Riverhead Town’s long-anticipated interactive website for obtaining public input on the comprehensive plan update is now live.
The town launched the site today. It includes a community survey seeking opinions from the public on a host of local issues. The survey takes about 10 minutes to complete. It is anonymous.
The new site also offers an interactive map that allows site visitors to post comments and ask questions about particular locations and issues in the town.
The new website was built by AKRF, the planning consulting firm hired by the town board in 2019 to update the Riverhead Comprehensive Plan, which was developed from 1999 to 2003 and adopted by the town board in 2003. Progress on the project was stalled by the COVID-19 pandemic. The town and AKRF recently amended the $675,000 consulting contract to reflect an amended timeline. The consultants’ work is now scheduled to be completed by Aug. 21, 2022, pushed back from the Aug. 1, 2021 date in the original agreement.
The planning consultants will soon schedule public outreach meetings based on hamlet areas. The meetings will be a hybrid of in-person and Zoom, according to Robert White, AKRF senior vice president, environmental and land use planning, who gave the town board a status update Thursday morning at its work session.
The contract amendment approved last month states those meetings will take place in the fall.
AKRF has prepared updated zoning maps, a task that had not been undertaken for about seven years, according to Building and Planning Administrator Jefferson Murphree. The town will soon have interactive versions of the zoning maps on its website, he said. Until now, the zoning maps have always been PDF documents, he said.
“These steps are only the beginning of the community participation process,” Supervisor Yvette Aguiar said in a press release. When all public input has been gathered this year, a second round of community meetings will be held early next year, she said.
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