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TOWN OF SOUTHOLD TOWN BOARD
COUNTY OF SUFFOLK : STATE OF NEW YORK
TOWN
PUB
OF SOUTHOLD
LIC HEARING
In uhe Matter of,
THE DRAFT GENERIC ENrVIRONMENTAL
IMPACT STATEMENT of SOUTHOLD
COMPREHENSIVE IMPLEMENTATION STRATEGY
Southold Town Hall
53095 Main Road
Southold, New York
June 24, 2003
7:00 p.m.
Board Members Present :
JOSHUA Y. HORTON, Supervisor
THOMAS H. WICKHAM, Councilman
JOHN M. ROMANELLI, Councilman
WILLI~M D. MOORE, Councilman
CRAIG A. RICHTER, Councilman
GREGORY F. YAKABOSKI, Town Attorney
ELIZABETH A. NEVILLE, Town Clerk
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SUPERVISOR HORTON: Good evening,
and thank you all for attending.
Many of you are aware that this is
a third in a series of three public hearings
on the Draft Generic Environmental Impact
Statement that's been prepared for the Town of
Southold. Please rise and join with me for
the Pledge of Allegiance.
[Whereupon, all rose Eo join in
the Pledge of Allegiance.)
SUPERVISOR HORTON: This is a
public hearing on the DGEIS, and we will be,
the Town Board will be taking public input on
this document.
We'll start the meeting. Just a
couple of procedural matters to clear up.
There is a podium stationed au the right-hand
front portion of the room, with a piece of
paper there and a pen, so, when you do address
the Board, we ask that you jot your name down
and the hamlet in which you reside, ani that
you speak clearly into the microphone ~nd
first stating your name and the hamlet from
whence you come, so we can keep that as part
of our public document. We like to do our
best to keep accurate records.
So that in mind, as I mentioned
this is an opportunity for public comment on
this document. This document's expansive. It
has been publicly available on the Southold
Town website as well as at the Town Clerk's
office; there have been a limited number of
copies that can be checked out, available to
the public and has also been available at all
the Southold Town libraries, libraries within
the Town.
So moving ahead, I think most
people have actually been to the past two
hearings, so what I'll do is I'll turn the
floor over to the public to offer input on
this document, to the Town Board and to our
two planners who have been pare of putting
this document together.
Yes, sir.
MR. TULLY: Should we just rise
and go to the podium?
SUPERVISOR HORTON: Yes.
MR. TULLY: Thank you very much
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for the opportunity of speaking. My name is
Sean Tully. I'm a landowner and a taxpayer in
East Marion.
I want -- I'm actually in the R-80
zone so most of my comments will be directed
toward that zone.
I love living or coming to the
north fork because it's a very unpretentious
area. It's an affordable area. It's an area
mixture of people, of farmers and fishermen,
people who want to relax. It's totally
different from the Hamptons. It's
unpretentious and affordable, but the way this
proposal is moving, moving to five acre zoning
will completely change the personality of the
Town.
When you upzone to five acres, you
are really moving to a really extremely
elitist type of zoning. Two acres is
enormous. Eighty thousand square feet to live
on is a big lot. When you're going to two
hundred thousand square feet, it's more than
big, it's an estate sized lot. And only that,
five acre zoning is a misnomer. If you have
nine acres, it's nine acre zoning. If you
Have eight acres, it's eight acre zoning. If
you have seven acres, it's seven acre zoning,
that's one house between five and nine acres.
So in other words, you got to buy nine acres
to get one house.
So we don't need six, seven,
eight, and nine acre zoning; especially since
one of the biggest objectives in the plan as
stated in the plan is to guarantee or assure
that the people that live in the town, whose
families have lived in the Town for many
years, can afford to continue to live in the
town. You don't achieve that by upzoning and
reducing density by 60 percent. What you do
is you create much, much more expensive
conditions for housing and essentially zone
people out of their ability to live here.
Again, the farmers, fishermen, the
tradespeople, they're going to have to come in
from central Long Island or somewhere else
that's more affordable. It's going to create
traffic problems. It's counterproductive.
So, what will the affect be?
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Well, essentially what happens is the
economics of going to five acre zoning dictate
one of two things. If you have a very big
lot, you build a very, very expensive house,
on the very, very big lot, that's between five
and nine acres. You have a subdivision;
you're going to have to pay so much for the
1.2 or whatever acre lot you're going to end
up with that you're only going to build -- you
see this in the Hamptons, enormous houses
because the economics dictate when you pay
that much for the land, you have to go for an
enormous house, because otherwise it's not
worth it. With no side yards, essentially
oversized for the lot. You see this in East
Hampton, you see this in Sagaponack. It will
be an extremely unattractive development.
In addition, this is really a rule
change. And people such as myself in the R-80
zone, which is a zone, which is not farmed.
My land is not farmland. My land is forest;
it's wooded. It's meant to be residential,
not to be farmed, and it hasn't been farmed
for decades as far as I know. That we're
paying taxes on this land and if it's down
zoned, and the density is reduced by sixty
percent, are we going to get a tax reduction?
I don't think so.
And this also comes to the point
of what is the economic impact on ~he farmers
and the people in the R 80 zone which was
touched on the report and there was a
remarkable sentence in the report, I hope you
have no more trouble, or much trouble, you can
decipher it more easily than I can. It said,
"The increase in land values has eclipsed the
diminution in value which may result from the
60 percent reduction in density." What does
that mean? Does that mean that within the
fortunate period where land prices have
increased, we're going to give part of it back
now to a reduction in zoning; or does it mean
that the expectation that we're going to have
some sort of bubble or surge in land prices
going forward that's going to make up for the
reduction in value that's going to come from a
60 percent reduction? It's completely vague.
And one ~hing is sure, this can't be disguised
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by the vague incomprehensible wording in chat
sentence, and that is, all other things being
equal, you just lost a lot of value. You may
get bailed out by a bull market and land or
you may not. We have no idea going forward
what's going co happen. It's happened in the
past, and you people here have lived through
what happened in the early '90s, land values
plummeted and then they scayed flat unzil the
mid-'90s, didn't catch up until late '~0s. So
we don't know what's going to happen going
forward, but we do know, we figure mayOe they
go sideways, they go up, they go down, but
even if they go up, you're going to have a lot
less value even though you may stay even or
~nake a little money than you may have if you
had been able to keep all of your rights
intact.
So I am not an opponent of
conservation. I'm a believer of conservation
but I'm not a believer in coercive
conservation. This is America. I chink the
market should work. And I think if
conservation should work with market forces in
charge, where full value is paid for land that
should be conserved it's already working very
successfully, and we want affordabilicy and
planning and not coercion and elitism. Thank you.
MS. NEVILLE: Mr. Tully, could you
please sign with your name and residence? MR. TULLY: Yes.
MS. NEVILLE: Thank you.
SUPERVISOR HORTON: Yes, Mr. Ross.
MR. ROSS: Good evening. Dan
Ross, Woodcliff Drive, Mattituck. And I'm
here to comment on the DGEIS and I reviewed
it, and while I don't agree with the
conclusions, all the conclusions and
recommendations, ic's an important document.
It's well organized, and there's a lot of
information in it, and I'm sure it's going to
provide a framework for discussion of land
use, and decisions for our Town for the very
near and the very far future.
Having served as a municipal
attorney, I appreciate the time and effort
that went into ~he preparation of the
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document. And I would just note that it's
packed with information, and it seems that
having been released just two weeks ago, in
would be advisable to extend nhe comment
period.
I reviewed most of it, and it
seems as though people who want to review it
and comment it on intelligently might need
more time and I make that recommendation.
Of the 43 recommendations, many of
them are solid, with the exception of mhe five
acre zoning, and many of them were solid ten
and 15 years ago, when they were first
recommended. In the summary introduction,
it's noted that the proposals basically come
from studies over the past 20 years. We've
seen them before in the prior studies,
transfer developmen~ rights, conservation
subdivisions, hamlet locust zones, tree
preservation, clarification of sign
ordinances. There are many recommendations
that we're seeing again one more time, and one
question we have to ask is? Why weren't they
adopted years ago, and why are they being held
hostage now to the five acre zoning component
of these recommendations?
There basically seems to be a fear
factor presented and the fear factor is
labeled "build-out" and the knigh~ in shining
armor is five acre zoning. And in order to
save us from the boogeyman build out, we need
five acre zoning and that's just not the
case.
The components are separable, and
we shouldn't be cramming into six months thau
which should have been done over uhe last Een
to 15 years. And I look forward to commenting
further with respect to the recommendations
and I thank the Board for your attenuion.
SUPERVISOR HORTON: Thank you
Mr. Ross.
Miss Norden.
MS. NORDEN: Melange Norden,
Greenport.
As I have listened to the
comments over the past three meeuings, I've
been struck by just how far away we are from a
shared vision of our community's future.
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We on the north fork face critical
choices regarding growth and development,
sus5ainability and quality of life, and so
much more. Yet, instead of planning and
acting ~ogether intelligently and decisively
to preserve and perpesua5e Ehe natural beauty
of the nor5h fork and our quality of life, we
are unfortunaEely much more focused on
reacting to prevailing trends and resuraining
forces of change, quibbling about zoning
meEhodology and planning tools.
The moratorium and DGEIS review
process and I'm not addressing now the report,
but the process itself its form of public
testimony, i5s severely limited access ~o the
documentation, it's circumscribed public
response period and lack of any meaningful
dialogue to say nothing of even simple
questions and answers between 5he public and
the planners, has succeeded in polarizing our
community rather than bringing us together.
Despite the face that numerous
people have advocated 5ha% this issue be
addressed and that the Board examine the
possibility of postponing some meetings or
changing the schedule, we are still on the
very schedule that was prescribed several days
ago, even though many members of the public
have asked you to reconsider.
I believe that a process such as
this one that we're involved, 5his planning
for the future must mean Eha5 we must learn to
work together to achieve a sustainable
community and preserve our quality of life,
and it is our and our government's
responsibility Eo find a workable means to
foster just that kind of dialogue.
This process, should I believe,
has resulEed in bringing our community members
together in a proactive way in really
assisting us in envisioning now new
opportunities and possibilities for our
future, and helping us develop goals and
s~ra~egies and benchmarks for change, and
helping deeply to enrich citizen involvement
in local government to promote visionary
communiuy leadership uo providing a much
broader foundation for planning and
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decision-making, and to result in concrete
measurable changes for our community. I don't
believe it has.
As we learn to work together, we
can protect our dwindling open space and
farmland as well as protect us against the
kind of development that brings a grea~ many
automobiles to our roads, which pollute and
further threaten our health and
life-sustaining ecosystems.
What also strikes me as missing
and absent in this discussion is a thorough
economic and social assessment of the carrying
capacity of our community, of the resources
required now and in the future to sustain any
growth and development and to maintain, what I
consider to be our superior quality of
life. The interplay then between population
and development has really not been looked at
deeply and thoroughly in this report.
Though I understand that land
planners traditionally focus on issues having
to do with land use management, any discussion
that entertains notions of one, two or even
five acre upzoning or a discussion that
purports to maintain the status quo, mus~
examine and attach a price tag in economic and
in human terms of the present and future
resources required to sustain such a
population. Resources such as water, health,
medical care, physicians, hospitals,
ambulances, fire, safeny, police, utilities,
traffic and roads, jobs, transportation,
electricity, education, schools sewage, waste
treatment, et cetera.
Some of these resources even at
present are thoroughly tapped out and many of
our systems need upda5ing as we speak, to say
nothing of what would happen if we had
burgeoning population growth, for example, in
the next five, hen or 20 years.
Further, such an examination must
include detailed economic forecasting as to
the dollar cost of such resources, as well as
a practical definition of demographic
parameters.
We hear in the report that 65
percent, for example, of our population are
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now senior citizens, and yet when we use the
build-out forecasting, and we talked abou5 the
$6,000,000 deficit in taxes, if the thorough
full-going build-out were to occur, it's
impossible 5o see from the report what kind of
definitions -- what kind of demographic
definitions were used. Does tha5 mean that
we're going ~o still continue in 20 years to
have a population that has 65 per,sent of
people say over the age of 55? Or, more
likely, are we going to see, as we have seen
with the increased number of members
households, much younger populations with
school age children?
The repor~ is very vague in its
capacity to use those examples and the
economic modeling changes dramasically when
5he demographic paramesers do.
Moreover, I really believe 5hat
the process and the report itself has failed
5o address some of 5he very pressing concerns
5hah have been a part of 5his dialogue ad
nauseam, certainly over the last several
years. And those concerns that have 5o do
wish the presumed equity loss, if any, of
various zoning models despite the fac5 that
the discussion of short term zoning or short
5erm equity loss is by no means a new one, as
well as manners and ways in which to mitigate
such laws. And, as a result of not addressing
those problems which are not new to 5his
dialogue, 5he process nas ended up pisting
environmentalists against farmers and planners
and has transformed the focus of our
discussion of our shared future inso
referendum on norsh fork farming.
