Southold Town has announced it will hold a community meeting to discuss the town’s new strategy to enact a zoning update on Thursday, June 11 from 6:30 to 8 p.m. at the Peconic Lane Recreation Center.
A first draft of the zoning update, prepared by an outside consultant, received a massive amount of public feedback last summer, and after parting ways with its consultant, Southold is now planning to prioritize adopting certain portions of the zoning update one at a time in the upcoming months.
The town says planners will discuss “how we plan to use the input we have already gathered, and what priorities the Town Board is considering moving forward” at the meeting
At a May 5 Town Board work session on the topic, board members seemed keen on prioritizing community housing, changes to the town’s 2022 “big house” law, zoning for hotels and a land clearing code.
Southold Town Planning Director Heather Lanza outlined the “proposal to restructure the zoning update project” to the Town Board at its April 21 work session, after a lengthy meeting to set priorities with the town’s Zoning Update Advisory Committee April 18.
She said the town’s decision last summer to part ways with its zoning consultant, ZoneCo, made updating the code incrementally in-house a more feasible goal than adopting the entire update at once.
“It was originally conceived as ‘we do it all at once,’ and that made sense when we had a consultant,” said Ms. Lanza.”We ID’d major changes that were needed, based on public input, and when it became clear the outside consultant had taken us as far as they could go, the approach of comprehensively revising it all at once has proven to be impractical.”
She added that a frequent comment she heard from the public during “charettes” with the community was that “this is a lot to digest.”
The town says it plans to make the June 11 meeting available via Zoom, and is asking people interested in the project to check for updates at https://southoldzoningupdate.com/latest-news.
According to that webpage, “the Zoning Update Project, as originally conceived, aimed to comprehensively revise the entire zoning code in a single effort. We made good progress towards this goal with a draft that went out for public review in 2025. We identified some major changes needed to that draft based on the public input. When it became apparent that our outside consultant had taken the project as far as they could, we chose to revise it with Town staff.”
“The approach of comprehensively revising the entire zoning chapter all at once has proven to be impractical for a small municipality with limited staff and resources,” the update adds. “Accordingly, the Town Board is restructuring the project into a series of smaller, more manageable phases.The next step is to identify and prioritize the key areas of the zoning code to address first.Priorities will be chosen that advance community goals and the Town’s Comprehensive Plan, as well as some corrections to the code where there are inconsistencies.”
The Southold Town Recreation Center is at 970 Peconic Lane in Peconic.
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