Town will choose next week between two suitors for 600 acres at Calverton Enterprise Park, supervisor says

After five-and-a-half years and more than $600,000, Riverhead Town is at last in the home stretch of a long, difficult and sometimes contentious process of subdividing, zoning and marketing the remaining land it owns at the former Grumman plant in Calverton.

Town Board members have been in earnest negotiations with two developers who are bidding on 600 acres the town owns at the Calverton Enterprise Park. According to Supervisor Sean Walter, the board will choose between the two next week. Both were brought to the table by Cushman Wakefield, the real estate brokerage the town retained earlier this year to market the site.

“We’ve done something that hasn’t been done on Long Island since the Hauppauge Industrial Park was developed,” Walter said.

The Hauppauge Industrial Park, built in the 1970s, was 10.5 million square feet of industrial space, the largest on Long Island. The town’s Calverton plan has a potential buildout of 10 million square feet.

The offers will bring Riverhead “tens of millions of dollars” in revenues, Walter said. He wouldn’t disclose the terms or the identities of the companies, but said each plans to develop the site rather than simply “flip” the land to other entities.

“They are both good companies, offering similar terms. It comes down to the vision,” he said. “What’s the right match for the town going forward? That decision is much more critical than any other.

As negotiations continued, the town has moved forward clearing hurdles necessary to create a marketable asset.

Last week, the board added a new chapter to its zoning code to implement the planned development zoning use district devised by planners through a process begun early in 2011. It also adopted an amendment to the town’s zoning map to reflect the new zoning at the site.

The new zoning replaces a code adopted by a previous board and widely criticized for inviting unrealistic proposals for large-scale projects.

Earlier this summer, the town completed an updated use plan and the requisite environmental study, concluding with the adoption of a findings statement under the State Environmental Quality Review Act.

The subdivision map itself must still gain approval from the Riverhead Planning Board. Walter said planning board chairman Stan Carey expects approval will be granted “expeditiously” now that the town board has completed the SEQRA process.

The town must still obtain a Wild, Scenic and Recreational Rivers Act permit from the state Department of Environmental Conservation. Town planners and engineers have worked with the DEC for several years on the configuration of the final subdivision map, plan and zoning and town officials are confident that the approval will be forthcoming. Walter said DEC representatives have told the town it will take four to five months, but that will run parallel to the due diligence period that will be allowed to the buyer under any contract signed by the town, he said.

The Calverton Enterprise Park was once the home of Grumman Aerospace Corp., which beginning in the early 1950s manufactured, assembled and tested military aircraft on a 2,900-acre site owned by the U.S. Navy. Grumman fighter planes built in Calverton included as the supersonic F14 Tomcat and the A-6E Intruder. When Grumman moved out of the facility in 1996, Riverhead lost 3,000 jobs and $1 million a year in real estate tax revenues (technically payments in lieu of taxes, known as PILOT payments, because the land was government-owned and tax exempt.)

Legislation authorizing the transfer of the site to the town was passed by Congress in 1994, after word of the impending closure was made public. The Navy deeded the site to the town in 1998, after the town had developed a reuse plan required by the federal government as a condition of transfer.

The town sold the 492-acre “industrial core” of the site to developer Jan Burman for $17 million in 2001. Since then, it has struggled with the redevelopment of the remaining mostly vacant land, much of it zoned for recreational and entertainment uses pursuant to a reuse plan adopted in 1996.

On taking office in 2010, Walter vowed to pursue a different approach at EPCAL. After the demise of a contract to sell 755 acres to a developer proposing to build a themed resort park that included an indoor ski mountain, Walter pushed for the town to develop a new comprehensive land use plan for the site and to pursue a subdivision of the remaining town-owned acreage that would allow the town to sell off smaller-sized lots or the entire site, with approved map, to one developer.

A trip to Devens, Massachusetts in January 2011 sparked the idea for a state commission with omnibus permitting authority at EPCAL. That evolved into state legislation authorizing an expedited review process for development at EPCAL subject to certain conditions.

The town hired VHB Engineering, Surveying and Landscape Architecture in February 2011 to update the 1996 reuse plan, prepare a supplemental generic environmental impact statement, handle the subdivision and draft new zoning. It also hired the economic, planning and real estate consulting firm of RKG Associates to complete a market study for the site.

“We’ve been through the wringer these past five years,” Walter said. “It’s an amazing feat that we’re accomplishing this.”

No matter who actually develops the site, however, they will be faced with some difficult — and expensive — infrastructure challenges. The Riverhead Water District will need to build new facilities before it can supply any new development and the existing sewage treatment plant on the site requires a costly upgrade and expansion.