This parsicularly saddens me
because our north fork farmland are the
foundations of a strong agricultural industry
and have been a way of life for generations
for farm families.
Our scenic landscapes and green
productive fields are an important part of
what makes 5he north fork very special. I for
one am deeply grateful to our farmers for the
beauty and 5he majesty of what they crease
each year.
Tom Wickham's fruit ~rees as I
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drive down New Suffolk Road brings nears to my
eyes when they're in bloom every year in the
spring, and I love the big round pumpkins at
Krupski's and the fields of zinnias behind
Seth's and all of the countless roses at the
end of all of the grape arbors. I get drunk
on the smell ef honeysuckle and wild roses on
the edges of wooded areas in my neighborhood
in the morning. I celebrate the red fox and
my neighberheed's deer herd. I worshie the
blue crab, say nothing of our dearly departed
lobster.
I want this beauty and these
habitats, these creatures and these farms and
woodlands preserved forever. What I'm clear
about is that there can be no compromise.
This farmland and woodland must not be
overdeveloped. It is our legacy, our greatest
natural resources, the most valuable gift we
can give our children, and once it's lest,
it's lost forever. But I am, and I bet many
ef our neighbors are, fully prepared and
willing to pay whatever is necessary to
preserve this land.
If it's necessary, I'll veto for
four percent tax. I will in every way seek to
examine whatever investment strategies are
available to have the funds that currently
exist achieve their maximum yield. I am
prepared to meet our farmers beyond the mark
of voluntary preservation in the open
marketplace and more than willing to
compensate them for any definitive equity loss
over the shore term if five acre zoning is a
vote.
I just need somebody, some planner
or some banker or some farmer to stop
theorizing, to step creating scenarios ef deem
and gloom, to stop implying less of access te
capital, and raEher to analyze ~his problem
and devise a fair and equitable plan with some
benchmarks that all of us can understand and
work together to achieve.
Much ef the open space that could
be developed is not being farmed; but for the
land that is being farmed, I sugges~ ~hat we
carve out a separate and special program and
that we make every effort to insure that our
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farmers have the capital to sustain and/or
expand their existing operations, eliminate or
reduce nheir debt load and further assist them
in estane and retiremenn planning.
I am prepared no do what it takes
to compete with developers no make all of our
farmers multi-millionaires tomorrow if they
are prepared to preserve their land.
I believe that we cannot place our
trust solely in good intentions, in mine~ in
ours, in our governments, or the farmers. Too
much is subject to pressure to change to the
winds of fortune or to misfortune. If we want
it, if we wan~ this land and we want to
preserve it, we must identify, plan~ and pay
for it in social, economic and human terms.
I want to make these farmers an
offer they cannot refuse so this land remains
forever green. That's how we create a
community value. And it is those values that
we carve out and create, the very things that
we hold most near and dear that together
create a community vision of the future.
I hope the authors of ~he DGEIS
will reexamine nhis equity loss argument,
devise workable tools and compensation models
to offset any equity loss, if in does exist,
including suggestions for increased access to
capital if capital access is a perceivable
restriction.
I believe the results of such an
analysis would go far to helping all of us
take the first step towards common ground.
Thank you.
SUPERVISOR HORTON: Thank you.
Mayor Kapell.
MAYOR KAPELL: Supervisor Horton~
Members of the Town Board, my name is Dave
Kapell, and I'm here tonight in my capacity as
a resident of the Town of Southold at 225
Center Street, Greenport.
The elitist proposal to rezone the
vast areas of Sou~hold Town to five acre lots
will turn the north fork into a private club
for the rich. The cost of membership will be
a building lot than costs $250,000 or more and
that the average family in Southold neither
needs nor can afford.
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If you truly believe than a five
acre lot is open space, there will be plenty
of it for the wealthy to enjoy, but for the
rest of us including the farmers, who are the
true and best stewards of open space in
Southold, will be forced out of town. I
wonder how many people here tonight can afford
to pay upwards of $250,000 just for a building
lot.
The explanations offered in
support of this horrendous proposal are open
space and environmentalists. For whom are we
saving open space? Only the wealthy will be
able to afford to live here. The rest of us
will have moved elsewhere, why should we
support a policy which is so obviously not in
our self-interest?
The environmental movement in
Southold has become a Trojan horse for social
cleansing. The republican members of the Town
Board and their supporters on the North Fork
Environmental Council promote a menu of
policies that is contrary to the interest of
working families. They oppose Plum Island or
any other use that might offer good paying
jobs. They oppose small lot and multi family
zoning that could offer hope for families in
search of affordable housing.
Instead they promote exclusionary
zoning like five acre lots that the average
family simply can't afford. They even turn
their backs on the plight of people like the
African American residents of Church Lane, who
are struggling just to protect the modest way
of life.
If successful, the cumulative
effect of these regressive and elitist
policies will be the cultural destruction of
Southold Town. The irony is excruciating.
Here you have a republican Town Board members
abandoning their party's longstanding
commitment to property rights, climbing into
bed with an environmental group that has
turned its back on the social progressivism
that is the cornerstone of the liberal
movement that has formed its core support.
This is an unholy alliance and it is no good
for Southold.
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If the Town Board wants to
preserve the characuer of the Tewn, it must
place the ecenomic and social needs ef
peeple first. If epen space is to be
preserved, uhe taxpayers have to pay for it,
not the farmers who are, after all, the
uraditional and best stewards of eur open
space.
To fund aggressive epen space
acquisition an appeal te massive state and
federal suppert is needed to insure that the
cost is affordable for local taxpayers. Such
an appeal will not succeed if it is designed
around an elitisu agenda. Why should lecal,
state and federal funds be used te subsidize
the social and economic preferences of the
wealthy? Who cares?
Let these peeple buy en the south
fork or in Greenwich, Cennecticut if they
den't want to live with peeple like us.
call on the Tewn Beard te abanden this
misguided and dangerous proposal and some
tegether with the people of Southeld ts
promote the preservation, not enly of ~ unique
physical environment but alse of a social
culture that is the envy of Long Islant and
beyond. It is ~ruly a national treasure and
sheuld be prompted as such.
Te succeed, such an initiative
must be based en egalitarian values that
respond to the diverse needs ef Ehe people of
Southold. We have enly to look south fur
guidance. Bast Hampton superviser, Jay
Schneiderman has warned us that large let
zening has not worked there. Take a ~rip over
there if you want to see for yourself. I was
there yesterday. It's outrageous what's
happened to East Hampton Town. Instead, they
have a daily trade parade of workers commuting
in to town to provide services from areas
where they can afford to live.
The mayor of Sag Harbor was
recently forced to resign from office and
relocate due 5o skyrocketing housing costs.
What we need are decent paying jobs, decent
good paying jobs and affordable housing,
wi5hout them Southold will become jusu another
elitist playground for the rich. Is this what
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we want for Southold? I say no thank you.
SUPERVISOR HORTON: Yes.
MS. WICKHAM-HESTON: My name is
Prudence Wickham-Heston, and I reside in
Cutchogue. And I'm not nearly as good a
speaker as some of the people that have gone
before me.
But I do think it's important to
stand up here and address you guys because
about six years ago my husband and I made a
decision to walk away from the careers that we
had in place in order to come back here to
Long Island to farm. And when we did that we
started the lengthy process of passing
responsibility on our farm from one generation
to the next. You know, there was a lot of
surprise in the community when we suddenly
showed up here, and I couldn't understand that
because to me there was never any question as
to whether another generation would pick up on
our farm.
In fact, there are probably other
people within my generation who will also come
back to farming. They love the farm. That is
true on lots of the farms out here. And what
Dan and I have been asked to do as we have
been farming here, is to talk no a lot of
other groups of young people coming along,
including at the high school last year for --
it was career day.
I was overwhelmed with the number
of students who were involved and who wanted
to be involved in agricultural. Lots of those
kids were kids from the farming families in
our community. Some of them were kids who
just want to get into it. We have interns
every year on our farm who are young people
who are interested in keeping agriculture
going out here.
We have a ~oung man out here on
our farm who's interested in flowers and some
day he'd like to be working the greenhouse
flowers. Right now he's learning to drive a
tractor, okay.
But there is a strong interest in
agricultural here for the upcoming
generations, and I mention this because I see
in reading the report that there's a }Dig push
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for five acre zoning, and I, and the other
farmers in this community, believe that five
acre zoning will be detrimental to farming out
here.
It is really unusual. I hope you
have taken note of the number of farmers in
the last three hearings who have shown up here
to stand up and speak out on that. Farmers
don't work together really well. We're a real
independent group, and I think the other
farmers in the community are great. They're
some of really good friends of ours at this
point. But, in general, farmers all move in
their own direction. They're all pretty sure
they know what they're doing, and they don't
need any input from anybody else.
On this one situation, they've all
come together; that's how strongly they feel
about this. And it's not just our efforts
that we're concerned about it's the efforts of
the children coming along behind us. Have you
noticed how many families have been here?
It's not just the people that are farming,
it's their kids tha5 are coming along to hear
what's going to be decided with this also.
You know, I think farmers have
gotten kind a bad rap here with this, with the
five acre zoning thing. It sounds as though
they're not interested in curbing development.
There was never a group more interested in
curbing development out here. There is a
reason that farms uend to exisu out in 5he
middle of no where, and for a long time the
end of Long Island was Ehe middle of no
where. It was way out there. And that's not
so true anymore. People move back and forth
quickly. We're looking to be pressed with
developmenu. The farmers are very concerned
about that. We're just wondering why you
would choose, or the report would choose when
it has 42 opuions out there that have been
stated as ways of really looking to curb that
development, why it would choose the one
method that everybody is really concerned is
going to hurt farming?
You know the idea of clustered
housing is something that scares the farmers
to death. Righu now on our farm we've got
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houses that ring all the way around, and the
thing that concerns us is when somebody new is
going to move in. Because everybody wants to
live next to a farm until they live next to a
farm. And we try really hard to have family
homes that act as a buffer between ourselves
and other homes in the community. Imagine
trying Eo farm on a little tiny parcel that
comes with this clustered community, and
having the complications that are going to
come with those new people coming into the
community and having their opinions about how
you should be farming that little piece of
land.
You think, there are lots and lots
of things here with this five acre zoning that
is concerning, but one of the things that I
would ask that this group consider and really
look aE is what exactly is your purpose here
wiuh this? Are you looking for open space, or
are you looking to preserve the farms out
here? Because they're two very different
issues. And everybody kind of talks around
that but iE will lead to two very different
outcomes for what this community is going to
look like for the next generation.
Five acre zoning is a tool for
developers. It's not a tool for preserving
farming. It doesn't intentionally look to
undermine the farms, but, in fact, it will
undermine those farms. So maybe we should
just think about and explore, creatively
explore those other 42 options tha~ are out
there for us.
The other thing that I would like
the Board to consider is you always get in
trouble when you're looking -- when you're
placing the whole burden for development on
one small group.
I understand that this is
something that has been pushed as being for
the greater good. It's never for the greater
good if people in the community can't gee
along. And myself, when I came back to
farming, I left a career in nursing. I've got
a Master's degree in nursing, and I have a lot
of other options. I could go back and I could
be doing other things in a heartbeat.
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As the next generation is coming
along, if this is not an inviting area to be
farming in, they will choose other options or
they will go somewhere else to do their
farming.
So as the report is being looked
at and reconsidered, I hope that you will
address the issue of how this will affect
future generations, because I did not read
that in the report. I never even saw it
considered. And I think that will make a lot
of difference. Thank you.
SUPERVISOR HORTON: Ma'am.
MS. SCHROEDER: Gwen Schroeder,
North Fork Environmental Council.
And before I get into my commen~s
tonight, I just have a few comments about
Mayor Kapell's comments about our organization
and it's really irresponsible of him to make
statements like that when he doesn't know the
facts.
First of all, we are not against
Plum Island. We joined with the union workers
to try to get them back to Plum Island, local
people that live in this community because we
feel that they can run that island more
safely. We ask for emergency plans to be
formed because we're vulnerable. We have two
roads in and out of here. And we askei for a
citizen's oversight committee. We are not
againsu Plum Island, jusu uo make that clear.
Second of all, I didn't see Mayor
Kapell at the ZBA hearing when there was
applications in the Church Lane community for
variances to put a business use in there. I
was there that night. So it's really
irresponsible to say we don't care. Just
because we didn't come out in favor of the
zone change there, doesn't mean that we don't
care, and you're misinforming people.
So, having said that, I just
wanted to read an ediuorial from the East
Hampton Star, and it's labeled "The Wrong
Message." It's the East Hampton Star,
February 27th of this year.
"We have been brooding over a
story that appeared in the Travel Watchman, a
weekly based on the north fork on February 6th
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reporting on a north fork appearance by the
East Hampton Town Supervisor in which he
criticized one of his town's primary tools for
reducing population densities and protecting
drinking water.
