“The car show goes on,” Riverhead Supervisor Sean Walter declared on Friday afternoon.
“This is a cruise night for a respectable group of men and women who come to town to show off their cars and patronize our businesses. I’ll be darned if I’m ever going to tell them they’re not welcome here,” Walter said Friday afternoon.
Walter’s comments were made in respone to a May 23 email message from Riverhead Business Improvement District Management Association vice president Martin Sendlewski to fellow BIDMA board members in which Sendlewski, chairman of a committee charged with overseeing the weekly event, advocated abandoning it.
In his email, Sendlewsksi cited complaints by business owners about lack of parking and concerns raised about liability issues.
The owners of restaurants and shops lining the western municipal parking lot, where the Thursday night “cruise nights” have been staged the past three summers, signed a petition delivered to the BIDMA asking that the event be relocated.
“I no longer support BID sponsorship or involvement with cruise night and recommend that the Chapter 90 application be withdrawn,” Sendlewski wrote the day after the BIDMA board meeting at which board members voted to move the event farther east, behind the vacant former Swezey’s Department Stores building. Sendlewski was present for the meeting and a vote taken to change the site of the events, and did not voice objection to the move east; nor did he advocate canceling the event.
The next morning, he made that suggestion via email and in the same message said anyone who didn’t agree and wanted cruise nights to continue should feel free to take repsonsibility for it.
After publication of a story about the dispute on RiverheadLOCAL, Walter said he was deluged with emails and messages from people worried the cruise nights, scheduled to officially begin May 30, would be canceled, as Sendlewski suggested.
“Not happening,” he said. “Unfortunately, some want to take their ball and go home because they did nt get their way,” Walter said Friday. “But we’re not going to let that happen.”
Sendlewski could not be reached for comment Friday and did not return a call seeking comment Thursday.
The supervisor recalled the day in Wading River when, speaking to the classic car enthusiasts who were being asked to leave the King Kullen shopping center on Route 25A, he said, “I stood on somebody’s tailgate and said give downtown Riverhead a try. Well these folks came and they are the sparks that made this town ignite.”
“Whatver I have to to do to keep them coming here, I will,” Walter said.
BIDMA president Ray Pickersgill, who both organized the weekly cruise nights since they arrived downtown and signed the petition seeking their relocation, said Friday, “There has to be some rules.”
“First, no drinking in the parking lot,” he said, noting he’s heard complaints about people bringing alcoholic beverages to the parking lot.
“Second, no cars on trailers.
“Third, no straight pipes revving their engines, which makes it unpleasant for those nearby,” Pickersgill said.
The exhibit area will be moved to the east, behind the old Swezey’s, as agreed by the BIDMA board Wednesday. A portion of the riverfront drive may also be blocked off, he said.
“We have 159 spots and most weeks, we get about 100 cars,” Pickersgill said. “So we’ll be fine.”
RiverheadLOCAL file photo by Peter Blasl
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