As the Riverhead Town Board remains divided on whether to pursue a moratorium on industrial development in Calverton, more than 100 people rallied in front of Town Hall yesterday to encourage the board to halt development until the town’s comprehensive planning process is complete.
During a press conference organized by the Greater Calverton Civic Association and attended by members of local civic groups and residents, speakers lamented the inaction of board members on pursuing a moratorium while the town updates its 20-year-old master planning document, something they have been urging the board to impose the past two years, and have been out in full force to support during the past several Town Board and Planning Board meetings.
“Enough is enough,” Calverton Civic President Toqui Terchun said, her comment echoed by the crowd. “Crowds of concerned, reasonable, thoughtful people have filled the Town Hall for weeks, months, even years calling for a moratorium until the comprehensive plan is completed. We are witnessing a local government with no sense of urgency and backwards priorities.”
Following the rally, the residents flooded the Town Hall meeting room to address the board directly, leading to a confrontational meeting that lasted more than four hours.
“The magnitude of the development proposed in Calverton is staggering,” said Phil Barbato, president of the Riverhead Neighborhood Preservation Coalition, referring to the more than one million square-feet of industrial development proposed in the area, which includes “cube” warehouses and logistics centers that have the potential to bring heavy traffic to the area’s roadways.
“It has the potential to irreversibly impact Riverhead forever and will disproportionately affect the residents of an environmental justice area,” Barbato said. “Yet some members of this Town Board seem determined to encourage it at every turn and at all costs.”
Most of Riverhead’s undeveloped industrial land is in the Calverton hamlet — which, while also having farmland and residentially zoned neighborhoods, is also the East End’s gateway to the Long Island Expressway.
The only board member currently in favor of a moratorium is Council Member Tim Hubbard, who came out in support of an 18-month moratorium after the Planning Board, the governing body reviewing the industrial projects in question, said in October they would recommend the Town Board adopt one. The Town Board was originally scheduled to vote during its meeting to schedule a public hearing on a six-month moratorium — a compromise reached to receive another board member’s support — but decided to pull the resolution because that board, Frank Beyrodt, was scheduled to be absent from the meeting.
The other three members of the board have expressed hesitation or outright opposition to imposing the moratorium. Another moratorium proposal floating around Town Hall would be six months long and include exemptions for certain projects, although the specifics of that proposal have not yet been revealed and the legality of that proposition is itself on shaky ground, according to the town attorney.
Former Council Member Catherine Kent said that because of Calverton’s farmland, open space and woodlands, the town needs to partner with stakeholders in local agriculture to responsibly plan the area. “Once the floodgates are open to development, it will be gone forever,” Kent said.
Kent, last year’s Democratic nominee for town supervisor, also criticized board members who said they were opposed to a moratorium because they said it would hurt the town’s tax base growth.
“By looking at just potential tax income and failing to consider the cost of such industrial development, Riverhead will be stuck in a continuous loop of taking on new development to pay for the adverse effects previous development has on our town,” Kent said.
“If this model was economically sustainable, we’d be totally set after the development of Route 58. Instead they have pierced the tax cap,” Kent added, referring to the 2022-2023 municipal budget increasing the town-wide tax levy by 4.51%.
Mark Haubner of Aquebogue, the president of the North Fork Environmental Council, wondered out loud why Town Board members were able to agree on extending a moratorium on commercial solar energy systems, but are incapable of doing the same with other industrial development in Calverton.
He also criticized the board for taking up proposals to allow battery energy storage systems and anaerobic digester food waste-to-energy facilities — two uses currently not allowed by the town’s zoning ordinance— without first analyzing their impacts through the comprehensive plan. Both those proposals received public hearings yesterday, at the same meeting where the board was scheduled to vote to authorize a new planning consultant contract to restart the long-stalled comprehensive planning process.
“This backwards approach to planning will dramatically and irreversibly impact the residents of Riverhead unless the process of comprehensive planning, then zoning for land use, then research and then hearings is followed,” Haubner said. “A moratorium is the most sensible tool for us to use to make this happen.”
Barbato also criticized board members for encouraging the influx of industrial development “at all costs” and suggested impropriety from members who received campaign donations from the project developers.
The energy of the press conference moved from the Town Hall lawn inside the meeting room at the end of the speeches.
Linda Nemeth, the rally’s first speaker, said the “concentration of the scale of industrial development posed in the Calverton area has the ability to forever change our landscape and our quality of life.”
“This is a critical point. Not just for Calverton, [not just] for Riverhead — but the East End as a whole. Developers have honed in on Riverhead’s zoning and planning failures and are poised to pounce,” she said.
See the video of the full press conference here:
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