"According to the paper,
Supervisor Jay Schneiderman said five acre
zoning was to blame for our traffic problems,
affordable housing shortages, big lots. He
said having taken away lots that people can
afford. The supervisor's implication that if
a greater number of small lots were available,
prices for houses and vacant land would
somehow have stayed within reach of the
average wage earner. It is not born out by
the facts.
"The five acre zones created here
in ~he mid 1980s did not result in a sharp
increase in land prices. Most people agree
uha~ a booming economy along with the
Hampton's mystique and low interest mortgages
helped drive up the demand, and with it, real
esEate prices. Does it sound familiar, is the
north fork not becoming the new place to be?
Are mortgage rates not down?
"In addition to holding a line on
the ultimate number of people who could live
here some day, helping to keep drinking water
clear, large lot zoning maintains open space
and reduces the cost of infrastructure and
taxes. To argue against five acre zoning is
contrary to the general agreement that
reducing population density is an important
goal for the future." This is from the East
Hampton SEar.
And I didn'u wane to get up here
tonight and get into a debate about five acre
zoning, 'cause it does a disservice to this
document, which is based in sound planning
principals and is a culmination of 20 years of
study and input from the citizens of this
Town.
I wanted to bring in the studies,
if I had a hand truck I would have. They
would have reached this high, and they're all
saying the same thing: You have a
responsibility to protect our open space and
farmland and our natural habitat. And it's
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not only about protecting farmland. It's
about protecting open space, natural habitat,
the bay and the Sound.
It really pained me, Councilman
Wickham, to hear you talk about transferring
zoning to condos on the Sound. Those are --
the Sound bluffs and those areas are important
natural resources, and it's inappropriate. If
people take the time to read this study, it
goes along in line with so many initiatives we
put forth, the S.E.E.D.s study -- and I didn't
want to get into a big debate about five acre
zoning, but it will decrease density. Even if
today you adopted all of the nools in this
study, we could still end up with 4,000 new
homes on this end of the island, and I don't
think anybody in this room can honestly say
that that's going to create affordable
housing. We know that now little lots in
Sleep's Neck and other places are being bought
up, big houses are being put on them. They're
not affordable today. These are undersized,
nonconforming lots.
So to say that upzoning will
increase affordable housing opporsunities is
disingenuous. I think it will create more
because it will give the Town more flexibility
to direct growth in appropriate places, in the
hamlets where we want it.
And I didn't want to get off on a
tear, but I just wanted to thank Valerie and
the moratorium work group, bravo, you lid a
great job, you really did.
And I got this thing from the Pew
Institute, and they were charge -- I mean,
there were lef5 wing radicals like George
Pataki on it, really crazy people -- but they
were charged with coming up winh a plan to
protect our ocean. And, if I may, I'd like to
show you this little GEIS mock-up of what
metropolitan New York looks like from now or
back in 1930 -- just like to pass these
along -- until the present day.
And if you look at than little
GEIS schematic, it will show you that in 1930
there was a hock of a lot of open green space;
in 1960 there was less, and in 1990 there was
even less. And this was 13 years ago. And if
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you think -- I honestly believe the farmers in
this room that say leave us alone, we want to
farm, jusn let us do what we're doing, but
they're non in~mune to the outside pressures
that they have no control over.
They're not immu~e, any more than
the Van Bourgondien family was when they moved
their farming operations no here because they
couldn't function because of increased density
in the wrong places.
So I ask you to look at than, and
in this report, whan in says is that
development along the coastline is increasing
up to five times Ehe rate of the
population. We like uhe water. We like to be
near the water. Development pressures are not
going to end.
Your principal planner last week
gave you a report about what was happening
since the moratorium was enacted and the
development and preservation rates, and
they're not meeting our agreed upon 80-60
goals.
And I tell you, after seeing the
report and what could come out if we even
adopted all these things, we should have held
out for a greater density reduction. We're
talking aboun 3,000 more cars on the road
every morning. I would like everybody to
understand what that means. It means we're
taxing, you know, our roadways, our
infrastructure, everything. We're polluting
the bay. We're polluting the Sound. And it
just frustrates me that this is being labeled
as some sort of left-wing, out there kind of
planning tool. Zoning is a tool that's been
used effectively across the country in Napa
Valley, Montgomery County, out of Washington,
D.C. And I think if you look at the plan as a
whole, it's got some wonderful stuff in
it. You have to be brave. You have to be
brave and you have to do what's best for the
community as a whole.
I honestly believe with what
everybody said here, they want to preserve
farming for Yheir family and future
generations but one real fact is that farmers
many times cannot find family members that
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want to continue in the business. It's a
risk.
And I just want to, you know, I
want to talk about the issue of reexamining
and opening up the issue of equity. I think
that the Draft Generic Environmental Impact
Statement deals with this issue in Section 3,
and I would refer to anybody to read that
section. We have been over this.
The other night A1 Krupski said
this is happening so fast. This has been
happening for -- somebody said it -- for 15
years. This is not something that's happened
overnight. Anne Lowery, who's our president
for many, many years, came to the hearing nhe
first night and went home discouraged, and I
encouraged her to come in here and say that;
say you're going home discouraged because
she's been in this for so long, and she has no
faith left in you folks, none. Because the
studies have repeatedly told you what to do.
If you would just listen to what the planners
have to say. It's good advice. Somebody
mentioned -- well, the majority of republicans
on the Board were directing the moratorium
work group. Well, I kind of looked at it as
they were like kids who were getting
conflicting messages from their parenEs. So
what were they left to do? Really look at the
facts and do a good job. I mean, iE's
painful, and i~'s tough on people, but I think
if everybody -- nobody's going to --
I don't understand the argument
where you say upzoning is going to create
astronomical land values and nobody will be
able to afford them, and then say that you're
going to hurt our land values and we're not
going to be able to borrow. You can't make
that -- I mean, an some point you have Eo
justify that.
So, in closing, I just want to say
I understand that people are frustrated. It's
a massive document. Like I said, I have a
stack of massive documenEs in my office, and I
understand about public disclosure, and
informing the public, but, you know, you can
study yourself into ineffectiveness, and
that's what's happening here.
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And I would just ask you, zf you
don't acknowledge the pressure that Southold
is under, then you're in denial. And if you
think what we're doing is going to continue to
work, I'm sorry, I don't believe it. I think
it's too much to gamble with.
If you adopt five acre zoning not
in a vacuum with a rural incentive district,
the farmers said we'll preserve in our own
time, that's a mechanism for them to do so.
They maintain two acre zoning, when they're
ready to leave it, they make a commitment not
to fully develop their land. We have been
giving incentives to the farmers, the
agricultural districts, all these things. It
doesn't speak, when we say -- and people can
argue about the numbers -- but we know the
majority of the landowners aren't farmers and
that's another risk. And I know that nhe farm
behind me, the gentleman that owns the land is
not farming the land. And I just think that I
feel like it's a little bit like the Emperor's
New Clothes, like don't you see what's
happening? It's happening, and if we wait and
ponder and study, it's going to be los~, and
you're going to lose good people, active
people ~hat get discouraged about the
community because they get discouraged and go
away.
North Fork Environmental Council
is an advocacy. We have members who c~re.
We're supported pretty successfully by people
in the community that believe in our mission,
and having worked there, and being somebody in
the economic bracket that kind of can
understand what affordable housing means, I
find it really, really insulting that, you
know, you say we're elitist, and we've aligned
ourselves with folks that just want to make
this a Wonder Bread community.
So I jus5 hope in closing that you
guys can act. You've studied, act. You have
the words of your professional planners who
you hired, paid the taxpayer's money, have
some vision; do what they sugges5 and move
along with this process.
SUPERVISOR HORTON: Mr. Penny.
MR. PENNY: Good afternoon, George
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Penny, businessman, Hamlet of Arshamonaque, I
believe.
Biggest question everybody's
asking as you walk around town now, are you in
favor of five acre zoning, and the town has
become fairly totally polarized right now.
How can you count on one zone to
solve the problems of a town for the entire
future? That's my question. This will be the
third Town Board since the passing of the
master plan in 1989 that is doing an unjustice
to the Town of Southold.
The first unjustice was the
removal of approximately 80 percent of the HD,
zones which prepared the town for an area for
higher density population. As a matter of
fact, I think there's maybe one or two left
that are in development.
When we did the master plan, and I
was on the Town Board then, we spent six years
reviewing this, and we took our meetings to
the public, and we tried to make a balance
throughout every hamlet in the town.
Obviously people didn't agree with that and
they went through and took several zones out
predominantly in the Southold and Greenport
area and then another Town Board put one right
next to where the other one had been taken
out. So if the area wasn't right why was it
taken out in the first place? This is why you
got to keep zoning out of the politics.
The second was the Route 48 study,
which was targeted to remove businesses from
the back road and a bunch of other things too.
But, once again, great effort was made to
remove something and no effort was made to
replace it. Same as with the HD zones, they
weren't moved or replaced anywhere else. They
were mainly deleted. So you deleted one
segment of the population, which is those that
want affordable housing, those who want senior
citizen condos or apartments, a mix of things
that could have been provided in those HD
zones.
On Route 48 there was no provision
made for the businesses that were removed from
that property to move anywhere else. Was
there any change of zone made anywhere in any
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of the hamlets to accommodate any of these
businesses? They were taking away businesses
that required warehouses, when warehouses are
not allowed in the hamlets.
And, if you followed the master
plan -- and there is a master plan, I have a
copy here. This is probably the one moment I
kept from years on the Town Board. The
purpose ef Route 48 was to put the high
density traffic out there. The 48 study was
totally against, not only the master plan, but
all of the businesses that had relocated there
at the behest of the Town. They were uold te
ge there, and then the Town uried te
annihilate them.
New we have the third wersl
approach: Five acre zoning. Hew do you know
if you're in favor ef five acre zoning for the
future of the town? You can't tell from this
document. I read this document. This
document took me ~en hours te read. And the
only way I was able te get through it is
because having worked on the master plan and
being familiar with zoning, I knew what I was
reading. So I didn't have to go back and
reread it 80 times.
But even tonight, just before I
came te this meeting, and I was figuring well,
what am I going to say; what am I going to get
up here and say? Because this thing is so
totally flawed. There are se many conflicts
and controversies in it, and I can point out a
few of them in a moment, but I would m'ach
rather that you would extend this time period
so thau we could put this down en paper and
possibly give the public, as I understand they
have been requesting, 30 ~e 60 days more, so
that the average person can take the time to
understand it. Nobody can do this all in two
weeks, unless they're very, very familiar with
it.
This Town needs a master plan. It
has one. It needs an update. This document
basically says that.
There are so many things that are
being offered in this document for change that
are net specifically addressed in any way,
matter, shape or form further on in the
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document.
How can you hold a public hearing
on something like this without a map? And if
you're going to make major changes in zoning
amendments as recommended by this -- excuse
me -- the Southold Comprehensive
Implementation Strategy, if you're going to
make changes or you're going to recommend that
changes be made, for God's sakes, can't you
tell the people what they are?
They knock --
~Applause!
They knock affordable housing.
They knock home occupation. There have been a
lot of complaints according to this document
on home occupation, but absolutely no mention
is made of how they're going to correct it
later in the document.
Residential office and LB district
should be reviewed. The HB district code
should be amended. Density and lot size
requirements for a minimum, should retire
larger minimum lo5 size for residential use.
The code previously required
special exception approval and did
explicitly permit two-family dwellings. If
you're going to make changes, what are they?
Ycu're not telling us anything.
AHD disErict review. The AH
district does not create permanent supply of
affordable dwelling units. It was never
intended to. It was entry-level housing.
If the Town Boards had followed
the Town Board that I was on, had followed the
Zoning code and the master plan and addressed
the overlay zones and put out probably 20
affordable houses per year, we would not have
Ehis problem in this Town. But Town Boards
have been reluctant -- all I've heard -- I've
sa5 home for I don't know how many years now,
and all I hear is all this mish-mosh about
well, we want to put it in big houses; we want
~o put it over here in little houses; we want
50 put it in somebody else's backyard. We
don't want it here. We don't wane i5 there.
And this document doesn't tell you where to
put it either. And yet that is our future.
Five acre zoning and no decision on affordable
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housing. Is this going anywhere? I don't
think so.
You want to send nhings into the
hamlets, yet nobody can even uell you in this
documenn, it says they can'n even tell you
where the hamlets begin or end. How do you
know? How do you know which hamlet you're
talking about if you go down to the road and
you don't know whether you're talking about
Peconic, or you're talking about Cutchogue, or
you're talking about Southold, that's what
this document says. And where's the map to
define this for us?
This process affords a unique
venue within which the residents of uhe
community can directly participate in the
public dialogue and debate that will drive
this process. Upon careful consideration the
need for this process becomes quiEe clear.
