town Board agreed two weeks ago to prioritize enacting pieces of the zoning update as stand-alone code changes, after a proposed massive overhaul of the code suffered several delays and was met with much public concern after a draft was unveiled in the spring of 2025.
“This is a priority you might want to consider,” said Ms. Lanza of updating the hotel code.
With members of the town’s Zoning Update Advisory Committee, she also laid out other priorities, including community housing, improving the town’s big house law and creating design standards for non-residential development.
Priorities she listed in a memo also included revising the code to better support agriculture and marina businesses, supporting water conservation and quality and coastal resilience, and a section dedicated to definitions that will be used consistently throughout the code.
Here’s Ms. Lanza’s memo to the board.
Among the changes Ms. Lanza said the Planning Department is considering are requiring housing for a percentage of hotel employees, requiring hotels on Marine II-zoned properties that have an existing marina to retain the marina use and not allowing hotels outside of hamlet centers except “in cases of adaptive reuse.”
Ms. Lanza said the project involving the reconstruction of the Capital One Bank headquarters is an example of adaptive reuse.
She said the changes to hotels in marine districts are “to prevent the loss of marinas,” and that the town would “work with local marina owners to see how to craft those regulations to see how that works for them to support the marina business.”
She added that hotels are currently permitted in the Limited Business zoning district but it’s the only district without a minimum lot size, an oversight she would like to correct.
She also recommended the town create its own Industrial Development Agency to control whether hotels can receive property tax abatements.
The Enclaves hotel in Southold recently received tax abatements from the Suffolk County Industrial Development Agency, over the objection of Southold elected officials and many members of the public here.
Councilwoman Anne Smith said she’s concerned what will happen with applications that come in after the moratorium expires but before the new zoning is put in place.
“We have to do this soon,” she said.
Town Attorney Ben Johnson agreed.
“That’s why we’re pulling this out,” he said.
Town Supervisor Al Krupski said people who want to build hotels may wait for the new zoning, particularly if they want to house their employees on-site, which they can’t do under the existing zoning.
“So, would we be just allowing it to fade off into the sunset in June?” asked Councilwoman Kate Stevens of the moratorium.
Mr. Krupski said “it will be clear we’re not extending it” when no notices of public hearing about a moratorium extension are sent out this month.
Other Zoning Update Priorities
Ms. Lanza was joined in person by Zoning Update Advisory Committee (ZUAC) members Pat Kirkpatrick and Leslie Weisman, who is also the town’s Zoning Board of Appeals chair, to discuss prioritizing aspects of the Zoning Update. ZUAC members Bruce Nelligan and George Kewin also joined via Zoom.
“We obviously cannot do all of this as once, but some things can be concurrent,” said Ms. Lanza, adding that the priorities are designed to “get this done in house, with our limited staff, in a way that’s most digestible for everybody.”
She added that several volunteer committees and groups of town staff are hard at work on different aspects of the code update.
Ms. Lanza said a group of town employees, including planning staff, Community Development Project Supervisor Andrea Sullivan and the town attorneys, have “taken on the whole code” regarding community housing, and are planning a whole new code chapter dedicated just to housing.
“Housing is, I think, everyone’s number one priority,” said Mr. Krupski. “Beyond that it’s logistics — making sure the staff can take that on.”
Ms. Weisman said changes to the town’s 2022 big house law “are very, very close. You have already approved some tweaks to that that have allowed us to at least tread water while we’re looking at the bigger picture. I think that’s one we could do very soon. I think we’re ready to present a draft.”
“People are still saying — what happened there? That house is really big. I don’t know what that means,” said Mr. Krupski. “How is the board going to make a decision that these are quantifiable changes that allow us to maintain the character of the community?”
Ms. Lanza said the ZUAC has done some three-dimensional modeling of the new code that will help the Town Board and the public visualize those changes.
Ms. Weisman said one of the big issues found when interns working for the town with ZUAC member and architect Bruce Nelligan ran the models, is the town has “an unbelievable percentage of non-conforming lots. We never had the database. Now we do. That’s a big step forward.”
The models found that 71 percent of the 17,000 lots in Southold Town are not conforming with the existing zoning code.
Ms. Kirkpatrick added that the committee has also looked at individual newly built houses that have surprised the neighborhood to see what is causing the perception of oversized houses.
“I think most people agree affordable housing is the number one priority, and the big house law is so close to being completed, we have to put it higher up,” said Councilwoman Alexa Suess. “Community housing is complicated and will take a while, but the big house law won’t take as long.”
Councilwoman Kate Stevens recommended involving the town’s volunteer committees, including its water quality and agriculture committees, more deeply in the zoning update project.
Ms. Lanza suggested the town hold a “single, informative forum that explains how we’re changing the way we’re going to do this project.”
“The past public input wasn’t a waste at all,” said Mr. Krupski. “We’re using all that public input. Those were good community-building exercises.”
“A public meeting would be really helpful,” he added.
“Each section is really in-depth,” said Ms. Kirkpatrick. “We’re able to break it up and go in depth, which is going to help the public to understand why it took so long and why it all matters.”
Appetite for a Tree Code?
At the work session, Mr. Krupski also passed around a copy of a land clearing code currently under consideration by Southampton Town, and asked board members if they were interested in drafting something similar here.
Southampton’s proposal, he said, is “based on square footage of clearing allowed without a permit.”
“This is coming up a lot. It’s important,” said Councilwoman Smith.
Councilwoman Doherty said she believed Ms. Lanza and Building Inspector Mike Verity may already be working on a land clearing code.
Councilman Brian Mealy said the town’s Conservation Advisory Council is also working on a land clearing code, and while “Southold is different than Southampton,” he has been following the community discussion in Southampton and believes it’s a conversation that should happen here as well.
The North Fork Environmental Council sent out an email blast asking its members to show up in support of the tree code in advance of Tuesday’s meeting.
“During WinterFest we were asking all the folks that stopped by our table about trees, and people came up to us and said ‘they’re clearing everything in my neighborhood,'” said the NFAC’s Southold Land Use Coordinator, Anne Murray, at the board’s regular meeting Tuesday evening. “We got 85 people who want to take action on getting the Town Board to make a tree code.”
She said the proposed tree clearing code “is an excellent place to start.”
“You will find a lot of people showing up to talk about this issue,” she said.
Sharon Kelly of Cutchogue asked the town to prioritize protection of keystone native trees, like oaks, which “support biodiversity and quite a bit of wildlife that are threatened by all the invasive species that nurseries are still selling.”
Mr. Krupski said a tree code proposed in 2024 was “a complicated matter and it was difficult to administer and a lot of other things became more of a priority…. We need something that can be enforced. The tree code was going to be very difficult to comply with and to enforce. This is something we will be bringing out to the public soon when it’s polished up for Southold Town, but I hope we can get people to support it. You’ve seen a lot of clearing that has taken place because there’s nothing in the code preventing it.”
Read Our Ongoing Coverage of the Southold Zoning Update
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