If you’re a Riverhead resident, the town needs your help planning for Riverhead’s future.
Riverhead is restarting its public outreach effort for the comprehensive plan update with a workshop at the Suffolk Theater Saturday morning from 10 a.m. to noon.
The town’s new planners will talk about progress on the plan so far and then lead small group discussions to gather input and opinions from residents.
Public input until now has been weak and town officials, who have new planning consultants in place, are looking to improve it.
“We’d love to hear your input,” Riverhead Supervisor Yvette Aguiar said. “All are welcome. This is going to be a roadmap for at least 20 years.”
Planner Noah Levine, who is leading the effort for BFJ Planning, the town’s new consulting firm, will update the public on progress so far, including a summary of “issues and opportunities” that have been identified. Then groups of 10-15 residents will gather with members of the planning team to discuss ideas and priorities, Levine said.
“We’ll get into some of those specific issues and people have an opportunity to talk with their peers about the priority issues that the comprehensive plan needs to address,” Levine said. “We find this is truly the best way really to hear, to kind of get into the nitty gritty details and also to bring people together that don’t often talk to one another.”
It’s been almost a year since the last public input meeting for the comp plan hosted by the town and its former planning consulting firm AKRF. A few months after that meeting, the town terminated its contract with the firm for what officials said was the “slow pace of progress and shallow depth of study.” The town later hired BFJ to finish the plan.
While town officials are hopeful that Saturday’s event will bring more public input, some civic leaders remain skeptical about whether the town even wants their input.
And if you look closely with a critical eye, it’s not so hard to see why: meetings were sparsely attended, progress on the plan was going at a snail’s pace, and in the months since the last session, community members have been at odds with the Town Board over land use issues the town has acted on, including significant zoning code revisions, that residents argued should have been addressed through the comprehensive plan update.
| This is the second in a series of articles on Riverhead’s comprehensive plan update. Read the first article in the series here: Riverhead’s comprehensive plan update: where it stands, where it’s going and why you should care |
As a document that’s supposed to reflect the community’s vision for the next decade, it requires extensive public input to be successful.
“How do you have a comprehensive plan update and basically sell the community on what other special-interested stakeholders want you to believe is best for you? I mean, to me, that’s a recipe for disaster,” said Barbara Blass of Jamesport. “It guarantees pushback. It guarantees controversy. It guarantees delay.”
Blass, who more than 20 years ago led the town’s efforts to create the existing comp plan as both a Planning Board member and a Town Board member said during an interview last month that the 2003 plan was built from the “ground up” with heavy public participation.
“And I think that’s why in the long run, we had very, very little pushback when we went to public hearings, very little,” Blass said. “People were aware of what was happening. They participated in what was happening.”
Blass, who has followed the current update process since the beginning, said the town’s public outreach until now doesn’t have “a lot of the pieces that made for a successful plan process the last time.” That process included multiple back-and-forth conversations among members of the committee working on the plan, interested residents and other stakeholders to hash out different aspects of the plan, and compromise when necessary, she said.
The public engagement up until this point has been surface level. The town’s first public meetings took place in September 2021 — a late start attributed to the pandemic — at the Riverhead Senior Center in Aquebogue and via Zoom. They got off to a rocky start. The first session focused on the hamlets of Aquebogue and Jamesport. A map presented by the consultants depicted incorrect hamlet boundaries, and the errors angered residents. Technical troubles prevented Zoom participants from hearing what was being said at the in-person meeting and what was displayed by a projector on a screen there.
Meeting attendance was low — the pandemic likely had an impact, with many fearing exposure to the virus and getting sick. One round of meetings was even held at the start of the omicron variant surge.
The town also solicited input for the plan through an online survey, which was also available in paper form at Town Hall. An online “social pinpoint” map offered residents the chance to make comments on specific areas or places within the town.
The results of AKRF’s public engagement —including notes from meetings with departments from town, state and country governments, large town businesses and special interest groups like the Long Island Farm Bureau and the Riverhead Chamber of Commerce — were compiled into a 126-page “compendium” document. The document is all raw information and offers no summary or direction based on the information.
BFJ has created a draft document that summarizes AKRF’s prior work. The document was presented to the comp plan steering committee at its March 28 meeting. It recognizes the conflicting opinions of those who participated in the earlier process in several different areas, including in housing and the potential future uses of the Route 58 commercial corridor.