First, relying on past studies
allows for all of the good ideas previously
developed to be evaluated in the conEext of
current trends and additions.
I saw references to pas~ studies
in this Town that I know were never accepted
by uhe Town. There have been studies done ad
nauseam. The Jones report was menuioned.
Nothing came out of the Jones report. The
US-UK suudy was much uoo conservative in its
approach, and nothing was ever adopted from
the US-UK study, yet i~'s mentioned here with
high regard.
Yet, if you can show me one thing
that came out of that study -- and the US-UK
study recommended hamlet studies, hamlet
groups, cluster groups in every hamlet,
working groups in every hamlet to develop a
plan for the fuuure and as an advocate for
that on the Town Board, I did non succeed.
So there were no hamlet discussions and
evenuually the whole US-UK thing went down the
uubes. But here it's being quoted with all
the other studies as Gospel.
Well, I don't think in here a
thorough review of all relevant issues while
making the ultimate decision-making process
transparent and publicly accountable, all
you're doing here is addressing us, you throw
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out a DGEIS that has enough stuff in nhere
that nobody can understand it, and then you
want, you ask us to comment on it. That's non
planning.
When we did uhe master plan, we
went hamlet to hamlet. We nook the maps. We
took the codes. We wenn into every one of the
schools, and it took us six years. How do you
think you can do something than is going to
have a more drasuic result to the Town of
Southold in less nime? I can't believe nhis.
I swore I wasn't going to ~o on
and on and on, but this thing is tonally
fraught. I got most of it.
By putting an issue like this into
the realm of a political theater for an
election does nobody any good. Whan I would
suggest is if there is a very strong advocaue
for this, and a very strong advocate against
this, then let them go out back and duel,
because it's going to be a lot simpler.
Because anything outside of that, unless --
nhis way here is doing as much an injustice to
the Town as it would be uo put it in nhe hands
of two people. And that's where this is
headed. So let's get back on track. Call in
an outside counsel. RPPW did the work
eventually. They creaned the maps. They put
everything out. They developed the codes, and
let's do this right because we're going in the
wrong direction.
Thank you.
SUPERVISOR HORTON: Yes, sir.
MR. LANE: My name is Dennis Lane
and I'm from Cutchogue.
I'd like to follow-up on whan this
gentleman just said. You know, you spent
$200,000 on this report and guess what, on the
maps, I can't even find out where my property
is. There's no labels. How could you spend
so much money on all these reports and non
have the roads, and everything laid out, the
railroad tracks? You have how many maps
there, about 35, 40? How can the people know
what they're looking at?
with that aside, in this reporn,
there's 43 tools, and I sat down and I read
it. I was one of the fortunate few who
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managed to get a copy of it. I started to
look at the fact that, if you follow the
money, in this whole issue, the only ones that
benefit, really directly is government.
Number 2, individual homeowners, but uhey lose
on the flip side.
Government in this report is
calling for increase of staff, creation of
departments. Where are you going to get the
buildings from? Where are you going to get
all the cars from to go out and do the
inspections of the properties? I mean, I sat
there and said, how big does a small town want
to get in its government?
You're going to restrict the
farmers from felling a tree, from putting up a
fence, from doing just about anything uhat
keeps them viable. You're going to
micro-manage every aspect of everybody's lives
here, it's not right.
My wife and I own 16 acres and
it's R-80. We came here, we moved here a
short time ago; we fell in love wiuh the
place. We had hopes of starting a vineyard.
That's completely out the window with what
your Town is doing. You're sitting here
trying to make a Disney Land. If you [ollow
all 43 of those tools, nobody will be able to
do anything. In will be artificial. You
might as well turn the lights off at the end
of the night.
I understand preservation. The
people here, all who came here want to do it.
They want to do it in a right way. They do
not want it shoved down their throats. Some
of the people who invested here, have invested
because that was better than the stock market;
that was better than a lot of things. You
can't condemn people for that. B~t you can't
take away the equity for their children, and
if you start rezoning and claiming 80 percent
of a farmer's land, you're doing a disservice.
It works because it's a rural areas. Rural
areas are not micro-managed like big cities,
where, you know, you walk your dog, you're in
~rouble; you do this, ~,ou're in trouble.
Here it's supposed to be more
free. People are supposed to have decisions
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in their lives. What is about to happen here
is the people up there are going to decide
everything we do out here. You're not going
to give us enough time to go through all the
documents in a logical way. You're going to
shove it down our throats in three meetings.
Mosn people can't gen nhis. How
many libraries are there? You got two copies
of this for reference, you got two copies that
can be taken out. Well, gee, I got two of
nhem. So who else has got it? I mean, it
doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out
you guys are going well beyond your mandate.
If you decide to go ahead with
this, make i5 a referendum. Get the people
involved. Do not take it upon ?'ourselves.
You will all be ridden out of Town. I'm
telling you it's going to happen.
Thank you.
SUPERVISOR HORTON: Are there
other comments from the floor?
Mr. Dinizio.
MR. DINIZIO: James Dinizio, Jr.
I'm in 5he Hamlet of Greenport, outside the
incorporated village.
You know, I listened to people
tonight, and I think there's one recurring
theme that seems to be going through, and that
is that model study may be good or bad, and I
attempted to read it and with my 17 years
involved with Southold Town, I had a very hard
time, you know, trying to understand jusn
exactly what they were trying to convey.
I think that you need no take this
study, if that's indeed what you want to call
it, and start tearing it apart and stern
making some sense and ssar~ giving some
guidance to the questions that are asked in
nhere.
I can tell you that if you really
think about it, this study is based on studies
that were rejecsed by the Town. I mean just
simply because %he Town doesn't -- people that
are sitting on that Board -- don't adopn it,
doesn't necessarily mean it was a bad snudy.
It means that there was not enough interest in
doing it that way, nhat simple.
Now, as I see in, it's the same
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drumbeat for 17 years, 15 years: Five acre
zoning; upzone; we want to save land; we want
to save open space. There's a real simple
solution for tha~. It's extremely simple:
Buy it.
That's why people purchased it in
the first place, because it was equity. They
have equity; they inherited in, and you're
going to take that away from ~hem. And I'm
going to give you a simple reason why this was
asked not noo long ago about someone non
understanding, you know. Are the land prices
going to go high, but they're not going to
have equity.
Well, if you have ten acres and
you have five lots, and suddenly you have ten
acres and you have only two lo~s, certainly
the price of those lons is going to be
extremely high, but any equiny in those lots
is going to be low. And ~he reason is is no
one is going to be able to afford to purchase
it, certainly not from around here, and so the
development is going to come from somewhere
else.
So I think that if we don't listen
to the people who own the land to tell us what
nhey know, which is -- they've lived with nhis
land -- it's not good. It's non a good deal
for anybody. And I nhink if we can purchase
the land, I'm willing to len my naxos go as
high as they want. Because listen, I've lived
here all my whole life, and I would love to
have mt, children life here if I could find any
way to do it. But I cannot and I will not,
take somebody's rights away from them.
AUDIENCE: Amen.
MR. DINIZIO: I just can'n do
nhat.
either.
{Applause;
And I'm hoping nhat you can't
I had the occasion just recently
to ask people, you know, why they're for this
five acre zoning, and I could not gen an
answer. I basically just got well, people
have agendas. Everybody has an agenda.
Everybody wants the best for themselves, and,
you know, if that hurts somebody else, well
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then fine, you know. I feel the same way.
But you have to have a better answer from that
when it comes to taking away people's property
rights and taking away their value.
And honestly, I don't gain
anything either way. If you go to fiwe acre
zoning, it doesn't bother me in the least bit.
If you don't go then really it doesn't bother
me either. I've lived here my whole life.
Traffic doesn't concern me, I just wait until
i can go out, and I go out. I don't get angry
about it. I just would like somebody to tell
me why they are for specifically five acre
zoning. I just cannot get it. With ridge,
without ridge, whatever it happens to be, you
can't tell me that it doesn't devalue the land
of the people who purchased it, the people
who, by the way, have planned to purchase it.
And a perfect example, you had a
Town meeting here not too long ago and a
gentleman came up to you, and he was trying to
explain to you why he purchased a piece of
land by the dump. Well, he was planning. He
moved, and he needed some place to put all his
equipment. He saved his money. I would bet
the better part of 20 years before he could
afford to purchase that lot, and now suddenly,
it may be taken away from him. I'm not proud
to say that that may be because of something
that I said, but certainly, it is 5he fault of
government. And government is doing it again.
You have to tell the people. If you're going
to change things in the middle, in mid-stream,
riot talking mid-stream 40 years, I'm talking
about midstream, middle of your election
cycle, then you've got no tell the pecple
exactly what you're going to do.
While this plan, which is based on
plans 5hat you have rejected in the past, may
be a plan, it doesn'5 tell you exactly the
ramifications if you vote for five acre zoning
based on this. I think you really have to,
}rou have to tell the people, each and every
person. And you know who they are, you send
them a tax bill every year. They're tile
owners. And if you can condense this thing 5o
a four or five page thing and then send it to
them, here's what we're going to do, arid then
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let them stand up.
And I don't disagree with George
Penny much, but I'm going to you, I say, let
it be a referendum. I say, you stand up for
this election, and, by God, one thing you
ought to do, all of you ought to agree to, is
if when you lose, five acre zoning loses. If
five acre zoning wins, then five acre zoning
wins, but that's the end of it. Le~'s get on
with our lives. Purchase the land if we got
to purchase it. Let the Town decide whau they
want to do, but personally I'd prefer just to
vote for it and not hang this over the
farmers' heads any longer.
Thank you very much.
SUPERVISOR HORTON: Are Ehere any
other comments from the floor?
Dr. Lizewski.
DR. LIZEWSKI: It's nice to see
that most things I would have liked to have
said have already been said. It gives me the
opportunity to be short abouu this.
One thing that I'd li~e to refer
to, the fact that we really don't have
undersized and nonconforming lots. They're
all legal lots uhat were made by legal
governments. Somebody had a subdivision and
it's legal. We don't really have in town a
lot of nonconforming, undersized lots. Half
acre lots are not necessarily nonconforming.
They are legal, they were founded by
government. They were passed with a legal
site plan, and those governments were legal.
I'd like to get through some of
the ideas that we've always had in this Town
about once we changed to two acre zoning, this
became nonconforming. We have enough
nonconforming.
There's one thing about the study,
one thing I think that this study should have
done for the kind of money that we paid is
address some of the present problems, not just
the future problems.
We have a lot of problems in this
town that have not been addressed. The
affordable housing problems that we have. We
have problems with the economics of ~he people
who live here. Very, very, very few uhings
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were really addressed as far as the people
problems. Do you remember when you went to
school, and you had a teacher that did testing
on you, and your father came in and he said,
you know, your kid has a low IQ or he has a
high IQ, and he should be this and maybe he
should be an astronaut. They did all this
testing then. It's always amusing to look
back at things and you see some of these
people in town who were told they may not
amount to much, now they own four or five
businesses.
You don't address people problems
with planning; just like education doesn't
always address children's problems, because
you cannot estimate what people are really
about. You cannot measure the drive of the
man, and these problems that we have don't
measure the kind of people that we're trying
to address.
We have a population of 20,000
people. This whole thing does not address it.
We don't address the people who are here now
and the problems they have. Why aren't we
addressing another way to lower our taxes?
Why aren't we looking into increasing our tax
base, because the only tax base we have is
second homeowners and homes. It doesn't
address anything.
We have tremendous problems here
that we have as individuals that most .of us
moan and groan about every time we get our tax
bills. There's no addressing that. We
address so little about the people who are
here. We should be trying to figure out now
are we going to keep the people we have here,
and how we're going to accommoda5e the people
we have. We should try to accommodate the
people we want to come back here, our own
children.
I mean, about eight out of every
ten houses that we are now selling are second
homeowners. So we're addressing the native
population, the people who have to work and
live here as much as we should.
This plan lacks an awful lot about
people. I mean, you want to calk about the
vistas and saving the land. I'll tell you
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something. I want to save the people. I
think the people need to be addressed who live
here. And I don't think that you should take
it lightly. I think you have an obligation
not only to save the vista and the nice piece
of farmland and save it for perpetuity and
everything. I think you should have an
obligation to save the people who are here.
So they stop moving out of here. So they can
afford to live here. I mean, everybody says,
well, maybe it's too far gone. Well maybe
it's not too far gone. You have an obligation
to take care of those people also.
So I think that this plan, first
of all, can't be looked at, as everybody else
has said, in the short period of time you've
given us. This is just a misjustice, it's a
travesty to think that this entire town,
20,000 people have an opportunity to run down
to the library and look at this plan and read
this thing. I mean, it's just unbelievable
that you gave them two and-a-half weeks to do
this. And as much as it's there, it's not
something that normal people sit there and
digest easily and take this thing apart.
And in all fairness, and if you
want to be fair, and you don't have to be, we
know that, you know, that's possible. You
should extend this for more study and more of
a look-see.
