by Beth Young
One year after Southold Town released a first draft of a massive overhaul of the town’s zoning code that received massive amounts of public feedback last summer, the town is now planning to make the changes incrementally.
They’ll be focusing first on priority areas that will likely include community housing, changes to the town’s big house law, and potentially specific areas of the code including hotels and marine uses. Work is already underway on zoning for cell towers and short term rental regulations, and Battery Energy Storage Systems are likely to be a focus as well.
A full list of priorities is expected to be established in the upcoming weeks.
Pictured Above: Town Council members Anne Smith and Brian Mealy heard from Planning Director Heather Lanza at the Town Board’s April 21 work session.
Southold Town Planning Director Heather Lanza outlined a “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.”
Read Ms. Lanza’s report to the Town Board.
Read Our Ongoing Coverage of the Southold Zoning Update
Town Board on Board
Town Board members were receptive to the new approach.
“The majority of us weren’t here when the Town Board hired the consultant,” said Town Supervisor Al Krupski. “But we ended up with what we had today.”
He ticked off the town’s work on a new short-term rental code, cell towers and public outreach on community housing and subdivisions as a sign that the incremental approach is already underway.
The Town Board also unanimously approved the third extension of a moratorium on Battery Energy Storage Systems Tuesday evening, April 21. The extension of that moratorium required a supermajority vote of the Town Board to override the Suffolk County Planning Commission’s opposition to the extension. The moratorium is in place as the town develops new BESS code based on changes to the New York State fire code adopted last year. The existing town code, and the town’s 2020 Comprehensive Plan, are currently silent on BESS because they predate the widespread use of this technology.
Councilman Brian Mealy said he believed the charettes were an important step in “the community educating us about what their needs are.”
Mr. Mealy, also a liaison to some of the town’s environmental committees, plugged the inclusion of aquifer protection and coastal resiliency overlay districts, which were originally left out of the zoning update because maps of these areas were not yet available.
“We needed the whole structure first, before we started picking at the little things,” said Councilwoman Jill Doherty. “Now we have to get into the detail on individual questions.”
Councilwoman Anne Smith said she would like to see an analysis of what town planners learned from the public at last year’s forums — the Planning Department has been categorizing and analyzing the public comments since last year, and was unsuccessful in an attempt to use artificial intelligence to analyze that data.
Councilwoman Kate Stevens, new on the board this year, said that, while it makes sense to break up the project so that the public and the board can focus on individual issues, she’s concerned that the overall picture, and how different areas overlap, may be lost in this approach.
Ms. Lanza said those overlapping concerns are all guided by the town’s 2020 Comprehensive Plan, on which the zoning update was based, “which calls for balance in all these areas.”
Ms. Stevens added that breaking the project into chunks might alleviate the community’s “sense of a blockage, that things can’t be done because the code is being updated.”
Ms. Lanza recommended that the board not adopt the zoning update map that was included with the original draft — the board has already agreed to reverse many of ZoneCo’s recommendations for a swath of name changes of zoning districts.
“People are still mad about that zoning map,” she said.
“I think it was necessary — it got the conversation going,” said Ms. Doherty.
Councilwoman Alexa Suess, who is also new to the board this year, urged Ms. Lanza to communicate the message about the town’s new approach to the public clearly.
“We have to take it on the road — go to the civics, the chambers and ask people for their priorities,” agreed Mr. Krupski.
Ms. Lanza said she’s planning to outline the new approach on the town’s Zoning Update website and advertise the changes.
She said the town still has money available from a $338,000 New York State grant for the Zoning Update, after paying ZoneCo $172,000.
“I’ve brought up the topic of restructuring to the state and they seemed open,” she said, adding that the town would need to submit an updated work plan to the state for approval.
Ms. Lanza also recommended the town bring in the Zoning Update Advisory Committee in the upcoming weeks for a special meeting with the Town Board to discuss priorities.
What Does the Zoning Update Advisory Committee Think?
Members of the Zoning Update Advisory Committee gave quick takes on their priorities at their April 18 meeting. Topping their list were community housing, updating the town’s big house law and regulations regarding hotels — the town enacted a one-year moratorium on applications for new hotels in June of 2024 in anticipation of changing rules regarding hotels in the zoning update, and has since extended that moratorium until June of 2026.
Ms. Lanza told the ZUAC she’s hearing “housing, housing, housing,” as a priority in her discussions with the community about the zoning update. She added that several sections of the existing code regarding housing have become outdated as the town began implementing its recent Community Housing Plan, and need to be updated.
“Making it a priority would give us the go-ahead to start working now,” she said.
The Town Board unanimously approved a tweak to the town’s Accessory Dwelling Unit code on Tuesday evening allowing ADUs in new structures.
ZUAC member Megan Hood urged the town to push the Suffolk County Health Department to make changes to its sanitary code to encourage community housing.
“It’s stopping housing diversity,” she said, adding that she hopes the Zoning Update “identifies areas where a sewer is a possibility and areas where people could develop and make that happen.”
Ms. Lanza added that the county has money available for septic upgrades for affordable housing.
A related proposal, to require community housing in conservation subdivisions, was also among ZUAC committee member Alvin Schein’s top priorities.
Greenport Mayor and ZUAC member Kevin Stuessi said that in addition to updating the hotel code, he’d like the zoning update to prioritize “marine zones and what’s happening on the water,” particularly in light of the sale of Port of Egypt to “a big private equity firm.”
“It’s obviously an incredibly environmentally sensitive area, where things are happening very fast,” he said.
ZUAC member Leslie Weisman, the chair of the town’s Zoning Board of Appeals, said she’s already working on changes to the town’s big house law to make it more useable.
She added that the ZBA is currently looking at “potential development on severely encumbered lots,” particularly lots that contain wetlands. She argued that the town should consider “the ability to sustain potable water in town” as a public benefit in setting its Community Preservation Fund land preservation priorities, in the interest of acquiring lots that perhaps shouldn’t be developed.
“Maybe there’s such a thing as an unbuildable lot,” she said.
“I don’t want to terrify people,” said Ms. Lanza. “I think we should be careful about that.”
Ms. Weisman countered that town officials are told to be careful about everything, but “change is just here.”
Ms. Weisman and ZUAC member Bruce Nelligan, an architect with Nelligan White Architects in New York City, added that they’ve heard that a lack of diversity of housing size in town has been a big concern. Mr. Schein, an attorney specializing in affordable housing law, said he’s been talking about this issue “from Day One.”
Last fall, after parting ways with ZoneCo, the Town Board had agreed to hire interns working in Mr. Nelligan’s office to run models of how the proposed changes to the Southold Town code would work with the properties that are actually here. Their initial analysis found that 71 percent of the 17,000 lots in town are already not conforming with the existing zoning code.
Mr. Nelligan said the perception of the public here that builders are maxxing out the size of houses being built is a reality across the country, pointing out that the online magazine Slate documented this phenomenon in a 2025 article, “How Giant White Houses Took Over America.”
“Under current zoning, these houses all have the same kind of character,” he said. “There are good economic reasons they’re being maxxed out — it’s considered the ‘highest and best use.’ There’s a tremendous pressure on builders and developers to max out each site.”
“We were all remarkably optimistic that a consultant could just wrap this up and we could smile and look at it,” said Mr. Nelligan. “This is a 23,000-person community, but it has all of the complexity of a much larger community. There is a necessity of breaking this into pieces.”
Read Our Ongoing Coverage of the Southold Zoning Update
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