Democrats fault incumbents for slow progress at EPCAL

Riverhead’s Democratic town board candidates and supporters gathered at the entrance to the Enterprise Park at Calverton Tuesday to criticize the Walter administration’s handling of the property’s subdivision.

Angela DeVito, Supervisor Sean Walter’s challenger, said the predicted buildout at the site will take at least 10 years, while a “catastrophic tax increase” is expected within the next two.

“A decade doesn’t help us within the next two years,” DeVito said. “I believe that the state legislation that was put in place will go a long way in helping us – you have to give credit where credit is due – it’s a good piece of legislation but it isn’t the end-all and be-all because we still don’t have a plan. We’ve had dangled by the town supervisor, twice now, the fact that what’s going to happen in EPCAL will make people in Riverhead happy, but we have no details.”

Council candidate Millie Thomas said “fresh eyes” are needed to look at a budget that sees more spending than revenue.

“The current board has an issue with this and it hasn’t been resolved. It’s going to take a lot and it’s not going to be an easy fix. Of course we’re going to work on whatever we can to develop Enterprise Park, but it’s not going to happen overnight,” she said.

Council candidate Bill Bianchi said there was “no accounting” by Walter for what was involved in negotiations for the legislation and said more information should be made public.

Walter told RiverheadLOCAL that the process was open and public and characterized DeVito’s criticism as baseless campaigning.

“I guess when you have nothing to say, you keep saying nothing louder,” he said.

Bianchi also said he learned last week that a facility belonging to Island International, which Bianchi said was Councilwoman Jodi Giglio’s employer, has no certificate of occupancy. Giglio “has a history of not doing C.O.s,”, he charged, referring to her Baiting Hollow home, which had been improved, over a period of several years, with an in-ground pool, a finished basement and a second-story addition for which no C.O.s were issued until this spring.

Town records show that Island International was issued a “final violation notice” dated June 7 alleging the company is occupying its metal manufacturing and storage building at EPCAL though the building has no certificate of occupancy.

Giglio, who attended the press conference with Councilman Jim Wooten, said Bianchi is wrong. She is not an employee of Island International, she said, nor is she an owner of the company or its facility at EPCAL. She said she only owns two pieces of property in Riverhead, her home in Baiting Hollow and the newly constructed Summerwind building, the latter being “close to having a C.O.” and having residents move in.

“As far as anybody else in the town having C.O.s, I don’t know. They would have to go and talk to those property owners, I guess,” Giglio said.

Giglio said in an interview after the press conference that she is not an employee of the company. She said she has worked for its principal, Tim Stevens, as a permit expediter in other municipalities — not Riverhead, since her election to town office. She also worked as a steel broker for Northeast Steel, she said. Northeast Steel and Island International are both subsidiaries of Island Companies, according to correspondence from Island Companies to the Riverhead Town building department.

The councilwoman said her opponents are grasping at straws to attack her in the closing days of the campaign.

“It’s false information,” she said.

DeVito questioned an assertion on the state’s StartUp NY website that the state owns 246 acres on which Stony Brook University’s Calverton Business Incubator is located. That is 196 more acres than the 50 that was transferred to the state for the facility.

Walter said the state owns 50 acres at EPCAL, where the incubator is located. Noting that he is not responsible for the content of the state’s StartUp NY website, he said the 246 acres referenced there includes land occupied by several of the university’s facilities located in Stony Brook, such as the Center for Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology and the Advanced Energy Research Technology Center. He criticized DeVito for what he called a lack of “very basic research.” Walter said that should worry voters.

He added that he’s been in charge of EPCAL for just under four years and has overseen considerable progress in its development, including what he called “landmark legislation” that DeVito supported.

“We are not at the beginning, not at the middle, but at the end of this commercial subdivision,” he said. “I’m not quite sure what she would do differently being that she has endorsed everything that I’ve done.”

DeVito said the town should provide citizens with access to the plan for marketing the subdivisions rather than only suggestions about what needs to be addressed.

Thomas suggested solar and wind power would be welcome industries at EPCAL. She said the town should be conscious of “marketing to the right people” concerning what jobs are attracted to the site.

“We want to keep our young people here on Long Island and have more jobs that they can work at so they can afford to live on Long Island,” she said. She said the chance of the Federal Aviation Administration facility coming to Riverhead are slim and it would probably use a workforce largely from outside the community.

DeVito said the challenge is to identify skill sets possessed by the local community and to target development that would employ those skills.

Maxine Kleedorfer, a DeVito supporter at the conference, said she is frustrated that EPCAL remains empty. She said she is being drained by ever-increasing property taxes since moving to Calverton 12 years ago.

“On a fixed income it becomes impossible,” she said.