And as far as the many plans that
were up stacked up to here, there's a reason
that 5hose plans weren't passed. They weren't
passed because the Boards at those times
didn't think they were adequate or they had
faults in them. And there's been people that
want these plans done over and over again. I
have to give them credit. They persevere.
They want certain things changed in this town
and they keep working on it. They keep on
working on it.
Well, once in a while then you get
a Board that will go along with it. Maybe
they found this time, but I can tell you that
the general public has to be addressed, and I
think that people who realize that those plans
were never passed, should realize there was a
reason for it. Because every Board had the
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right to pass those plans.
So the agendas of all these years
have finally come to nhe culmination, I think,
in Ehis plan with the hope that a lo~ of this
stuff will be passed.
But, I don't think that like
Councilman Richter once said up there, that I
will not vo~e for five acre zoning unless
there's an affordable housing plan Yhat goes
along with i~, and I hope you stay with Thank you very much.
SUPERVISOR HORTON: Anybody else
care to address the Town Board?
Mr. Lukeman.
MR. LUKEMAN: Good
afternoon, Mr. Supervisor, Members of the Town
Board. I'm a member of the community.
Josh, in's great to see a younger
person than myself in Yhe room.
MS. NEVILLE: Please state your
name for the record.
MR. LUKEMAN: I never heard
anybody else state it so --
My name is Cy Lukeman from
Orient.
I noticed George wanted to create
one out of Arshamonaque, 'cause I guess thaE's
how confusing the plan is that is out in front
of us. 'Cause when I grew up in school, we
did a game. It was called "Scholastics" or
"Senior Scholastics." You compete with other
schools in ~he area, and you do mathletes or
history exams, and one of the questions was
What are the hamlets of Southold Town? So
I've noticed a few people, either in's the
miswritings of ~he papers, which definitely
happens in this community, or someone
misspoke. But the hamlets starn in Laurel.
It goes to Mattituck; then ~here's also New
Suffolk and Cutchogue. New Suffolk is ~hat
one down below; and then you travel on further
it's Peconic and Sou~hold and the Greenport,
and then East Marion, Oyster Pond, Orient,
Shelter Island -- Fisher's Island. Shelter
Island is not part of us. Riverhead was once
part of us.
So we really want to talk about
comprehensive master plan around here, we have
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to put in the idea of what is one going to do
for the young people that want to stay here.
We need not only just talk about Southold in
its own way; we need to calk to our neighbors
to the west in Riverhead.
We've seen a whole area gec
developed. It bothers me terribly, bun I
don't see the farm fields thac I grew up in.
We can't ride motorcycles like we did when we
were kids. We can't do half of what I
wouldn't want to grow up today. I'll cell you
that right now. It would be sad to grow up in
Southold Town the way that I saw it. That if
I have the wonderful opportunity co raise
children here, which for me has not yet
happened, but I have been around 22 nephews
and nieces thac got to spend a lot of time in
this community.
We go ahead and pass chis
legislation, it would be a grievous afront to
all those who you've all grew up besides.
Even those of you who sit on the Board who
didn't grow up here in Southold Town, you
should realize what you embraced when you
first came here. These people chat came here
into our community the iasc con years to
invest, while others were leaving and selling
out their equity to go enjoy the beauties of
Virginia and North Carolina because they
didn't want to put up with all the stress of
zoning; they didn't want to put up with all
the stress of, oh, these people don't like the
idea of dust.
How can we think about clustered
zoning when I grew up farming and someone new
moved into my community and complained about
dusc because you're disking. I mean, you move
next to a farm, disking exists. You know, we
try not to disk when the grounds are dry
because you don't want to lose your top soil.
But there's times when you have to cultivate,
if it's disking, you got to dig the crop, if
it's onion or potatoes. And, oh, they call up
Town Hall and complain. The farmers are
making trouble. They're causing ail chis
noise. They're causing dust in my home.
Well, didn't you look at the farm
before you moved next to it? Come on. We
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won't have any farms left. Five acre zoning's
no way. And that's just one problem in that
thing. There's so many other problems. If
that also includes ~hem 'cause I didn'% have a
chance 5o go read this documenn, but I read
the Local Waterfront Revitalization Plan, and
that was a disaster.
So if you're going to tell me all
5hose plans have no5 been accepsed by 'shis
Town, is part of this, I may be misinformed
you can correct me, Mr. Supervisor, buL if
I've been lissening to Mr. Penny, Mr. Dinizio,
Mr. Lizewski, speak in front of you about all
these plans have been put and grounded down
into this latest one, please, give your Town
that you care so much for a respite. Lo5 us
enjoy the summer, and let us just think about
something for a bit.
We just had a long, cold, nasty
period from November through June. Now if we
have a bad moon at 5he end of the month, we'll
have a bad July because it's been 5hat way
since November. The new moon the end sf the
month is always the worst weather.
Now, give us a break, okay buds?
Guys, think clearly. Thank you very much
everybody for your time.
SUPERVISOR HORTON: Are there
other commenss from the floor?
Miss Hargrave.
MS. HARGRAVE: I'm Lousia
Hargrave. And I have to ask a ques5ion. I
was a member of the Blue Ribbon Commission;
however, I have moved across the border into
Riverhead. If I address you, will my comments
be on the record?
SUPERVISOR HORTON: One hundred
percent.
MS. HARGRAVE: Thank you. I
thought that I would just ask some quesnions.
First of all, why did the Blue
Ribbon Commission not hold the public hearings
that it was commissioned to hold in order 5o
ge5 community inpuL on how to preserve
agriculsure in the Town of Southold? I think
that this particular hearing is not a
substitute Lo that kind of input, and I had
been looking forward to doing that.
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What evidence do you have that
shows the impact of the previous change from
one acre to two acres on farmland? Is it not
true that at the time of that change, many
farmers quit farming? And I believe that this
was addressed during the Blue Ribbon
Commission and basically the response, the
answer was ignored, that a lot of farmers did
leave in the early '80s.
What considerations have been
given to the visual impact of clustering
houses on one acre lots near a road and
preserving the land behind the houses; what is
the track record of existing clustered
subdivisions for retaining agriculture on a
preserved portion of farmland, such as the
development call "Farm Vue" on Sound Avenue.
(Laughter~
That's how it's spelled, Farm Veu.
What evidence do you have that
increasing zoning to five acres on farmland
will, in fact, preserve farmland? I ask you
to review the zoning change in Marin,
California, where such a zoning change did not
protect agriculture.
Is it not true that in Marin the
only way to protect agriculture after nhe
zoning change has been with something similar
to the RID currently proposed for Souuhold?
And lastly, why have you not taken
into account the fact that many property
owners who have tried To create conservation
areas on their proper[ies have encountered
unreasonable road blocks? Thank you.
SUPERVISOR HORTON: Would anybody
else care to address the Town Board? Mr. Edwards.
MR. EDWARDS: My name is Bill
Edwards. I live in Mattituck.
I serve on the land preservation
committee but my comments tonight are my own
personal concerns aboun 5he report.
The best thing about this whole
debate is that virtually everybody wants to
arrive at the same destination, which is to
save our town from the fate that has befallen
the towns to the west of us. This deba[e is
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about means; it's not about ends. That's a
good thing.
At the same time, I am deeply
concerned that some of my friends in the
preservation movement care far more about
controlling population density than they do
about the preservation ef farming, with this
brush-choked fields that you're passing hold
equal value to vineyards, row crops ant
orchards. I reject this position.
To me farming is Southold Pewn.
Preserving the land and not preserving farming
is like going fishing in the swimming pool.
The water's clean but what's the point. The
way to keep farming, to preserve our
agricultural in this town is to keep farmers
farming. And we should listen to those
farmers who have been speaking te this
audience.
{Applause}
Farming is the soul ef this town
and the farmers are its keepers. The Southeld
without farms is not a Southoid I want to live
in. And I expect those farmers to take their
responsibilities seriously. To quote a book
only slightly longer than this report, "What
will it profit a man if he gain the whole
world and lose his own soul."
Southold farmers have been blessed
wi~h some of the finest land, farming land
that anybody placed en the face of the Earth,
and I don't want to lose one acre of it.
I'm concerned about valuations
after upzoning because they affect both, the
farmer's ability to borrow and the valuations
they would receive if they sold their
development rights to the Town or to the
County.
On Page 328, the report states
that upzoning does net have a negative effect
on land valuations, though the only example of
five acres used is in Montgomery County,
Maryland. I know Montgomery County, Maryland.
I had a store in Montgomery County, Maryland.
It's just outside Washington. It's en the
Metro. It's not 80 miles from a major city.
It's a closed end suburb.
The proponents of upzening argue
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that the amount of money borrowable agains~
the land, even at lower valuations, is
sufficient for seed, fertilizer, pesticides
and the like, but farmers also borrow against
their land for a variety of other measures
reasons, which may not relate at all to the
crops on a particular piece of land.
The farmer has just as much right
to borrow against his assets to send a kid to
college, help an unfortunate relative, fix up
his house, build a barn, and a drop in
valuation leads directly to a drop in the
land's value as loan to collateral.
Therefore, I want to know more
than the report tells me about what happened
to those valuations in communities which went
to five acre zoning. Did it involve
clustering? Without which we would ent up
looking more like old Greenwich than Southold.
And if it did involve clustering
how did the clustering work, and how were the
values preserved? Consider a 30 acre parcel,
which presently would yield 12 or 13 building
lots a~ one acre each, with Ehe balance being
preserved land. The buyer of one of these
lots is paying for two acres, but has ~he
actual use of one acre. While this condition
has not so far affected the land values,
consider now the impact of five acre zoning
with clustering in which ~he purchaser pays
for five acres, but s~ill has the practical
use of about one acre. At that point, the
buyer's paying waterfront prices but not
getting waterfront.
And I can tell you tha~ ~he impact
of upzoning with clusnering, which is the only
way ~o do it, potentially has a greater impact
on values than the DGEIS report -- hard to say
that -- indicates.
So I ask the authors of the
report: Have you researched the impact of
upzoning to acres with clustering on the value
of the land; what happened when it was done?
Last night I sat in in ~his room
and heard the largest landowner in Southold
Town tell us than he wants to grow grapes and
he has no intention of selling his land for
development purposes.
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Indeed, any vineyard owner knows
very well how much it cost him or her to
create that vineyard. At an average of
$15,000 per acre and capital investment to get
nhose vines into the ground, into bearing age,
is it realistic to be afraid that vineyard
owners are going to yield to the siren's song
of developers and thereby write-off that
$15,000 investment? I don't think so.
Since the cost of getting the
vines to bearing age exceeds the current value
of the land, non counting the developmenn
rights, they're far better off no sell their
development rights to nhe Town or the County
and keep on making land -- making wine.
In Table 3-1 on Page 33, the
theoretical build-out potential has created a
nightmare scenario producing an additional
6,700 houses in Southold Town, of which 2,300
would be built in nhe AC zone. No allowance
is made for future land preservation, even
though both the Town and County have an
ouusnanding record on the preservation front
and an ongoing program, and no allowance is
made for the vast majority of farmers who warm
to continue to farm.
I ask the authors of the report to
specifically project the land which we know
will be preserved by the ongoing acnivities of
the Town and the County.
Finally, I'm concerned that nhe
report gives little credit for the successful
preservation programs to date, whether public
or private, and skips blithely over future
efforts, as I mentioned, of the Town, the
County, the Peconic Land Trust and the Nanure
Conservancy. I want to know why with 43
recommendations, there is no recommendanion
than relates to a potential bond issue for
acquisinion of development rights, either size
or indeed any bond issue at all. Than seemed
an obvious thing to put in there.
Yesterday morning I antended a
press conference for two of my favorite
people, Henry and Helen Rutkoski of Matnituck,
who recently sold their development rights to
the Town. When Superinnendent Horton praised
the Rutkoski's for their ach of preservation,
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Henry said, I wouldn't have done it any other
way. That is the kind of land preservation
which brings people together, and that is the
kind of land preservation we should all be
proud of.
Thank you.
SUPERVISOR HORTON: Any other
comments from the floor?
Mr. Mudd.
HR. MUDD: Good evening, Steve
Mudd from Southold.
I have a question for the Board
this evening, is Louisa Evans ill? Does
anybody know if she's ill?
SUPERVISOR HORTON: She's out of
town with her family.
MR. MUDD: Okay. Because this is
the third public hearing, and she hasn't
attended any. I want that put on the record,
please.
The question I have, after, you
know, everybody's getting tired of hearing
everything, you guys on that side of the
fence, and we are winded on this side too, and
everybody kind of likes to put their best foo~
forward and get on with this thing.
After the time and effort tha~
we've spent, and you've spent and we're still
nowhere near handing an olive branch over the
fence here, which I think is sad. Even the
FNC tonight made a comment, it would be kind
of nice if everybody worked together.
