The Riverhead Town Board unanimously adopted its Comprehensive Plan Update without language recommending agricultural resorts Wednesday afternoon, and has canceled a Sept. 18 public forum on the proposed resort zoning.
Pictured Above: Alfred Weissman Realty’s aerial view of the property north of Sound Avenue where they have proposed to build an agritourism resort.
Town Supervisor Tim Hubbard had announced late Tuesday that the board had agreed to remove the language from the Comprehensive Plan, as local civic and environmental groups, along with the Southold Town Supervisor planned a press conference in opposition to the resort zoning districts outside Riverhead Town Hall just ahead of the Riverhead Town Board’s meeting. The groups canceled the press conference after Mr. Hubbard’s announcement.
The proposal, which would have allowed “agritourism resorts” on the bluffs overlooking the Long Island Sound on properties of 100 acres or more, if the property owner agreed to keep 70 percent of the property as farmland, has been much maligned by the community over the past nine months, after dogged reporting by staff at the website riverheadlocal.com revealed that developers planning just such a resort had offered to help the town write the code that would enable their project.
A crowd packed into the Town Hall meeting room Wednesday afternoon to air their other concerns with the Comprehensive Plan and to ask for clarification on what the removal of a recommendation for the agritourism resort code would mean.
“We removed everything having to do with agritourism resorts,” Mr. Hubbard told former Town Supervisor Laura Jens-Smith, now the head of the Greater Jamesport Civic Association, which has spearheaded the campaign against the resorts. He added that there’s no longer any reason for the Town Board to hold the forum on the resorts initially scheduled for Sept. 18 because “there’s no reason to discuss agritourism resorts because they don’t exists. There will be no further movement on agritourism resorts.”
“Everybody’s happy about it,” said Ms. Jens-Smith, whose group had gathered more than 2,500 signatures and spearheaded a letter writing campaign to the town board that yielded more than 120 letters opposing the proposal.
“I am too,” said Mr. Hubbard, who has acknowledged over the past several months that the public did not support the concept.
“I think it would have been disastrous for Riverhead’s future,” said Ms. Jens-Smith.
But other members of the Town Board made clear that, while they agreed at the last minute to remove the proposal from the Comprehensive Plan, they did not share the supervisor’s sentiment.
Councilwoman Denise Merrifield said the town is running out of tools to preserve farmland after bonding $72 million against future Community Preservation Fund revenues in 2015 to purchase farmland at that time. The town has already protected 8,800 acres of farmland, she said, but there are still 6,342 acres of farmland that are unpreserved.
Ms. Merrifield said, however, that preserved land is no longer on the tax rolls, and with the “increase in citizens in this town, the increase in taxes from residents is not enough to cover the cost. It’s commercial development that helps… To keep saying Sound Avenue is pristine and we have to keep it this way is ignoring the immense tax problems that are coming.”
Councilman Ken Rothwell, who has been pushing the effort throughout the year, said agritourism resorts could have generated about $300,000 per year in property tax revenue for the town.
He added that if Riverhead loses a lawsuit it recently filed to stop the Town of Southampton from establishing a sewer district in Riverside, “2,500 apartments could be coming into Flanders.”
“Agritourism was one tool for how do we solve the financial woes of the Town of Riverhead,” he said. “We need to find financial ways to move forward.”
Mr. Hubbard thanked Councilwoman Joann Waski for “working behind the scenes to get the support of the board to remove this from the Comprehensive Plan,” adding that, though he’d heard the public concern loud and clear, the town needs to expand its tax base while helping farmers.
“The bigger reality is — what are your taxes going to be?” he said. “Farmers are selling land because they’re not able to make a living doing traditional farming. We don’t want to preserve 6,300 acres and take it off the tax rolls — then nobody’s going to be able to live in the Town of Riverhead. But there has to be a happy medium.”
Several members of the public raised other issues with the final draft of the Comprehensive Plan before the board’s unanimous vote to approve it.
Joan Cear of Jamesport asked why the plan included recommendations to upzone several properties in Jamesport and Aquebogue owned by the same people, adding that if the changes were enacted “parcels throughout town could be spot rezoned. That’s a risky thing.”
She also raised concerns about the plan’s recommendation to remove the cap of 650 square feed for accessory dwelling units (ADUs), and replacing it with a rule that ADUs could be up to 40 percent of the size of the primary dwelling.
“If somebody builds a 4,000-square-foot house, which is not unusual these days, they’d be looking at an ADU in their backyard that’s 1,600 square feet. That’s about the size of my house,” she said. “To have it based on main dwelling size is a little bit excessive.”
Ms. Jens-Smith was also concerned about the rezoning proposed in Aquebogue and Jamesport.
“It strikes me as odd that BFJ (the consultants who prepared the Comprehensive Plan) would come up with these particular properties with non-conforming uses and make them conforming uses,” she said. “Are you aware of that? Does that raise any questions?”
“It’s pretty obvious we have business owners that have spoken out and requested that be done, and we listened to that and we decided to do it,” said Mr. Hubbard.
Cindy Clifford of the Heart of Riverhead Civic Association said the plan is still not clear about whether the town will pierce the cap of 500 apartments downtown, and said she is also concerned about the accessory dwelling unit changes.
Claudette Bianco said she believes potential warehouses in Calverton have not been adequately addressed in the plan, and added that “it shouldn’t have taken the community in an uproar” for the town board to rescind the agritourism resort recommendations.
Karen Kemp agreed that Calverton’s needs are not addressed in the plan.
“Proposing an area in Calverton being called the “Calverton Industrial District” — I think that’s such an awful thing to do to the people who live in Calverton,” she said. “You have farm stands, all along Middle Country Road on the north side, and on the south side is warehouses? That’s just terrible.”
Toqui Terchun, President of the Greater Calverton Civic Association, agreed, adding that terms like “urbanizing” and “urban area” shouldn’t be used to describe the rural hamlet of Calverton.
“We did not see inclusion of our concerns, nor hear reasons why they’re not included in this document,” she said.
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