Costco gets green light to open tomorrow

Costco’s Riverhead warehouse will be opening tomorrow morning.

Riverhead Town has issued a temporary certificate of occupancy for the 150,000-square-foot warehouse store, Supervisor Sean Walter said today.

But the controversial gas pumps on the site won’t be pumping gas tomorrow, Walter said. The temporary C.O. issued today by the town doesn’t cover the gasoline facility because it still hasn’t gotten clearance from the Riverhead fire marshal, according to the supervisor.

The site developer, Brixmor Property Group Inc. was granted approval on an amended site plan May 15, aimed at allowing Costco to open even though site work and construction on the rest of the previously approved structures would not be completed. The planning board allowed the developer to plant cover grasses on about 13 acres approved for development with with four additional buildings. The planners required the developer to finish construction and planting of a berm designed to shield neighboring residents in the Foxwood Village community immediately to the north of the commercial site. The board also required the replacement of a wooden fence with a six-foot chain-link fence, augmented plantings along the property lines and the installation of an irrigation system on site.

Town officials said the Costco temporary C.O. would not be issued until all outstanding items were completed.

“The only open issue is the hydro-seeding along the entry roadway,” Walter said, referring to the cover grasses required by the amended site plan.

“They were installing the irrigation today,” the supervisor said.

The site plan, the land-clearing, the berm are “examples of things the town did not get right,” Walter said. Since the uproar caused by the clear-cutting of the entire site last year, the town board passed a code amendment that requires a developer to leave a wooded buffer on a site such as Brixmor’s, Walter noted.

Asked whether the developer would be required to post a performance bond to guarantee planting of the cover grasses, the supervisor said the town can only require a performance bond for the completion of public improvements.

“That’s not in our code,” he said.

Walter said he won’t be on hand when Costco snips the ribbon tomorrow morning.

“But [code enforcement officer] Richie Downs won’t be there either.”

“I’m disappointed but I’m not surprised,” said Foxwood Village resident Robert Hall, who has been an outspoken advocate for changes to the site plan approved by town planners in 2012. “They have friends in Town Hall,” Hall said.

The temporary C.O. was “the only club” the town had to make the developer do what was agreed to, Hall lamented.

Foxwood Village resident Barbara Ross, whose home abuts the boundary line with the Costco site, said she is pleased with the new chain-link fence erected along the border.

“What they’ve done for us is good,” she said. “I’m pleased with what’s in my backyard now.”

Ross had criticized the first wooden fence installed along the border — which she called a “popsicle fence” — as flimsy and insecure. She and fellow residents pressed the planning board to require it be replaced with a sturdier fence.

Ross said she plans to continue to press for the replacement of arborvitae planted on the berm. “They are not good specimens. They are not eastern arborvitae; they are western arborvitae,” she said. They are already dying, she said.

The white spruces planted along the eastern border — which runs along woodlands adjoining the northeast portion of the Costco site — are “absolutely beautiful,” Ross said. “The deer in the woods got great screening there,” she said.

Ross also said she’s not surprised Costco got its C.O. in time to hold its advertised grand opening tomorrow.

“That’s politics,” she said.