During the second day of a public hearing begun in April, neighbors of the Dimon Estate in Jamesport continued to urge the Riverhead Town Board to reject the restaurant’s request to expand its operations to include an on-site catering hall.
During the continuation of a public hearing last Wednesday, residents said the property’s owners, Kar-McVeigh LLC, should not be granted a special permit that would allow them to build a 6,045-square-foot dining/catering room addition to its existing restaurant on Manor Lane, with a covered patio and patio areas and additional parking, which is located in the Agricultural Protection Zone district.
Area residents have long complained about the use of the site — formerly the Jamesport Manor Inn — as a catering facility, particularly about the noise and other disruptions coming from weddings and other events there. Residents turned out in force for a second time last week. The public hearing began on April 4, but was adjourned until June 21 to allow Kar-McVeigh to submit a required sound study and traffic study for the project.
Kar-McVeigh applied for the special permit after litigation between the property owner and the town was stayed by a stipulation that the parties would explore settlement of the two pending actions — one brought by Kar-McVeigh to overturn a Riverhead Zoning Board of Appeals April 2022 ruling and the other brought by the town for alleged violations by the owner of the town’s noise ordinance.
The April Town Board hearing was adjourned to allow Kar-McVeigh’s consultants to update sound and traffic studies to include data collected in the warm weather season. The consultants presented their conclusions at the June 21 meeting.
Traffic engineer Steven Schneider of Miller Place told the board the “traffic counts changed very little after updating the seasonal factor.” He said the level of service grade for one of the intersections studied changed from a B to a C, “by three seconds.”
Acoustic consultant Sean Harkin of Sound Sense in Wainscott told the board that the analyses done “show that with the appropriate mitigation, the sound received at all neighbors are predicted to meet the design criteria for the project.”
The acoustic study recommends several mitigation measures, including changing some of the building’s features and reconfiguring its layout and using sound-insulating building materials.
Area residents reasserted their objections to the approval of a catering facility at the Manor Lane site, stressing that the surrounding area, consisting mostly of agricultural lands, allows sounds to travel long distances.
Manor Lane resident Frank Blangiardo, citing past experience, said the applicant “is not a good neighbor” and should not be granted the special permit it seeks.
“This would be a scar on the APZ,” Blangiardo told the board.
“This is not a pre-existing use,” Manor Lane resident Phil Barbato said. It used to be an inn, a place were someone would spend the night, he said. “This has morphed into a restaurant, a major catering facility,” Barbato said. “It’s way beyond what the prior nonconforming use was.”
Numerous other neighbors spoke against the application at the hearing, nearly all complaining about how sound travels across the wide-open spaces and how they can hear loud music from the venue from within their own homes with the windows closed, as well as other noise from activities at the site — ranging from car doors closing as guests arrive and leave the venue, to arguments among guests and “the sound of a full container of glass bottles” crashing into a recycling container.
The town supervisor left the hearing record open for written comments for ten days, until June 30.
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