Planning board heeds civic president’s request, keeps hearing open on controversial Wading River retail center

It was a long night for new Planning Board Chairman Stan Carey. His first meeting as chairman lasted more than two hours Thursday night, thanks mostly to a long public hearing on the site plan for a Sonic Drive-In restaurant on Osborn Avenue and County Road 58. See prior story.

Carey and former chairman Richard O’Dea, who served in that capacity since 2002, swapped seats for the first meeting of the new year. The town board on Tuesday appointed Carey, who was named to the planning board in 2014, as chairman. It also named Ed Densieski vice chairman. Thirty-year board member Joe Baier, whose term expired Dec. 31, remains on the board as a holdover. The town board is currently seeking applicants for the position, according to officials. (The supervisor sought to replace Baier with retiring councilman George Gabrielsen, but Gabrielsen, who initially said he was willing, withdrew his name from consideration.)

Venezia Square application held up
A hearing on the site plan application of Venezia Square, a proposed 40,000-square-foot retail center on Route 25A in Wading River, was held over another month after Wading River Civic Association president

Sid Bail argued that closing the hearing before the board had received comments from the state Department of Transportation was premature.

After hearing a second round of comments at last week’s meeting — the hearing had begun and was held over from a previous meeting, the board chairman appeared ready to close the hearing, noting that “closing the public hearing doesn’t indicate approval.”

But Bail, who had voiced numerous concerns about the project, returned to the podium.

“I’m not sure what the purpose of a public hearing is unless the public has an opportunity to comment on as complete an application as possible,” Bail said. “How can the public do that if it doesn’t know what is being proposed? For instance, we don’t know if there’s going to be a traffic light. What if DOT won’t permit the light? That changes a lot of things, doesn’t it?” Bail asked.

“It should be kept open,” he said. “The public will be able to make more intelligent and more astute comments when they have the whole picture.”

The board then voted to keep the hearing open for another month.

Subdivision plan in Laurel aired
The board had a first look at a sketch plan for the seven-lot subdivision of Kaufold Farms, an 18.3-acre site on the south side of Route 25 in Laurel. The site is in the RB-80 zoning use district, which allows single-family dwellings as a permitted use. The zoning code requires minimum lot sizes of 80,000 square feet in the RB-80 zone, but allows the developer to cluster the dwellings on smaller lots on part of the land to preserve farmland on another part. The number of homes allowed — the site’s “yield” — is determined according to a standard subdivision map for the site, also referred to as a yield map.

The yield map shows seven lots are allowed, surveyor Howard Young told the board.

The plan drawn by Young clusters six of the lots — all between one-third and one-half acre in size, north of the railroad track — along a new roadway ending in a cul-de-sac; the seventh lot would be a 9.8-acre farm lot.

The farmland includes about 11 acres of “prime agricultural soil,” so the developer is required to preserve 70 percent of that prime soil, building and planning administrator Jeff Murphree said.

The homes would be served by public water, according to the applicant’s attorney, John Wagner.

The proposal will be aired before the town’s agricultural advisory committee tonight (Jan. 11), Wagner said.

Main Road coffee house gets OK
The board amended the administrative site plan of North Fork Coffee, to allow the owner of the new Main Road, Aquebogue coffee shop to open with a temporary certificate of occupancy.

The coffee shop owner Jason Belkin plans to open Sunday, Jan. 17. (See separate story.)

The town is waiting for a report from the state DOT before a permanent C.O. can be issued, but the DOT has no problem with Riverhead issuing a temporary C.O. Murphree said.