The Riverhead Town Board is poised to set a public hearing on a local law to extend the town’s moratorium on industrial development in Calverton for another three months.
A majority of Town Board members supported the public hearing after discussing their options with the town’s planning and legal staff on Thursday. It wasn’t clear at the end of the discussion whether a majority of board members immediately support extending the moratorium, which halts the processing of applications for major industrial developments and subdivisions in the Calverton hamlet.
The town’s planning staff have recommended extending the moratorium — which was originally for six months — to give the town time to adopt the new comprehensive plan and adopt new town laws necessary to change the regulations of industrial zoning in Calverton.
The town’s consultants on the development of the comprehensive plan said the Town Board could vote to adopt the plan as soon as August. The town’s current moratorium is set to expire on July 12. If the extension is approved by the board, the moratorium would instead expire on Oct. 12.
“My concern is, after talking to fellow board members, is that this was maybe — we overreached our bounds a little bit in shutting everything down in that area,” Supervisor Tim Hubbard said at Thursday’s work session. He said the moratorium was done because of the Town Board’s concern with warehouse projects, and that he is “not concerned about other projects.”
Hubbard had put a resolution on Tuesday’s Town Board meeting agenda setting a hearing on a three-month extension of the industrial moratorium, but it was tabled in a 3-2 vote, with Hubbard and Council Member Denise Merrifield against tabling the resolution. The primary objection, from Council Member Ken Rothwell, was that the subject should be discussed at a work session.
“So my suggestion would be if we could do this for three months or two months — whatever we think is going to be [the] time period — just on warehouses itself to get the comprehensive plan completed, and then move on from there,” Hubbard said. “So I’m gonna ask my board members what their thoughts are.”
Council Member Joann Waski asked whether the town could put a moratorium on warehouses and logistics centers.
Town planning staff pushed back on those ideas. The town code also does not define logistics centers, Riverhead Senior Planner Bergman said. Bergman said there are several applications for projects besides warehouses that were paused by the moratorium: a large major subdivision, a battery energy storage facility and a dirt bike track that requires the excavation of sand.
There are also clear exemptions in the current moratorium, Senior Planner Matt Charters added.
“While yes, warehouses were sort of the thing that pushed us over the edge to realize…we were having an issue in Calverton and drew attention to the comp plan and the changes that we’re going to make in this area, the changes in the code are what’s important. The changes of the comp plan are what’s important,” Charters said.
Charters said the town can’t make changes to industrial zoning districts — which includes the reduction of development size, changes to dimensional regulations, and the implementation of the transfer of development rights program to generate farmland preservation revenue from new industrial development — if the plan and its environmental analysis are not adopted by the Town Board.
“The purpose and the intent of this moratorium was to sort of give the town that cover knowing that there was going to be substantial changes to this area,” Charters said. “Once this cover is gone, it’s business as usual until we make the code changes.” That would include staff reviewing development applications and asking developers to make changes after a new code is adopted, he said.
“We’re not there yet. We’re very close,” Charter said. “We’re not asking for a year, we’re not even asking for six months. We’re recommending three months, which I think is pretty reasonable.”
“I don’t take this matter lightly — property rights are very important — but we have a monumental task ahead of us in updating this code and making sure things are correct in Calverton and I wouldn’t want to do anything to hinder that process,” Charters said. “And I understand people own property and they want to develop — I really do — but we as the town want to make sure we’re getting the best for that area.”
Charters said in response to a question from Council Member Ken Rothwell that adopting the new zoning for Calverton is going to take a month and that it has “always been the first thing that we’re going to address.” Dawn Thomas, who oversees the town’s planning department, added that the town needs to leave time for the public to comment on any codes proposed by the board.
Rothwell asked whether the town can put in the moratorium law if it could end automatically when the zoning is implemented. Town Attorney Erik Howard said that is not possible because there must be a definitive end date.
Town staff said they can start drafting the legislation needed to implement the new zoning now. “We already know what the comp plan looks like,” Deputy Town Attorney Annemarie Prudenti said. “We’ve heard some comments back from the Town Board and residents.”
The Town Board has not yet adopted the new comprehensive plan, which is currently a draft, nor the final environmental impact statement for the document.
Council Member Bob Kern said he wants to see exemptions in a moratorium. “I was never in favor of blanketing industrial land,” he said. There is a “huge imbalance” between what residents and industrial development pay in the town, he said, and wanted the land to be “activated” as soon as possible.
Rothwell said the town might be doing a “favor” for a developer by extending the moratorium. “As a developer, if I’m going to invest in a project, I’d really rather not start writing checks to my architect, my engineering staff, or my legal staff to start filing papers, or to begin the whole process knowing that I’m probably wasting a lot of money, because I’m going to have to go back to the drawing board…,” he said.
At the end of the discussion, Hubbard asked if he had support for a public hearing and got a ‘yes’ from both Waski and Merrifield. Rothwell and Kern remained silent.
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