Ironically, I just want to remind everybody,
the previous administration we had a tractor
rally here two-plus years ago, that was a sign
that we had as landowners on top of a piece of
equipment we had here, plain and simple, it
said "Let's work together." It's pretty sad
two years plus that we haven't even
accomplished that goal.
I presently serve on, and I have
for many years, an ag advisory committee to
you guys and ladies, and it's called the Ag
Advisory Committee for the Town Board. And
our committee had contacted ~he previous
administration supervisor to voice concerns
about the initial discussion on this five acre
zoning proposal thing. And we were reminded
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with an index finger, it was a good choice
because it could have been another, but it was
an index finger from the previous supervisor
reminding us that we serve at the Board's
discretion. And I want to just remind
everybody sitting up there that this BDard, we
still serve at the Board's discretion. Ail
you have to do is ask. Ail you have ts do is
ask, guys; uhat hasn't happened yet.
The point I wane to make is it's
not too late Es work together. Five acre
zoning, quite honestly, should be a trigger
mechanism to be used in consideration if the
other 42 tools don'n accomplish the goals a~
task.
Thank you for your time.
SUPERVISOR HORTON: Thank you.
Mr. Weir.
MR. WEIR: My name is Stephen
Weir. I'm a vice-president for First Pioneer
Farm Credit.
We manage over $100 million of
loans to Long Island's farmers and
fishermen. A good portion of these loans are
outstanding to Southold's farmers and
fishermen. I intend to commenu and question
some of the information presented in the
DGEIS, but first I feel it's necessary to
address some of the public comments made up
'til now relative to Farm Credit.
During the past two public hearing
sessions of this public hearing several people
have commented on who Farm Credit is, and what
our self-interest is. Although I appreciate
the attempt, I feel the record needs to be set
straight.
Farm Credit is a lending
cooperative owned 100 percent by farmers and
fishermen. We are restricted only to lend to
farmers and fishermen. We do not lend to the
general public for strip malls, gas stations,
heating contractors or carpenters, just
farmers and fishermen. Congress made it that
way in the early 1900's when President Teddy
Roosevelt say something ominous. Because of
the cycles of boom and bust for agriculture,
regular bankers got hurt lenOing to farmers.
In reaction to those losses, bankers stopped
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lending to farmers. Farm production dropped
as did farm productivity and stability.
In fact, some economists attribute
the farm crisis which resulted after World War
I, as a leading cause of this nation's Great
Depression. So Congress established the Farm
Credit System. A lending cooperative
dedicated to the successful growth of
America's agriculture and rural communities.
You see, keeping Farm Credit out
non-agricultural lending keeps us focused on
agriculture. We recruit employees from the
best ag universities in the nation and
continually perfect our expertise in
agricultural economics.
In the nearly 100 years of ag
only lending, we have seen just about all
there is to see in agricultural economics.
Our self-interest in this DGEIS is very
simple: We seek a strong and viable ag
economy. Without it, we don't succeed. If it
ain't ag business or fishing, we don't do it.
As agricultural goes, so goes Farm Credit.
The strategy proposed by this DGEIS puts that
in jeopardy.
The actions presented in this
DGEIS, particularly the five acre upzone, the
80 percent preservation and the ag overlay
district will cause a change in the
equilibrium that exists now in Southold's ag
land economy. Those changes, as one study
shows, have the potential to reduce land
values by as much as 62 percent. I'd like to
present that study to the committee and the
Board for inclusion in this DGEIS, with an
expectation that the Final DGEIS address the
impact upzoning will have on Southold's
farmland values and the agri business industry
if farmland values drop by the numbers
presented in that report.
I couldn't agree more with one
speaker last night. She's a former board
member of the North Fork Environmental Council
who called for a public forum to see what the
effect of upzoning on farmland values is. I
too call for such a forum, and that's going to
take some time. The stakes are too high. The
winners and losers too far too apart not to
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properly assess the impact on farmland values
and the business of farming.
After all, on Page 1-36 Section 18
of the DGEIS it strongly states than the
business of farming, not just farmland, but
the business of farming needs to be not just
preserved but encouraged to the maximum
extent. In fact, here is what it says: "It
is a policy of the Town of Southold that
agricultural land and the business of farming
shall be preserved and encouraged to the
maximum extent."
My question to this body is then:
How do you achieve the goal of farmlanJ
preservation which can reduce farmland values
significantly, restrict farm business access
to capital, reduce farm business net worth,
reduce farmland liquidity, add the instability
of the agricultural economy in Southold and
still achieve the goal of preserving and
promoting a range of business opportunities,
and using the words found on Page 1-17 of the
DGEIS, "Particularly those traditional uses
such as farming. Agricultural is recognized
as a fundamental element of the Town's
landscape."
Those goals appear to conflict.
To make matters worse, we don't know the
extent to which farmland preservation goals
will impact the business of farming since this
DGEIS did not produce an economic and
financial analysis of the impact.
I said i5 last Thursday night and
I'll say it again:
{1) If farmland preservation goal
is achieved, what is the estimated change in
farmland values immediately and over the
longer run?
(2) What is the impact of
decreasing farmland values on the business of
farming, business opportunities which support
a socio-economically diverse community?
The issue for Southold's
agri-business here is significant. Limit or
reduce farmers' land values and you limi~ or
reduce farm business. Southold farmers need
every dime of land value 5o sustain their
business. Farming on Long Island is the most
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capital intense farming I have seen anywhere.
Did this report consider what it
costs to build a greenhouse; what it costs to
line out and bring to maturity a nursery
operation; what it costs to buy efficient
potato grading equipment; what it costs to
establish a vineyard; what the residual value
of each of those capital projects are? If
farmland values decrease, will these
industries be able to meet the costs of these
capital needs in Southold? The DGEIS did not
address it and didn't attempt to address it.
The farmland owners regularly
pledge their farmland for collateral no
finance these capital needs. It requires
using all of the value in the land. What will
the impact on these industries be the goal of
farmland preservation is achieved?
Yeah, there are those who come to
this community who have other assets which
they can use to finance these projects, but
for the vast majority of Southold's farmers,
they need all the value they can get.
I have been privileged to work
with two other east end towns struggling with
these same issues. I can tell you from these
experiences that now is the time for
leadership from this Board to arise. This
Town is clearly divided on the five acre
upzone and land preservation.
Whenever I hear taxes used like we
did last night, I know the community is set in
its division. We use taxes to define nhe
winners and losers in the plan. Elected
officials can take a side and use taxes as
their justification. The tax issue will
divide this community even more.
Members of this Town Board, it is
time for leadership. Leaders who seek to
provide an environment of a working community,
not a divided one. It is time for all the
Board members to lead. Lead this community to
the hex5 step. Bring the community together
to work towards a consensus. Leave this place
where we will have winners and losers.
Provide an environment for all at the table to
win. That vision needs to be set. After all,
the other east end town boards have done it.
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To accomplish that vision, I
request that you keep these hearings open.
Extend the moratorium for six months, so the
work that needs to be done has a chance to get
done.
Thank you.
SUPERVISOR HORTON: Miss Weisman.
MS. WEISMAN: Good evening,
Supervisor Horton, and the Board, committee:
I would like to begin my comments
tonight by just stating a general observation
of the document. I learned a valuable lesson
25 years ago when I began my career in
psychotherapy. That lesson has followed along
with me throughout my professional life and
remains just as valuable today in mi, work as
an advocate for the Long Island's agrisultural
industry as it did 25 years ago.
The lesson learned was that
titles, degrees, associations and positions of
authority did not qualify me or any other
individual the authority to dictate what is
best for the future of an individual's life,
their family's life or their livelihood. In
fact, it is the titles and degrees that
provide the foundation, the knowledge base and
tools to assist our clients through
life-changing issues.
After wading through much of the
DGEIS, I was left with the impression that the
proposed action plans for preservation is
neither working with or for the entire
community of Southold Town.
The weight of the document's
proposed action plan is centered directly on
the town's agricultural community. What
appears to be a dash to the finish line to
implement the suggested plans without giving
time for democratic process to unfold is in
total opposition to the freedoms we have which
are so coveted by other countries. Due
process must be provided to the constituents
of this community. The decisions and the laws
enacted as a result of the DGEIS document will
have profound affect on the future of Southold
Town.
The next segment of my comment
will be references to the DGEIS and questions
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to follow that.
First reference from the DGEIS
document socio-economic impact, document Page
3-32, third paragraph: "In summary the
potential socio-economic impacts to the town
of an upzoning are not anticipated to be
significant. In addition, solely economic
impacts are not required to be addressed under
SEQRA; and any land use initiative must be
considered the general good of the town.
"Upzoning has been documented as a
valid growth management density reduction tool
that has been widely used throughout the
country. The actual impact on value is
expected to be minimal, given increasing land
values, the fact that reported densities of
recent projects are consistent with
significant diminution of value, and
agricultural land value will remain intact.
"Given the consideration of this
issue as documented herein, no significant
socio-economic impacts are expected as a
result of this action."
Now, I would like to reference to
you, according to 2003 New York State
Environment Quality Review statutory authority
Environmental Conservation Law, Article 8,
Section 8-0101, purpose, Number 7:
"It is the intent of the
legislation that the protection and the
enhancement of the environment human community
resources shall be given appropriate weight
with social and economic consideration in
public policy.
"Social, economic and
environmental factors shall be considered
together in reaching decisions on proposed
activity."
Now, in that same documenn,
Section 8-0109, preparation of Environmental
Impact Statement, Number 1:
"Agencies shall use all practical
means to realize the policies and goals set
forth in this article, and shall act and
choose alteratives which are consistent with
social, economic and other essential
considerations to the maximum extent
practical."
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Number 8: "When an agency
decides to carry out and/or approve an action
which has been the subject of an environmental
impact statement, it shall make an explicit
finding that requirements of this section have
been met, and that they are consistent wi~h
social, economic and other essential
considerations to the maximum practicability."
Section 8-0113, Rules and
Regulations, Number 2B: "Taking in~o account
social and economic factors to be considered
in determining the significance of an
environmental effect."
Number 4, Coordination with
agricultural districts program. "The
commissioner -- in consultation with the
Commissioner of Agriculture and Markets ....
that would be Nathan Rudgers -- "shall amend
the regulation promulgated pursuant to the
provision of this section as necessary and
appropriate to assure the advancement Df
public monies for non-farm development on
lands used in agricultural production and
unique and irreplaceable agricultural land
within agricultural district in accordance
with 5he provision of Subdivision 4, Section
305 of the Ag and Markets Law."
My question: Explain the use of
the following subjective statements made in
reference to the economic impact of 'an upzone.
This statement: "Not anticipated to be
significant." Ano5her statement: "No
significant socio-economic impacts are
expected as a result of this action."
In addition, I would ask to
identify the supporting documents that were
used to come to this conclusion.
Another question: Explain to the
community 5he gross discrepancy between 5he
DGEIS documen5 and the 2003, Article 8
Environmental Quality review on issues of need
to assess economic impact on a farming
industry.
I'll move on to a second
reference: According to Legg Mason, a
document to study the effect of zoning on the
business of agriculture per acre values of
developable land in typical Maryland
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metropolitan and rural locations, Page 50,
Section D, this is the summary:
"In summary it is naive and runs
counter to all land economic experience to
contend that zoning and other command and
control policy power land use control
techniques do not lower the value of land
placed in more restrictive versus less
restrictive land use categories." The summary
goes to say, "Public policy that results in
the application of low density development in
rural areas must take into account the impact
that such a zoning has on the ability .Df the
farmer to maintain the farm business." My
question: The summary of the Legg Mason
document indicates that an exhaustive research
of the economic impact and of upzoning on
farmland was not conducted by the moratorium
planning team. I would ask that this ~ocument
please be reviewed and report on the
significance that this document has to the
DGEIS.
Another reference: SEQRA local
law review revision. This is in reference to
the DGEIS Page 135, Number 16 regarding the
recommendation that the Town adopt its
specific Type 1 list that would identify
actions that are likely to have a significant
impact on the environment. As stated in the
document, the suggested Type 1 actions
include: Critical environmental areas,
actions with scenic byways, projects that
remove significant acreage from agricultural
use, conventional subdivisions exceeding a
specified number of lots, actions involving a
minimum threshold percentage of a significant
feature such as wetlands, steep slopes, beach
watershed protection areas, woodlands, et
cetera.
Actions that generate more than a
certain minimum threshold number of vehicles,
my comment: It is important that the general
public of Southold Town be informed on the New
York State Environmental Quality review as it
defines Type 1 actions. This is the
definition: "Those actions and projects that
are more likely to require the preparation of
an environmental impact statetnent than
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unlisted action. The recommendation to the
Town to adopt a specific Type 1 list is a
recommendation to tighten the regulatory arm
of the Southold Town government." My
quesuion: What is the definition of "critical
environmental area"? How is scenic byways
defined? What is the definition of projects
that remove significant acreage? Please
quantify significant acreage. And what
actions would define agricultural use? How
many specified numbers of lots is needed to
exceed conventional subdivisions? What is the
minimum threshold percentage of a significant
natural feature? And finally, to define the
minimal threshold number of vehicle trips. My
question is: Do vehicle trips include soccer
moms and little league games? They cause a
lot of congestion on the roadways.
