Dunleavy calls for incorporated ‘downtown’ Riverhead village

It takes a village.

That’s the opinion of Councilman John Dunleavy, who says he believes the key to downtown revitalization lies in establishing an incorporated village that will straddle the Riverhead-Southampton town lines to encompass downtown Riverhead, Riverside, Northampton and Flanders.

“You need all the adjoining areas to get this going,” Dunleavy said in an interview. The Riverside-Northampton-Flanders area is really already part of Riverhead, Dunleavy said.  

Dunleavy is calling for the formation of a committee to explore the possibility of incorporating a downtown village.

“Villages revitalize downtowns. We’ve seen it in lots of other places,” he said.

But the councilman’s concept got no support from his fellow Riverhead Town Board members.

“I view it as another level of government that would probably cost the taxpayers more money,” Supervisor Sean Walter said.

“We’re going to revitalize Main Street and it’s not going to take a village to do it,” Walter said.

The supervisor’s concerns about increasing the taxpayers’ burden was echoed by board members.  

“With a village mayor comes a village planning board, a village building department, a village clerk, village police,” said Councilwoman Jodi Giglio, who has an ownership interest in a downtown Riverhead development, Summer Wind on Peconic Avenue.

“It’s another layer of government and it would only increase property taxes,” she said.

Giglio said even the incorporation process would be costly. “I spoke to a lawyer about it and he said his fee alone would be $45,000,” she said.

“You’d certainly have to do a feasibility study to let the property owners know what their taxes would be,” she said, adding, “if the property owners want to incorporate I wouldn’t want to stop them.”

“It might be a good idea, but I think it’s the wrong time,” Councilman George Gabrielsen said. “It’s another whole level of bureaucracy. Somebody’s going to have to pay for it,”  he said.

Dunleavy believes it would not necessarily result in increased taxes. The village mayor and trustees can serve without pay, as they do in other villages, Dunleavy said. And large portions of the likely area of the village, the boundaries of which would need to be determined, are already in Riverhead’s water and sewer districts, he said.

“You can get more done when you’re concentrating on a localized area,” said  downtown businessman Raymond Pickersgill, president of the Riverhead Business Improvement District Management Association. “Maybe the BID tax would be replaced by the village tax, so maybe there wouldn’t be an increase,” he said. But, he said, he is skeptical.

Councilman James Wooten, who lives downtown, said the concept was not a new one.

“Ten years ago they were looking at it,” Wooten said. “It died a natural death because it was way too cost-prohibitive.”

Wooten said Main Street’s empty storefronts and absentee landlords make a sustainable village even more difficult.

“What do you think the socioeconomics of this village would be,” asked Supervisor Sean Walter.

Ultimately, whether or not a village will be created, or even put to a vote, depends on residents  and property owners within the proposed village boundaries. Under state law, a village drawn to take in parts of Riverhead, Riverside, Northampton and Flanders, which are located in two different towns, would be limited to a five square mile area.

The incorporation process starts with a petition, which must be signed by either 20 percent of the residents of the proposed village or 50 percent of the owners of real property in the proposed village. The petition would be filed with each of the towns, and the town supervisors would have to convene a public hearing on the petition. If the supervisors determine that the petition is legally sufficient, a vote would be held in which every resident eligible to vote for town officers would be eligible to vote. If a majority of the votes cast is for incorporation, the new village is born.

Dunleavy said he would ask the RiveheadTown Board to set up a committee to look into the viability of a downtown village.