Downtown business owners sign petition asking Thursday night cruise nights be relocated

Controversy over use of the Peconic River parking lot for classic car cruise nights every Thursday may scuttle the popular weekly event first introduced downtown in 2010, if the vice president of the BID Management Association has anything to say about it.

Architect Martin Sendlewski, BIDMA vice president and chairman of a committee formed to oversee the weekly “cruise nights” this year, says objections raised by business owners along the western municipal parking lot have led him to conclude the event should not go on.

Restaurant and shop owners along the western municipal lot have signed a petition demanding that the weekly car show be moved, complaining that it interferes with their customers’ use of the parking lot, which is owned by the Riverhead parking district.

The petition was delivered to the BID Management Association board of directors at yesterday’s meeting by board president Raymond Pickersgill, whose signature appeared among the 10 names affixed to the document.

After a brief discussion, the BIDMA board voted unanimously to relocate “cruise nights” farther east on the Peconic riverfront — behind the currently vacant Swezey’s Department Stores site and along the riverfront drive.

Sendlewski had planned to stage the “cruise nights” in the western lot, as it has been in years past. But the northern portion of that lot was to be rendered off-limits to car show participants by barricades and signage, reserving use of the spaces closest to the buildings for customers of the Main Street shops and restaurants. He was present at yesterday’s meeting and vote, and did not voice any objection to moving the location of the car shows to the east.

But this morning, Sendlewski emailed fellow board members to say he thinks that the cruise nights should be canceled.

“In light of the fact that a signed petition has been presented to the BID Board of Directors from downtown business owners indicating that the cruise night has had a negative effect on their businesses,” Sendlewski wrote, “I no longer support BID sponsorship or involvement with cruise night and recommend that the Chapter 90 application be withdrawn.”

Sendlewski went on to say in the email that the BIDMA should not sponsor an event that costs BID members business and raises liability issues. That “is contrary to the purpose and charter of the BID,” Sendlewski wrote.

“Should any other member feel compelled to continue with this event, please feel free to do so,” he concluded.

Pickersgill said he concluded from Sendlewski’s email that he’s no longer interested in chairing the event, which is officially set to begin again next week.

Sendlewski did not return a phone call seeking comment.

“I will continue to do it,” Pickersgill said of the weekly summer event. The BIDMA president has overseen arrangements for most of the BID’s special events since he became the organization’s president in 2010. The “cruise nights” began on the riverfront that year at the invitation of the BIDMA and the town, after the classic car enthusiasts, who’d been setting up in the King Kullen parking lot on Route 25A in Wading River, were asked by the landlord to clear out.

But the growing number of riverfront events — including, but not limited to the car shows — are have become too much for businesses in the downtown parking district to bear, said Dark Horse Restaurant owner Dee Muma. Properties in the parking district pay a special district tax to have and maintain the municipal parking lots downtown.

“It’s our parking lot. It’s our livelihood,” Muma said in a phone interview prior to yesterday’s meeting, which was held in a conference room at the Hyatt because the town hall meeting room was unavailable due to a town board meeting scheduled for yesterday evening. “We’re being told we can’t use it. And it seems like it’s happening more and more.”

To add insult to injury, Muma said, event organizers are signing up vendors — which pay the organizers — to sell food and beverages that the downtown businesses sell. That’s just not fair, Muma said.

Scheduling events in the riverfront lot was “a development tool for an area that was absolutley blank 20 years ago,” Muma said during yesterday’s BIDMA meeting. “It’s now succeeded. It’s time ot move on,” she said.