In conclusion, by no means does
this entry into the Final Generic
Environmental Impact Statement sugges~ there
are no further questions. In fact, it is not
possible to read and digest the full impact
the proposed changes will have on the entire
community of Southold Town.
It should be noted, this is the
busiest time of the year for most in the
farming community. Closing a public hearing
while the farmers are working night and day
between severe rainstorms to get their crops
in the ground is unconscionable.
It is important that tonight's
DGEIS public hearing be recessed until such
time as question and answer period is
completed.
Thank you for your time.
SUPERVISOR HORTON: On }'our way
out state your name.
MS. WEISMAN: I'm sorry, I'm
sorry, I wrote my name but I forget ~e tell
you my name. I'm Rebecca Weisman. I'm
Associate Director of Long Island Farm
Bureau.
SUPERVISOR HORTON: An}, other
comments from the floor?
Hr. Nickles.
MR. NICKLES: Good evening. John
Nickles, Jr. I'm a resident ef Seuthold. I'm
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also the president of Southold Business
Alliance.
I'm non sure if I missed an
opportunity to talk about how nhis process
snarned, or if it's shill something that can
be considered by the Town Board. This is more
directed at the Town Board than at the
planning group.
As I see it - I'm not an
attorney, obviously. It looks to me that
there's some question as to the legality of
the definition of the proposed action
regarding SEQRA. I'm not an attorney, it's as
confusing as it is questionable for a proposed
action to ask a group of people ~hat are not
the Town Board to pass studies for ideas and
~ools, and then give ~hem the power to choose
which tools these planners and consultants
believe should be utilized in the proposed
action.
By definition, the proposed action
from the ounset should have been defined, and
it should have been defined with the exact
tools that you wanted to consider or that you
wanted to have considered. I don't believe
that it should have been derived by giving
latitude to a planning workgroup and looking
a~ past studies.
In this way I think that the
process seems fundamentally flawed and the
legality of its funcnion should be considered.
This may be too late, water under the bridge,
I don't know but it's a concern that I have.
I'd like to talk a little about
environmental impacts. I think that many of
us understand why a study of this magnitude,
however problematic that it may be, would
require an environmental impacn study. The
state requires that it be done.
While the environmental s~udy was
necessary ~his analysis seems to me was not
necessarily the most important aspect to be
considered. Nobody would deny than studying
the prospect of less intensive development in
the Town of Sounhold may be environmentally
beneficial. I don't think anybody in this
room or anybody in this town would argue that
point.
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The Town of Southold was not
considering -- excuse me -- except for the
transfer of development rights and focusing
growth into the hamlet centers, I didn't see
anything in the plan where the Town of
Southold was considering more intensive
development than is already allowed by current
zoning and the current master plan.
If we were considering more
intense uses than the current two acre zoning,
say down zoning to one acre zoning, I'm sure
that the residents of the Town would be crying
and screaming to have an environment impact
statement done to see what negative affects
more intense uses might have upon the
environment.
So, that while we know that the
DEC mandates SEQRA and requires an
environmental impact statement be done, if
we're not proposing more density than the
current code would allow, what are the
residents of Southold paying for?
Every one of us already knows that
the prospect of less development may very
likely have positive impacts upon the
environment.
I'd like to talk about the
economic impacts. The SEQRA regulations have
focused --excuse me -- nhe workgroup has
focused in on the SEQRA regulation that
provides a loophole to allow the study group
to pass over doing a full socio-economic study
of more restrictive zoning. While this is not
completely unbelievable from a political
viewpoint, there is, I think, a perception in
town that this five acre zoning thing is what
everybody's really looking at.
It should be completely
intolerable by all the residents of the town
for overlooking or not addressing what this
entire multi-year debate has been about. What
is the economic impact that more restrictive
zoning is going to have upon the business of
farming? What is tile economic impact upzoning
is going to have upon the successful farmland
preservation program? What is the economic
impact that five acre zoning is going to have
on the cost of living in Southoid Town? What
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are the economic impacts with and without a
viable affordable housing program?
The opinions rendered in this
study about the reduction in landowner value
or appreciation are noU sufficient to rely
upon and absolutely deserve more analysis.
The business of agriculture and the success of
preservation and the cost of living in
Southold Town are too important ~o be based
upon a few outside opinions by so called
experts. We are not ur}ring to down zone land
and create more densiuy than what is currently
allowed. I didn't see that anywhere in the
proposal.
Although uhe State may have
required an environmental impact statement,
what should have been mandatory is a detailed
study and assessmenu of the economic impacts
that would occur. Farmers, landowners and
residents of Southold Town deserve better uhan
that.
Southold Business Alliance
requesUs that the Town Board take action to
require due diligence from this study group.
An environmental impact study that does not
address the serious economic consequences of
an action is only hal{ a study. Thank you.
SUPERVISOR HORTON: Anybody else
from the floor?
MR. FATZ: My name is Harry Katz.
I want to thank you for giving me the
opportunity to talk.
SUPERVISOR HORTON: Can you give
the hamlet uhat you're from, sir, just for the
record?
MR. KATZ: From Sou~hold. I live
in Southold. My son Carlson and my wife.
I just wan~ ~o say something ~hat
the last fellow said, Mr. Nickles. I think
he's confusing the issue of affordable housing
with upzoning. The facu is you can't even buy
a used house in Southold for under $300,000
Affordable housing is a completely
different issue nhan two - most people can't
afford a two acre house, and they can't afford
a five acre house. You've got to star~_
affordable housing thau's beyond zoning. Two
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and five acres, than's not affordable ~o
anybody. That's the first thing.
The second thing I want to say --
SUPERVISOR HORTON: If you can
address the Town Board, please.
MR. KATZ: I do want to apologize
to anybody that I offend in this because I
really think farmers are doing God's work here
on Long Island. I can't say how much I
respect them and what they've done and how
they've preserved this incredible heritage
that I'm privileged uo be a part of. And I
would like to see everything done ~o protect
their businesses and to keep what they're
doing for Southold and the entire east end.
It's beautiful, it's wonderful. Producing
food, you know, I have one of my own gardens.
I think I have one of the biggest gardens in
Southold. I love it myself, and that's why
I'm here. And I think everything should be
done to encourage the perpetuation of 'farming
in Southold, everything.
But, I have come to the conclusion
that I also have to say that I support
upzoning because I want to see my quality of
life decent. I like the rural open sp~ces. I
love the country feel of Southold. It's the
last place Ehat you can live this way on Long
Island. I'm very privileged and blessed to
live out here, and I feel that with all -- I
just don't see the precedent further west.
Like Riverhead, where the one acre zon[ng has
preserved a lot of the farmland. I don't
think it's worked.
If I could be assured that by
keeping the two acre zoning you would ]preserve
farming, I would go for it all the way. But I
don't see that happening, if one looks at the
precedent of Long Island.
My apologies to the farming
community, if they're interested. But I would
have to say, I don't know the specifics of
this plan here, but I do have to say that I am
at this point for the five acre zoning, unless
it can be proven to me nha~ the two acre
zoning, as it is now, can keep ~he farms
viable.
Thank you.
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sir.
Town Board?
SUPERVISOR HORTON: Thank you,
Are there other comments for the
Yes, sir, in the front.
MR. NAVARRA: Hi, my name is
Kerry Nevarra. I'm from Mattituck.
This proposal here is way too much
for people who have their businesses that run
in the summer time to get involved in the
summertime.
MS. NEVILLE: Could you adjust the
mike and put it up a little bit?
MR. NAVARRA: Right now is like
the worst time in the whole year that anybody
that lives out in this town or works out in
the town that can have something like this put
out in front of them. This whole thing should
be made available to all the taxpayers, where
we can each get a copy of this, we can review
it, and sometime in the winter time when we're
sitting here in the snow, we can start
discussing what this whole proposal has.
This is just way too much for anybody out here
to handle.
And, at the same time, you people
in this proposal have to consider what's going
to go on with that Grumman site. Someone else
mentioned that. That site there is going to
have more of an effect on what's going to be
in the future in this area.
I don't know if you're aware of
all the outside companies from Atlantir City
and other areas, Las Vegas that are looking
for that site for casino gambling. It's ripe.
The State's broke and guys are looking at
purchasing sections of that property and
putting in billions of dollars worth of hotels
and stuff like that. And that's going to have
a tremendous effect on this area. Don't sell
it short. It's going to be eight years, nine
years that that's going to happen. It's not
the Indians. The State does not want to allow
the money to be going up to Foxwoods and stuff
like that. They want the revenue right here.
It's their last resort. The State is broke.
So keep that in mind when you start looking at
that proposal in your master plan; you got to
consider to the wes~ of us.
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Okay, the second thing is in this
whatever this thousand page document you got
here, I haven't been able to geU in. Someone
gave me a little information on it, and it was
about a proposal for the wineries and the
vineyards to build catering facilities and
hotel rooms on land that they have bought
under the use of agricultural use, okay. I'm
totally against it. Okay, I'm 100 percent of
having vineyards and wineries built. In Napa
Valley and other ~reas of the country where
they have vineyards, nhey don'~ allow them to
get involved with any type of lodging, any
type of restaurant, any type of catering
business, okay. They want balance in 'their
community. They want other people ~o [nave the
opportunities to make money in their
community, not one thing, it will just suck
dry all these other businesses. They don'n
allow it. Real farmers don't get involved
with hotels, restaurants and drive-in liquor
stores, okay.
That's basically it. Thank you.
SUPERVISOR HORTON: Thank you,
sir.
Board?
Domino,
Anybody else care to address nhe
Mr. Domino.
MR. DOMINO: Thank you. Mlke
Southold Hamlet.
You'll be happy to know I'm not
going to talk about five acre zoning. I just
would like to mention on a Table 4-1 summary
of the mitigation features, it mentions the
tree preservation local law. And the Tree
Committee would like ~o nhank you for l~he
opportunity for input. We had plenty of time
for that, and plenty of time for review, and
during that review it was obvious to us that
we just needed to clarify one thing, the
proposed tree preservation law. It's non
clearly enough spelled out that specifically
targeting lots nhan are greater nhan one acre,
single and separate and undeveloped.
Preservation as we proposed, it
has nothing to do with lands t~at are
presently developed nor lands that would be
under normal subdivision, commercial
properties and lasnly, agricultural lands.
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We specifically exempt farmland, agricultural
land from our concerns.
Thank you again for the
opportunity for this additional -
SUPERVISOR HORTON: Thank you,
Mr. Domino. Are there other comments from the
floor; does anybody care to address the Town
Board? Mr. Cooper.
MR. COOPER: Doug Cooper,
Mattituck.
I have a few questions for the
moratorium committee. It appears that you are
doing a disservice when you do a build out
analysis versus a tracking analysis; why?
There's details of the tracking details I
would like the deuails of it, not a summary,
full details.
Have you looked at the
interrelationship of the different tools? How
some tools may contradict or work against
other tools?
I spoke last night here of some of
your computations, distortions, in my opinion,
are disEortions. Jusu an example I thought of
to make some of that clearer: If I do a major
subdivision on my farm, it will be clustered;
half of it will be - the houses will be
clustered on half of it; is this correct?
Yes. That will lead to a 50 percent
preservation effect.
If I sell half my PDRs, rather
than do a development, rather than do a major
development, I sell half my development
rights, from what I ui~derstand, that would be
considered a 50 perce~lt preservation effect.
One scenario is I develop the
property to the fullest extent, is 50 percent
preservation. The other scenario is I build
nothing, I only sell some of my development
rights and that's 50 percent preserved. This
is crazy stuff. Absurd.
This report -- and you people make
me think I'm in the Twilight Zone or
someEhing. There are enough serious areas and
distortions and unanswered questions in this
report, a serious lack of studying Ehe
enhancement of current tools and expediting
the preservauion, five percent we are now
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doing. There is still a hang up. People
dragging their feet in our preservation
departments. This is crazy. This report was
prepared, in my opinion, by people who
strongly want upzoning. It is biased. It's
prejudiced. The numbers are distorted to
support their arguments. And any argument to
support other preservation tools are dismissed
When Mr. wickham put together the
BRC, the Blue Ribbon Commission, he made it up
of a cross-section of our town. I was on that
commission. I felt there was too man},
preservationists on it, too many non-farmers
on it; but the fact of the matter is, we
worked together. It was a balanced report.
Nobody had power there. There was business,
there was farmers, landowners,
preservationists, and we came to a strong
majority conclusion in that report. But that
was only after a lot of compromise and
discussion. This document has none of that in
it. It's all slanted in one ~irection.