“I believe that it provides a perspective, but clearly more input from the community is required in the current process,” Andrew Mitchell, a member of the comprehensive plan steering committee and the former longtime CEO and president of Peconic Bay Medical Center, who now works as a consultant for businesses developing large capital projects, said in an interview last month.
The public outreach up until now has been ”very poorly done,” Riverhead Community Development Director Dawn Thomas said in an interview last month.
“I don’t think it was for lack of attempting, but I don’t think there was enough publication,” Thomas said. She added that the town needs to leverage social media to get more participation and to reach out to younger people especially. She is hopeful that BFJ will be more effective in reaching out to the public.
“You need to bring it to them,” Thomas said. “And the school particularly. Like, you need to go there and hand out the surveys and do that kind of public engagement.”
Other town officials have a different view and said the town has made an effort to solicit public participation, but that the public hasn’t shown an interest in responding.
“Has it been effective in reaching out to the public? It reached out to the public,” Council Member Tim Hubbard said in an interview last month. “Has the public been effective in responding? No, they have not.”
“The people that want to attend these are going to attend them. The people that don’t want to attend them will find an excuse not to go,” Hubbard said, adding that the meetings were “sparsely” attended for “something as big as a comprehensive plan.”
Hubbard — a candidate for town supervisor who might end up leading efforts to implement the comprehensive plan — said that lack of participation upsets him, especially because information is more accessible than it was when the previous plan was being developed due to how widely accessible the internet is.
“It seems to be just a trend with the way society is,” he said. “And it’s unfortunate, because so much could be achieved with better participation from all the residents or a majority of the residents. And we just don’t have it.”
Hubbard said residents will get involved and attend public meetings if the impacts are happening in their immediate neighborhood, although he wishes that weren’t the case.
In total, only 467 people completed the survey distributed by the town and AKRF, which is roughly 1.3% of the total town population. Young people were the least represented age group in those who took the survey, with only one respondent being under 21 and only 39 respondents being between the ages of 21-35.
There was also a noticeable lack of Hispanic residents at in-person meetings. Since 2000, around when the 2003 comprehensive plan started its development, Riverhead’s population has increased by roughly 8,000 people, according to census data. The most significant demographic shift during the last twenty years has been the proportion of residents who identified as Hispanic, which more than doubled: from 6.1% in 2000 to 14.6% in 2020. The survey did not ask the participants about their race or ethnicity, so it’s hard to know for sure how many members of certain demographic groups answered the town’s survey.
Rose Herrero AICP, an urban planner with the Boston-based firm DREAM Collaborative, said some municipalities reach out to civic and neighborhood groups, business associations, nonprofits and immigrant groups to try to get participation for the public engagement process. “Comprehensive plans tend to try to be representative of demographics,” she said.
The town has made no public effort to reach out to the Spanish-speaking community within Riverhead to solicit input for the plan.
Blass said she was surprised by the lack of diversity during the public meetings. “Our demographics are different, our focus on people is very different. I would have expected to see a lot more new faces, out of curiosity even more than anything,” she said. “What is this comp plan thing all about? How can I have a say? What can I do?”
Civic leaders have criticized the town for not being the most active in encouraging participation in meetings.
Greater Calverton Civic Association President Toqui Terchun said the town’s ability to reach the greater public has been “functionally inadequate.”
“I have not seen anybody in the structure indicate to the heads of civics, ‘Hey, we’re gonna need your help. Because we can’t reach as many people as you can…’” Terchun said. Yet the town seems to rely on the civics to reach out to people, she said, adding that the town is doing the process “passively.”
The Calverton hamlet is probably undergoing the biggest changes of any hamlet in the town right now. Home to the Calverton Enterprise Park and large tracts of industrially zoned land, the hamlet is the epicenter of industrial development plans currently in the works, including the Calverton Aviation & Technology proposal at the enterprise park — where 10 million square feet of development is planned, most of it being logistics and distribution buildings along the site’s two runways — the 641,000-square-foot Riverhead Logistics Center on Middle Road, a 131-acre industrial subdivision on Middle Country Road near Splish-Splash, the H.K. Ventures 30-acre industrial park on Middle Country Road near Fresh Pond Avenue.
Industrial development in Calverton did not seem to be a source of major community concern during the public outreach process, as evidenced by the small amount of comments about industrially zoned areas mentioned in AKRF’s compendium document. Questions about industrially zoned land were also not included in the survey.
