Battle lines drawn in Jamesport: ‘The only thing left is the fight’

The coalition group calling itself “Save Main Road” has hired attorneys to challenge Riverhead Town’s April 3 approval of special permits for The Village at Jamesport.

“At this point, the only thing left is the fight,” Larry Simms of South Jamesport, a vocal opponent of the proposed 42,000-square-foot Main Road commercial development, told a Saturday morning gathering of about 40 people at the Jamesport Meeting House.

“In many ways this is a lawless town,” Simms said. “The problem is not just about this project. It’s about the whole process. The mission here is to change the way Riverhead does business.”

Simms said he has retained the Northern Environmental Law Center in Sag Harbor to pursue an Article 78 petition seeking to overturn the special permit approvals, which Simms said fail to meet the minimum legal standards required by law.

The law firm was recommended by Bob DeLuca of Group for the East End, who also attended Saturday’s meeting. “They really get it,” Simms said.

DeLuca announced a matching, dollar-for-dollar grant by the Group for the East End for all donations to the “Save Main Road” legal fund. Organizers took up a collection at the meeting and raised $1,300 on the spot.

“We don’t do this lightly,” Simms said. “We don’t look at this cascade of errors and mistakes and say ‘Let’s sue these guys.’ 

“We did everything we could to avoid it,” he said. 

“Richard Wines did everything that could have been done to slow this down and get them to look at this more carefully. Jen Hartnagel [of the Group for the East End] did everything that could have been done to get us a proper public hearing.

“Instead we walk into a room where the supervisor is horse-trading with the developer’s attorney, who’s standing in the back of the room, to add a condition to the permit that the developer said he agreed to years ago,” Simms said. “Why wasn’t it in there in the first place,” he asked, referring to the condition that the “bistros” would have table service by wait staff, thereby precluding the possibility of fast-food restaurants.

Simms said the rationale articulated by board members before voting to approve the permits did not match up with the State Environmental Quality Review Act findings statement previously adopted by the board or even with the provisions of the resolutions they voted to approve. The findings statement itself did not accurately reflect the environmental study that was done, he said.

The Jamesport-South Jamesport Civic Association has also hired an attorney to represent its interests before the town planning board during the site plan review process. Civic president Georgette Keller said the organization has hired attorney Hermon Bishop of Westhampton to advocate for it during the site plan review, starting with seeking a public hearing on the plan. The town board recently revised town code to require public hearings on all new site plan applications, but did not extend the requirement to applications that had already been filed. The decision whether or not to have a public hearing on The Village at Jamesport site plan is left to the discretion of the planning board, she said.

The civic group is circulating petitions to demand a public hearing on the site plan, and Keller distributed petition forms to the people attending the meeting.

“It’s not clear what the town’s policy and procedure is for requesting a site plan hearing, or if they even have a procedure,” Keller said. “So we’re collecting signatures on the petition and asking people to write letters requesting a public hearing.” She said anyone writing letters to anyone in town hall should send copies of all correspondence to the Riverhead Town Clerk.

The Group for the East End has agreed to receive donations for “Save Main Road” legal defense fund, which allows contributions to be tax-deductible, Keller said. 

The organization will keep the money in a separate fund earmarked for “Save Main Road,” said DeLuca, a former resident of Jamesport and Aquebogue who said he is familiar with “how things are done or not done in the Town of Riverhead.” The Group for the South Fork, predecessor of the Group for the East End, was formed because opposition to a proposed commercial development in Bridgehampton galvanized “people like you who said this is not the future of the East End.”

Editor’s note: A previously published version of this article had duplicated text due to an editing error.