When the Southold Town Board unanimously approved a tweak to its 2022 “big house law” Tuesday evening, it bit off just the tip of the iceberg of a major overhaul of its zoning code that has suffered setbacks since an early draft was rolled out last spring.
The big house code limited house size based on a calculation known as gross floor area (GFA), which limited the GFA of a house based on the size of a lot, but the method the town used to calculate GFA has confounded homeowners and design professionals ever since, leading many applicants to need to turn to the town’s Zoning Board of Appeals for relief.
It’s an expensive process that has confounded homeowners, builders, architects and the ZBA itself.
Pictured Above: A large house under construction several years ago on New Suffolk Avenue, as the big house code was being finalized.
The change, suggested by Zoning Board Chairwoman Leslie Weisman last fall, removed a section of the code that requires that variances not “exceed the average gross floor area of dwellings in the immediate area.”
Her argument for the change — the code as written lacks a definition of what the immediate neighborhood is, and getting neighbors to grant access to their houses so that their neighbors’ architects can calculate the gross floor area of their houses is “almost impossible and an invasion of privacy. You don’t want everyone in town knowing what the inside of your house looks like.”
Ms. Weisman said at the Town Board public hearing on the change Tuesday evening, Jan. 13, that she sees the change “as a small interim step, a minor code modification, that will make things simpler to administer.”
The hearing was a rare occasion in which Ms. Weisman and attorney Patricia Moore, who often appears on behalf of her clients before the town’s land use boards, agreed.
“I want to commend Leslie. Her eloquent comments are right on target,” said Ms. Moore at the hearing. But she urged the board to go further in changing the GFA calculation, which she said also currently penalizes homeowners with cathedral ceilings and attached garages.
“They shouldn’t have to get a variance because they have a cathedral ceiling or a garage,” said Ms. Moore, who added that her own home has a cathedral ceiling that would fall victim to this code calculation. “That was not the purpose of the code, and it should be addressed immediately…. We have a lot of local people who are trying to do some relatively minor renovations” who are affected by the code.
Ms. Moore added that she’s seen an unusually large number of demolition permits issued recently by the town’s Building Department, which she’s been told by the Building Department is because the town’s definition of ‘demolition’ applies to anything greater than 50 percent of the value of a structure. The town is currently basing the formula for construction values at a cost of $500 per square foot, she said.
“We have not revised the definition to meet our current economic conditions,” she said. “I don’t think any of us anticipated that.”
George Cork Maul of New Suffolk, a retired builder and the treasurer of the New Suffolk Civic Association, said he believes the big house code should include an absolute maximum square footage.
“We need to add a line like ‘no house in Southold should be larger than 10,000 square feet,'” he said. “We have to consider the possibility of a very large house on a very large lot where there’s a neighborhood around the lot. I think that would destroy neighborhoods and be detrimental to the North Fork… If we’re going to protect our neighborhoods, we should also consider maximum house size. Any day now, someone could come and plop down an application for a monstrosity and that would not be appreciated by the residents.”
Editor’s Note: Mr. Maul is the Creative Director for the East End Beacon, a non-editorial role.
Mr. Maul also advocated for the town’s volunteer Zoning Update Advisory Committee (ZUAC) to play a larger role in the zoning update, pointing out that the committee, which formed more than two years ago, had initially been actively engaged, but after being put on hiatus during delays in the release of the initial draft, seems to have lost steam.
The town’s application for state grant funding for the project said the ZUAC would be charged with overseeing the Zoning Update process, he said, playing more than just an advisory role.
He said the ZUAC’s meeting scheduled for Jan. 12 had been cancelled due to the workload pressures faced by the town’s Planning Department, which was preparing for its regular work session and meeting that evening.
Mr. Maul said that everyone in the Planning Department “works really hard. They’re really efficient. They do a great job and they’re very overworked. I’m sure that everybody knows that.”
Ms. Weisman and architect Bruce Nelligan, both members of the Design Subcommittee of the ZUAC, have begun running analyses of how the new code will work in practice, work that Mr. Maul said seems to be productive.
Dr. Kathy Agoglia of Laurel also asked whether the town can do more to protect trees, after many in her neighborhood received pamphlets from a neighboring golf course alerting them that the golf course would be taking down trees, and offering to remove trees on neighbors’ properties in exchange for receiving the wood.
“I’m not necessarily a tree hugger, but I didn’t come out here from Brooklyn to be subject to the complete destruction of the environment out here,” she said. “I see this as a complete disregard for the environment as it stands, just because the tee greens are not getting enough air flow.”
“We have been working on a tree code for many years, and we haven’t gotten it off the ground,” agreed Councilwoman Jill Doherty, the Town Board liaison to the town’s Tree Committee, which proposed a tree clearing code more than a year ago that hasn’t yet been adopted. She added that, outside of site plan and subdivision applications before the Planning Board, “right now there’s nothing that the town could do if somebody wants to cut down a tree in their yard. The Tree Committee is done with it, and it’s in the Town Board’s hands.”
“Thank you for your advocacy in trying to make the code better,” Town Supervisor Al Krupski told the attendees at the meeting. “I think the Town Board is willing to consider changes outside of the zoning update. We have to at this point.”
“The Zoning Update is like a puzzle with a thousand pieces,” he added. “This is why the board should be considering changes sooner than later.”
The Town Board also agreed at its work session Tuesday morning to set a Code Committee meeting for Thursday, Jan. 29 at 2 p.m. to work to draft a new Short-Term Rental Code, based on suggestions made by the town’s Short-Term Rental Task Force in August of 2024.
The Town Board will also hold a public hearing on a proposed new cell tower code at its Feb. 10 meeting at 6 p.m., drafted after receiving feedback from the community in a survey last fall.
Read Our Full Coverage of the Southold Zoning Update
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