In March 2022, six civic associations and a number of residents called on the Town Board to enact a moratorium on all development pending the completion of the comprehensive plan. No board members supported a moratorium at that time.
But since the public engagement process under AKRF concluded, and development proposals made news, residents — especially Calverton residents —have become more engaged, attending meetings and speaking out in favor of a moratorium and against specific projects. Residents express concerns that the development could overwhelm residential neighborhoods where narrow roads are not built to handle heavy truck traffic and they worry that the new industrial development could permanently change the Calverton hamlet’s character.
Public support for a moratorium — this time primarily for industrial development — was energized. Pressure on the Town Board to enact the moratorium increased when the Planning Board and town planning staff came out in favor of the pause last fall. Residents filled the Town Hall meeting room several times in support of the moratorium, but a vote to hold a public hearing on a moratorium was rejected by the board in a 3-2 vote, with the majority of the board members saying that the moratorium would take away property rights.
Town Board members have occasionally downplayed the influence of civic associations and the public when they want to pass legislation a group might be opposed to. Most recently, this happened when the Wading River civic opposed a proposed zoning amendment to allow drive-thru services for restaurants and coffee shops in Wading River, although the Town Board never voted on the zoning amendment following negative feedback at a public hearing on the proposal.
Thomas said the town needs to engage civic associations, and she has suggested more ways for BFJ representatives to engage with the public.
“I would go out to those entities rather than asking people to come into meetings,” Thomas said, referring to residents attending civic group meetings.
“It’s something that they [residents] were planning on going to anyway,” she said of the local civic meetings.
At the same time, Thomas said she personally believes people have a responsibility to participate in their community’s decision-making and development.
“We give them the opportunity to do it. If we put it on Zoom and we go to the civics and we do all that outreach and people don’t participate, I don’t want to hear you complain then,” Thomas said.
Another reason residents may not have been engaged with the comprehensive plan update process up to this point is because they don’t know what a comprehensive plan is, or what municipal planning in general is, or why it is important.
“I’m not so sure that people either are aware of the power that they have in affecting the future of their community, or… [possibly] they don’t believe that it’s really going to make a difference anyway, because the government’s going to do what they want to do,” Blass said. “And that’s not too far off-base right now.”
Blass is skeptical of whether or not public input will change the direction of the comprehensive plan or not, given the rejection of the moratorium when it had so much public support.
The decision to oppose the moratorium affirmed for many that a board majority would side with development interests rather than residents, even if they go against the advice of the planning officials.
“I just feel as though this particular administration wants to hear less and less from the community,” Blass said.
It remains to be seen whether Saturday’s public meeting will have more attendees than usual. But the recent increase in civic activism in opposition to new warehouses, commercial battery energy storage systems and other industrial development may indicate residents are more willing than ever to stand up and speak their minds in front of town officials.
In addition to the two public workshops, BFJ will have “working groups” to advise on and review specific materials for the comprehensive plan, and virtual “focus groups” made up of members of town hall committees and department representatives to get input on the plan, according to Levine. Each town advisory committee is also being asked to weigh in on the new plan by reviewing and completing a survey on elements of the 2003 plan.
The comp plan steering committee, which has replaced the previously inactive central advisory committee, has also begun to review and discuss the 2003 comprehensive plan to identify where changes should occur. The committee will hold its next meeting on May 3 at 3 p.m..
The comprehensive plan update process also continues without the town’s head planning official, Jefferson Murphree, who was suspended last month pending disciplinary charges brought against him by Aguiar on behalf of the town. One of the charges against Murphree, in a document alleging neglect of duty and incompetence, stems from his alleged mismanagement of the comprehensive plan update process, including misrepresenting the progress of the plan to the Town Board. Murphree denies the charges.
| MORE COVERAGE: Riverhead’s Building and Planning Administrator faces charges of insubordination and incompetence at disciplinary hearing |
Janice Scherer, a town resident and a planning official in Southampton Town, was hired as a consultant specifically to lead the comprehensive plan update process. Community Development Director Thomas is temporarily overseeing the town’s building and planning department.
Editor’s note: This article is an analysis of news events that have transpired, and therefore draws on the views, perspectives and experience of our reporters in order to provide a deeper understanding of those topics.
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