The Riverhead Town Board is set to adopt the town’s new comprehensive plan during a special meeting called for 6 p.m. Wednesday.
The plan, which will help guide town policy for the next 15-20 years, includes recommendations on a range of issues, the most impactful of those being how land across the town should be used and what development should be allowed or prohibited, incentivized and discouraged.
The comprehensive plan draft and other documents related to the plan are available to view and download on a dedicated website, https://townofriverheadcomprehensiveplanupdate.com.
The new plan will replace the existing comprehensive plan, which was adopted by the Town Board in 2003. The update has been a long time in the making, with the Town Board first approving a contract to develop the update with consultants AKRF in 2019. After more than two years of what town officials said was slow progress, the Town Board canceled the contract with AKRF and hired a second firm, BFJ, to take the plan over the finish line.
After the plan is adopted, town officials will decide whether to update town laws and regulations to implement the plan. The critical recommendations in the plan are for the town’s zoning and land-use regulations, which control what kinds of development is allowed in the town, where it’s allowed, and what the development looks like. Key recommendations are outlined in the plan’s final chapter titled “Future Land Use.”
Comprehensive Plan Update: July 2024
Key recommendations in the comprehensive plan include:
- Allowing agri-tourism inn and resorts. See recent coverage of the issue here.
- Allow “golf cottages” on or adjacent to golf courses throughout the town.
- Allow the expansion of buildings within the Calverton Enterprise Park’s Planned Industrial Park zoning district.
- Rezone industrial areas along the south side of Middle Country Road in Calverton into a new “Calverton Industrial” zone, which would have smaller building coverage, larger front yard setbacks and greater maximum height than the area’s current zoning districts.
- Rezone industrially zoned areas not south of Middle Country Road in Calverton to the Light Industrial zone.
- Allow assisted living facilities within an overlay zone along and off of a portion of Suffolk County Route 58.
- Reform the town’s transfer of development rights program to designate more areas that can be preserved through preservation credits, while designating more areas that could generate revenue for preservation through density and other development bonuses.
- Rezone certain areas within the town that have uses that no longer conform with the current zoning ordinance. Conforming these uses would allow certain commercial enterprises to expand. Several examples of nonconforming are listed in the plan, including marinas along the Peconic Bay and commercial properties on Tuthills Lane and Edger Avenue, which are all currently zoned for residential use.
- Implement design guidelines for new development in certain commercial zoning districts, including those downtown and along Route 58.
- Expand the town’s Hospital zoning district to the former Mercy High School campus owned by Peconic Bay Medical Center, and allow various uses for the campus’s development, including housing for hospital employees, physician offices and wellness-related uses.
For the last four and a half years, town officials have discussed and debated the future of the plan with residents, local business leaders and land owners. An advisory committee for the plan, made up of primarily town elected and appointed officials, representatives from two civic groups, as well as representatives from interest groups like the Long Island Farm Bureau, the Long Island Builders Institute, Peconic Bay Medical Center, met throughout the process with the town’s consultants to help develop the plan.
The town held several public input sessions and accepted written comments from residents, town advisory committees and other interested parties. The town held a hearing on the plan in May.
After recent backlash against legislation to allow agri-tourism resorts, the Town Board canceled a public hearing on the code and scheduled a public forum on the topic for Sept. 18 at 6 p.m.. Supervisor Tim Hubbard said the town would not delay adoption of the new plan until after that meeting and keep the recommendation related to agri-tourism resorts in the plan.
“[I]f we settle on something a little bit different than what’s been presented… even after we approve the comp plan, each unit has to go and be codified,” Hubbard said. “So if there’s a change to what the agri-tourism is going to be, it would be made when it’s codified down the road.”
Town officials met during the Town Board’s June 27 work session to discuss comments on the comprehensive plan and decided to make several changes. Changes to the plan since the public hearing are included in the final environmental review document for the plan.
Recommendations removed from the draft of the plan include:
- Considering the allowance of short term rentals in certain “popular areas” of the town.
- Allowing private schools to be built on industrially zoned land. Read more.
- Lowering the height requirements of new buildings from five stories/60 feet to four-stories/50 feet, with a 45-degree step back on the fourth floor. That was a key recommendation of the pattern book, a downtown planning document adopted by the board in 2021, but never codified. Read more.
| More articles from RiverheadLOCAL about the comprehensive plan update can be found here. |
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