Zoning Board chairperson is retiring after 28 years on the board, 16 years at the helm

Thursday’s Zoning Board of Appeals meeting will be the last for Chairperson Fred McLaughlin, who is retiring at the end of this month after 28 years of service on the ZBA.

McLaughlin, 76, joined the ZBA in January 1996 and has served as its chairperson since February 2007.

McLaughlin said he has submitted his resignation to the Town Board, which appoints ZBA members and officers. 

He is only the third person to hold the position of ZBA chairperson in the 64-year history of the board, succeeding Martin Keller, who in 1995 succeeded the board’s first chairperson, Patricia Tormey, who held the post for 35 years.. 

“It’s time,” McLaughlin said in an interview last week. “I am retiring from everything.”

McLaughlin has also retired from a long career as a funeral director. Though he is currently still a co-owner of McLaughlin Heppner Funeral Home in Riverhead, he has not been involved in its operation for several years, he said. McLaughlin is the third generation in his family in the funeral home business.

He will retain his residence in his adopted home town of Riverhead, where he’s lived since 1985. He has a daughter and grandchildren in Hampton Bays and many close friends in town, he said. But he hopes to do some traveling now, including spending time with a daughter and grandchildren in California.

“The funeral business is 24/7,” McLaughlin said, “so I never got a chance to get away too often.”

McLaughlin said he’s seen the town go through a transformation since he moved here nearly 40 years ago.

The population has almost doubled, he noted. There’s also been a tremendous amount of commercial development, something that’s changed the face of the town. “Route 58 wasn’t really developed at all when I first moved here. There were only a couple of shopping centers,” McLaughlin recalled. The Destination Retail zoning along the commercial corridor, which brought “big box” national retailers to Riverhead, was still a thing of the future.

The Zoning Board of Appeals is intended as a kind of “relief valve” for property owners from town zoning rules and regulations that can make legal uses of their property impossible because of area and setback restrictions, McLaughlin said. 

“There are a lot of properties in the town, smaller lots,that are non-conforming under current zoning,” he said. The lots may have been created before the town adopted a zoning ordinance, or they may date back to a time when prior zoning rules were in place. The ZBA’s role is to hear appeals by property owners who cannot obtain building permits without the ZBA’s permission, which is known as a variance. 

ZBA members review the application documents and visit all the sites, McLaughlin said. 

“Does it conform to the community character? We do site visits to make that decision,” he said. 

The number of appeals like that has decreased over the years, McLaughlin said. “There were a lot more, especially back in the days when a lot of new stuff was going on and showing up on our agenda,. It was a lot of running around, checking out the sites and then discussing in meetings and then listening to people — and some could be a little more contentious,” he said But the workload is not quite that heavy anymore, the board chairperson said.

Another function of the ZBA is to interpret the provisions of the town code. Often that can be challenging, because of the way the code has evolved over decades — or the way it has not changed with the times.

“It’s not always clear,” McLaughlin said. “I wish the Town Board through the code would give us some direction. We don’t look to set a precedent.”

Logistics centers, battery storage facilities, anaerobic digesters — proposals for uses that are not in the code at all often land in the laps of ZBA members.

These applications can involve the ZBA in some controversial situations its members would rather not have to try to resolve with an interpretation or a use variance.

McLaughlin said the board members have been lucky enough to have had “excellent attorneys” to rely on for legal counsel during his time on the board. He ticks off their names. “Bobby Koz [Kozakiewicz], Scotty De Simone, Dawn [Thomas] and now Annemarie [Prudenti] and they’re all very competent, and that really makes it— You get a good view of what you can do or what you can’t do,” McLaughlin said.

He said his predecessors as board chairpersons left big shoes to fill because they were so knowledgeable. Tormey was on the town committee that developed Riverhead’s first zoning code and she served as the ZBA’s only chairperson until her retirement in December 1994. Both Tormey and Keller were very smart, and really knew their stuff, McLauglin said. 

“Everybody I served with over the years, everybody — we’re into it, you know. Okay, let’s try to do the right thing,” McLaughlin said. 

“We were always a reasonable bunch.”