The public comment period on the most important planning document for the Town of Riverhead in a generation has concluded and now it’s up to the Town Board to review and digest comments made by community members, property owners and other interested persons and decide whether to make changes to the plan as proposed.
Representatives of BFJ Planning are scheduled to attend the Town Board work session Thursday morning to discuss next steps on the Riverhead Comprehensive Plan Update, now that Town Board members have had a chance to read and digest the consultants’ summary of public comments received.
At the June 18 Town Board meeting, Supervisor Tim Hubbard said that the consultants had provided the board earlier that day with a document that “filtered those comments into the final draft plan.”
The consultants had been scheduled to attend the June 20 work session, but since the document that was going to be discussed had just been received and since Town Hall was closed for the Juneteenth holiday on the 19th, there wouldn’t have been enough time to review the document.
“We want more time to digest it,” Hubbard said, so the meeting with BFJ was put off until this week’s work session.
“They did a great job with it, the way they set it up and the way you can read it,” Hubbard said of the document that BFJ apparently annotated with public comments.
But the public apparently won’t get to see that document in advance of Thursday’s work session.
As of Tuesday afternoon, the document Hubbard referred to last week had not been posted with other documents scheduled to be discussed at Thursday’s work session. After an inquiry from RiverheadLOCAL, the town posted a document with the agenda materials for the work session, but the posted document did not match the supervisor’s description. It does not show the public’s comments or proposed changes suggested by the planning consultants.
Hubbard acknowledged afterward that there was “probably something missing.”
“We have a copy marked draft that had numbered footnotes that referred to possible changes,” the supervisor said in a text message. “We will be discussing that at work session. What was posted was what BFJ said to post, as the other version with the footnotes hasn’t been acted upon yet,” Hubbard wrote.
It is not clear when the other version Hubbard referred to would be released, or even whether it will be released prior to a vote of the board acting upon the proposed changes.
It is also unclear whether such a course of action would comply with the N.Y. State Open Meetings Law. Since February 2012 any record required to be released by the State’s Freedom of Information Law, as well as “any proposed resolutions, law, rules, regulations, policies or amendments thereto,” when either is “scheduled to be discussed during an open meeting” must be made available to the public, to the extent practicable, at least 24 hours prior to the meeting.” In November 2021, the law was amended to require these items to be posted to a municipality’s website. See this explainer document from the N.Y. State Committee on Open Government.
Town Board members have a big job ahead of them because there’s a lot to review and digest. The draft comprehensive plan, written after a long process of steering committee meetings and community outreach, is a complex document and it was the subject of comments made by 32 speakers at a May 20 public hearing and written comments submitted by 62 individuals and organizations during a public comment period that extended through June 10.
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See compilation of written comments
The topic most commented upon in written comments submitted to the town was, far and away, the proposed agri-tourism code, which drew nearly three times as many written comments as any other topic. The proposal drew comments from 32 people or groups — more than half of those who submitted written comments. All of them expressed opposition to the proposed code — in particular to the resort hotels that it would allow on certain properties north of Sound Avenue.
Northville resident Kathy McGraw asked at last week’s meeting whether board members “plan to listen to this significant and growing sentiment telling you that the residents of Riverhead don’t want these resorts on this issue.” McGraw said the board’s “premature discussion” of the proposed code at the June 6 work session, while the comment period was still open, sent a “loud and clear” message “that you don’t really care what the residents of this town have to say on this matter.”
Later in the meeting, in response to comments from John McAuliff of Riverhead regarding the North Fork Resort plan for an agri-tourism resort, Hubbard said it was mentioned that “there were like 23 letters on agri-tourism” and questioned the significance of that in the scheme of things.
“There’s 23 letters on it. And there’s 35,000 residents in the town of Riverhead. And I’m not saying that to say that I’m not listening to what’s being written in. But there are people that do favor this that just don’t care enough about it to come up to the microphone or write a letter,” Hubbard said. “So I don’t want the 23 people that wrote letters to think that everybody in town feels that way, because they don’t and it’s not fair. It’s just something that, you know, the vocal people are against it. The people that either don’t care or want it, don’t want it enough to come up to the microphone,” Hubbard said.
Council Member Denise Merrifield backed him up. “Even Rob Carpenter in his letters as the president of the Long Island Farm Bureau states they want agri-tourism,” Merrifield said.
Council Member Joann Waski complained that residents weren’t offering ideas for how to preserve farmland. “Everything is no, no, no, we don’t want change, we don’t want this, we don’t want that,” Waski said. “Change is coming and some are alarmed. So put your heads together and figure out something else,” Waski said.
“We welcome your solutions to the problem,” Council Member Bob Kern said. “So you know that would be a great thing. Anybody that wants to, you know, write in solutions and their ideas on how to preserve the north side of Sound Avenue, write them in,” he said.
Several residents and representatives of civic and environmental groups did actually make suggestions for alternatives.
The Group for the East End suggested “increasing the mandatory open space percentages for subdivisions on lands throughout the town that contain environmentally sensitive natural features and resources, as well as the adoption of meaningful cluster standards for ALL residentially-zoned land that can be further divided.”
Barbara Blass of Jamesport, who was chairperson of the Riverhead Planning Board when that body was tasked in 1997 with overseeing the development of an update to the 1973 comprehensive plan and was later elected to the Town Board where she worked to see the plan through to adoption and implementation, suggested Riverhead consider conservation subdivisions as a preservation tool not currently provided by Riverhead Town Code. Blass cited the provision of Southold Town’s code that she said “affords a greater area of preservation via a reduction in density which affords the property owner additional financial benefits.”
Other comments were submitted pertaining to the transfer of development rights program, housing development downtown and raising or eliminating the 500-unit cap on apartments in the DC-1 zoning district, easing up on short-term rental restrictions and on the requirements for accessory dwelling units, proposed changes to the industrial zoning in Calverton, changing codes to convert pre-existing, nonconforming uses into conforming uses, preserving Sound Avenue’s scenic and historic resources, and allowing more density in the Commercial Residential Campus zoning district.
Compilation of written comments on draft comp plan
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