Bulldozers in the backyard: neighbors in shock over Costco land clearing

Some residents at Foxwood Village, a senior citizen community off Middle Road in Calverton, are walking around their backyards in stunned silence this week, shaking their heads and holding their faces in their hands.

They say they are in shock over the breadth and extent of land clearing on the adjacent 41-acre site where a Costco Wholesale Club, six other stores and a bank will be built pursuant to a site plan approved by the Riverhead planning board last fall.

Contractors have clear-cut the formerly wooded acreage behind their homes and have begun installing a six-foot fence along the property line.

“We didn’t realize they were going to clear right up to the property line like that and put a fence right on the line,” said Joan O’Shea this afternoon, as she watched bulldozers and backhoes remove the remains of tree stumps and their roots from the area behind her home of 18 years.

“It’s horrifying,” she said of the denuded landscape.

The developer got permission to clear the entire site, even though it can only build approximately half of the planned total buildout — unless and until it purchases farmland development rights to build the six more “big box” stores it eventually plans for the location. Town officials approved the developer’s request to clear the entire site up front, so it could use soils from part of the site to fill areas of low elevation on the portion of the site that will be built first.

“We don’t even know whether the rest of the site will be developed,” said a neighboring resident, Barbara Ross, yesterday.

The site plan approved by the planning board does not require any of the natural vegetation to be left intact as a buffer and calls for the fence to be erected along the property line. It requires the planting of a landscaped buffer inside the fence.

Foxwood resident and Riverhead Town Councilman John Dunleavy, who was canvassing Republican voters for signatures on his designating petitions yesterday, looked around at Ross’ plants and shrubs which would be soon uprooted to make way for the fence.

“When you see it happening, it’s a lot different than looking at drawings on paper,” Dunleavy said.

“Progress,” he said. “That’s what they say.”

The councilman told his neighbor the town board has no authority over site plan design and approval, which rests with the planning board.

“We can only make suggestions,” Dunleavy told Ross.

Foxwood residents circulated petitions against the original plan for a 499,000-square-foot retail center when it was first proposed. Among their concerns was the location of a fueling facility to be operated by Costco.

Peter Mastropaolo, a principal in Foxwood Corp., which owns the land on which the manufactured housing community is built — and himself lives in one of the homes abutting the new commercial development — today recalled a time when Route 58 was little more than a collection of active and fallow farm fields.

The site being developed for Costco was the former home of a manufacturing plant for a defense industry electronics contractor, Hazeltine Corporation. There were a lot of lingering environmental contamination issues on the site, Mastropaolo noted.