The Riverhead Town Board unanimously voted Wednesday evening to postpone a vote to adopt its Comprehensive Plan Update to its Sept. 4 meeting.
Pictured Above: The Riverhead Town Board at a May 20 public hearing on the Comprehensive Plan Update.
Town Supervisor Tim Hubbard announced at the start of the special meeting, which was called solely to adopt the plan, that “within the past 45 minutes we realized an issue with what was posted online. It was not correct. We need to amend it to make it correct and put the adoption off for two weeks.”
“We also got a lot of complaints from people that they didn’t have time to digest this, so it actually is a blessing in disguise,” he added. It will give people a lot more time to go through it. It’s thick. There’s a lot of reading in it.”
The Comprehensive Plan Update has been in the works for more than four years. Public hearings on the plan and its Environmental Impact Statement were held in May of this year, and the town adopted the Final Generic Environmental Impact Statement (FGEIS) on the document Aug. 6.
The changes to the Comprehensive Plan Update made since the public hearing are included in the FGEIS, which is posted on the town’s Comprehensive Plan Update website, but the final draft of actual plan has not yet been posted to the website, though town officials said they plan to post it imminently on the home page.
“The final document was not made available to the public in a timely manner,” Riverhead Town Community Development Director Dawn Thomas explained before the board voted to table the adoption. “We will post the right, final version, and the public will have a couple weeks to review it. There is nothing in the final version that has not been available since Aug. 6.
The changes can currently be found on pages 13 through 27 of the FGEIS, which is found by scrolling to the bottom of the “Documents” page of the town’s Comprehensive Plan Update website.
Changes include removing numerous references to “considering short term rentals in some areas,” ‘reviewing’ instead of lifting the 500 unit apartment cap downtown, changes to the language regarding vertical farms and ensuring that renewable energy regulations mirror NYSERDA’s guidelines for facilities like solar farms. While private schools have been removed as a proposed use in industrial areas, assisted living facilities have been added as a potential use allowed by special permit.
Mr. Hubbard said anyone who wishes to find the information can call town hall and staff there “would be happy to walk people through it.”
“Our town website is horrible. We are aware of that,” he said. “We’re looking at companies to review that. I think it’s one of the worst websites I’ve seen.”
He added that the Comprehensive Plan is a series of recommendations of steps the town can take to plan its future, and individual zoning changes within the plan would have to be vetted through a public hearing process.
Several residents came to the podium before the vote to ask questions about the comprehensive plan process, and to ask the board if it could change the time of the Sept. 4 meeting, which will be held at 2 p.m. on the first day of school in Riverhead.
Ms. Thomas said the town is required to vote on adopting the plan between 10 and 30 days after accepting the FGEIS, and the Sept. 4 date is 29 days after it was accepted.
John McAuliff asked that the board remove all sections of the document that pertain to “agritourism resorts,” a proposal that has been the subject of great public backlash in recent weeks and was not vetted during community discussions before the Comprehensive Plan was unveiled. The board will hold a separate public forum on a proposed zoning change to allow agritourism resorts on Sept. 18 at 6 p.m.
“You would save yourself and us a lot of anxiety if you withdrew all the agritourism resort stuff and took it out of what you’re going to present on the 4th,” he said, adding that that section “didn’t come out of the organic process of the Comprehensive Plan.”
“I agree this is a list of recommendations, but it is also more than that,” he added. “We spent a lot of money, time and effort on something that’s much less than we thought it was going to be. Five or ten years from now, that’s going to be the Comprehensive Plan, and all this discussion that’s going into it, all the discussion that can happen on the 4th, won’t make any difference if it’s not reflected in a change of text to the Comprehensive Plan.”