I'd like to know how many things
are buried in this document that have to do
with things other than let's say upzoning.
And by that I mean, everything from the tree
code to country inns, which I support the
concept of country inns if it's done right.
But these are things buried in here that the
average person may not know about unless they
have some way of getting through this.
I think this document is way
too -- trying to do too much, trying to do it
all. And that's -- how many different things
do you have in this document, and what are
they that you will now not need to do a DGEIS
for? I'm getting pretty good at saying that.
Your numbers in there, I believe,
I strongly believe, are inaccurate, distorted.
I would like Supervisor Horton to have an
independent review of the way you do your
numbers, and how they -- and the actual
In our land preservation efforts,
there is room for compromise. When we are
currently doing somewheres between, on the AC
and R-80 land, somewheres between 15 and 20
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6O
building lots scheduled. And it all depends
on how you wan~ to figure those numbers. And
that's a joke. It ought to be a set number.
And I think it's up around 20. But, when we
are doing that good, whether you choose 15
acres or 20 acres for every new building lot
approved, those are excellent numbers.
There's an easy compromise, and
the Blue Ribbon Commission recommended this,
and that is to monitor, and the numbers set a
trigger, and someone else mentioned this
tonight, if the numbers get too low, if they
hit the trigger, let's hook that baby up to
upzoning. But right now upzoning is only
going to hurt this Town.
I asked for a build-out scenario
under five acre zoning, and you did a
build-out scenario under doing absolutely
nothing but not couilting, not taking into
effect what we are preserving today. And
that's wrong. A worst-case scenario.
Let's do a build-out scenario of
what five acre zoning will do, compared to
what we are doing today. Thank you.
SUPERVISOR HORTON: Mr. Baiz.
MR. BAIZ: In another lifetime I
used to read the Wall Street Journal from
cover to cover every day. And in my specific
area of expertise that led me to have to read
that journal every day, which was in the
metals and mining industry, when I'd read some
staff writer's article there, nhey would
present a point of view in ~he article, and I
would say, nhat's right bu~ ~hey forgot about
something else; or this isn't right, they're
just trying to twist the argument. And afner
several years of just reading that within my
area of expertise of the newspaper, I suddenly
got wisdom. I said, holy cow, wha~ if the
whole paper is written like that by all these
staff writers who are all editorializing and
morphing and twistii~g to their own
conclusions. And so, no that end, I mean, we
just heard several o~her speakers speaking to
some concerns of what's buried in here, and I
haven't had a chance to go through this line
by line, page by page, but I have found a
number of things.
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First of ail, I'm absoluuely
intrigued with Table 3-1, the gargantuan
build-out analysis for the Town. And yet, in
the fine print uhat nobody's yet poinued out,
up at the top on the last line, before you go
into all the numbers on the table, it says:
"This build-out analysis" -- in very small
tiny little letters here -- "might never be
achieved, and if it were approached, it could
be over an extended period of time."
So, you know everybody's focusing
on the page and the numbers, there's no
analysis for forecasuing ability here as ~o
"might never be achieved" and "would be over
an extended period of uime."
On Page 3-28 there is a specific
reference with regard to what five acre
upzoning might do uo farmland agriculuural
values. And it says, specifically reading in
uhe middle of one paragraph, Therefore, a
reduction in allowable density from a uwo acre
to a five acre yield, may affect the value of
one-quarter, 25 percent, to one-third, 33
percent, of uhe land. This fact was presented
by an appraiser to the Blue Ribbon Commission
at which time it was indicated that a study of
land values and upzoning, eu cetera in the
Brookhaven Town concluded.
Now, this appraiser was the
president of Rogers and Taylor, Gary
Taylor. We were all si%ting au a uable here
and somebody from the general public asked a
question, or it might have been one of the
members of the Blue Ribbon Commission asked a
question what Mr. Taylor thought would happen
to farmland values if ~hey were upzoned to
five acres, and he's said, oh, probably 25 to
33 percent, just as uhe report says.
Someone from the Blue Ribbon
Commission then inuerjected, waiu a minute,
iu's not only five acre upzoning, but it's
clustering onto one acre. And with uhat,
Mr. Taylor had such a puzzled look on his
face. He was sitting next to Ray Blum, head
of the land preservation committee here, and
Ray had to repeat the question to him. And
the guy thought we were crazy for trying to do
such a horrendous damage 5o our farming and
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farmlands. He's said, if you do that, it
would be 45 to 50 percent reduction in land
value.
Now, this is just point Number
2. This is where we get half truths. We have
written the report to support an argument
that's an editorialization as opposed to a
fact finding document trying uo measure.
What is a half-truth? Is a
half-truth, something short of the whole
truth? Is a half-truth a lie when it's meant
to editorialize and dis~oru a conclusion?
Another example in here, and it
was referred to by Ms. Weisman in Farm Bureau
in part, and uhere were some indirect
allusions by others, including Mr. Weir of
First Pioneer Farm Credit. In this study to
claim that there were no diminution or minimal
diminution in farmland values in an upzoning,
the DGEIS reports a reference to a Robert E.
Edgerton, Jr., the affects of agricultural
zoning on the value of farmland. He is either
employed by or is Resource Management
Consultant's, Inc. He prepared a reporu in
February 1991 with regard to the Maryland
situation, Montgomery County, and wheuher
upzoning would reduce the agricultural land
values nhere.
Now, two years later, Maryland
Farm Credit system, the same thing as
Mr. Weir's office here but in the State of
Maryland, hired a securiuies firm by the name
of Legg Mason, a well known broker-dealer firm
down in the Maryland area; and asked their
realty division to do a review and study and
analysis. And in that document, the findings
are totally the opposite of Edgerton. Yet
there is no reference to the Legg Mason
Maryland Farm Credi~ document in here. And
what I find so confounding is how in the hell
do you think any of us can get-together when
we have a document of half-truths?
And what concerns me is that I
haven't had the uime to go through this page
by page, line by line to see how many more are
in here. I've got Ewo or three more on my
list here, but I don't want to keep going and
take up the time for now.
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There have been issues about
funding for farmland preservation. This has
been our primary tool for the purchase of
development rights here in town, from a
monetary point of view. We have also had
landowners who have made contributions through
the Peconic Land Trust and/or other mechanisms
in contributing farmland to preservation.
Somewhere, someone's created the idea that the
taxpayers of Southold don't want to have
anything to do with raising more taxes for
farmland preservation. Yet we have succeeded
over a number of years now, probably going
back 15 }'ears or more, just at a local town
level of raising bond issues for $2,000,000
referenda for the purchase of development
rights off of these farmlands.
We have probably raised on the
order of $15 million to $20 million 5brough
that vehicle, and when you look at the total
cost of what that means per year per person of
the annual year-round citizenry of this
community, that's $20 a person. If we take
the school's total costs per }'ear to the
community for the local year-round resident,
it's about $2,300. And so I ask you, what
small price is it to pay for further and
increased participation in the acquisition of
purchase of development rights on these
farmlands?
I spoke last night about my
involvement with S.E.E.D.s, going to these
weekly meetings and trying to figure out how
many cars run here and there, and it just
happened also at last week's meeting, I spoke
with the East Hampton Planner, who was
attending the meeting, and I said well, tell
me what do you think of five acre zoning in
East Hampton? And I qualified that and said
with regard to agricultural. And he said,
it's failed miserably. We don't have any
farms left in terms of the farms that we think
of are farms.
He said what we've go5 left are
tree and shrub nurseries catering to the new
suburbs, because that's all the people want.
They want landscaping for their yards, and so
all that's left is the tree and shrub
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nurseries.
I also an that point, and I spoke
momentarily to that lash night, but have I
asked all the planners at that S.E.E.D.s
meeting table at Southampton College last
Wednesday, if they knew of any way to, while
they're trying te sort out their development,
that they could -- any new tool that they had
te try to limit or slow down the building or
the build out rate in ~he building.
And, again, the East Hampton
Planner said, well, we're looking at the
Petaluma case right now. I presume it's from
Petaluma, California, but that's wha~ he
quoted it as, the Petaluma case. And the
Petaluma case was vetted by the U.S. Supreme
Court, and said, yes, as a management tool you
can use the ability ef limiting the issuance
of building permits on new construction in
order to manage your development. Great tool.
And I would suggest that we seriously look
into that and make an exception for affordable
housing. If it's affordable housing
construction it gets accelerated.
Last night I spoke about the
consensus issue. What I didn't speak about
was the time issue te achieve consensus. And
this is where I felt the Blue Ribbon
Commission came up short. We were trying to
do it in six months.
When I spoke about consensus last
night, the question also arose, well, how long
will you allow it to take? This was directed
to the New York State DeparEment of
Transportation representative at the meeting,
Jerry Bogads. And Jerry said, whatever it
takes. We always plan for 18 inonths, he said,
but our experience has been uhree to five
},ears. And this is just en traffic issues for
a localized area trying te sort things out.
You heard a former town supervisor
speak te taking six years, if it takes six
years, but we have the tools here now.
Between the moratorium and the right to limit
that to conservation opportunity subdivisions.
We have by right te manage the growth as we
need it, and can see fit. Just right new with
all the inconsistencies, and the half-truths
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in here that need to be sorted out, don't give
us anything until you can give us consensus.
Okay?
SUPERVISOR HORTON: Thank you.
Are there other comments from the floor? Mr. Cooper.
DOUG COOPER: Doug Cooper again.
Just one comment I forgot ~o make.
Wi~h all the problems wiuh uhis documenn, I
~hink we ought to uhrow it ouE and staru over,
cut our losses while we can. Le~'s star~ over
and do it righ~ this time.
Thank you.
SUPERVISOR NORTON: Thank you,
Mr. Cooper. Miss FosEer.
MS. FOSTER: Good evening, my name
is Mary Foster-Morga~l. I live in Orient.
And I also would like to add my
voice to those of who are saying to please let
us have more of ~hese hearings.
Something's come up, I've tried to
come to all of them to listen and jusu as a
member of the public ko Ery to understand the
issues. Something's come up about the tools
we currently have ~hat I'd like Eo address the
moratorium group with.
I understand there's as much as
1,500 acres of conservation projects currently
before uhe Town, and some have been wai~ing
for months, and some have been waiting for
years. Is there some way this process can be
expedited? In fact, are there any ways that
you can streamline the process? Can you give
us any suggesuions or recommendations on how
to streamline this process? And I think thau
would go a long way as we listen and talk to
each o~her to having -- you know, affecting
some positive change here.
It's a very important issue that
you're putting in front of us about Town land
use policies, how uo limit development ne
preserve our rural character and our farming
heritage. I, for one, wish to be part of a
community that treats ever}r segment of our
society equally and fairly.
I would like to see Seuthold stay
in farming, and I would like to see it keep
its farm families. Thank you.
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SUPERVISOR HORTON: Other comments
from the floor? Yes, sir.
MR. MORGAN: Tom Morgan, Orient.
I've been to two of the three
hearings, and I can say that it's apparent
public sentiment amongst the people who have
attended or apparently are concerned about the
outcome of this is overwhelming against five
acre zoning.
I haven't looked at the
document. I have no access to it. But
there's an awful lou of concerned people that
are againsu it.
Is it inappropriate at a Town
meeting to ask for a show of hands how many
people favor it and how many don't? Can I see
a show of hands?
SUPERVISOR HORTON: Just address
the Board.
MR. MORGAN: Oh, yes. Can the
Board ask for a show of hands?
SUPERVISOR HORTON: It's not the
purpose of this Public Hearing, which is to
comment on the specific topic. I again --
MR. MORGAN: I was going to ask
how many people were for it, against it and
how many were undecided.
SUPERVISOR HORTON: I understand
what you're asking.
MR. MORGAN: I understand. How
many people are undecided? I don't think they
have the opportunity to see the information.
I do have a petition, which I will have at the
back of the room for anybody who wants to sign
it, just asking for more time and more
consideration.
I also think that the farmers have
been custodians of this land since 1640 and if
I'm not mistaken, there's at least two farmers
in this room whose families have farmed
continuously since the 17th Century.
And I think we deserve to give
them some credit and to give them some faith
and to trust them with our future. Thank
you.
SUPERVISOR HORTON: Any other
comments from the floor? Yes, ma'am.
MS. WELLS: I wasn't going to say
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anything. M~r name is Carol Wells, I live in
the Hamlet of Southold.
My family farmed on South Harbor
Road from about 1720 up until the land was
preserved in 1986. I came back ~o the east
coast after living in Seattle and Alaska in
1989 as a finalist for a job with the Nature
Conservancy in East Hampton. I didn't get the
job. I've been patien5ly waising for 13 years
to gen back out here. I made it a year ago.
My family still owns one of those shacks down
on the beach, those seasonal shacks, and I
live in a litmle house in Mill Colony.
I came back because I needed to
live by the water, obviously, if I lived in
Seattle for 15 years and Alaska before that.
I need the sea, and I need the food, and need
the grapes.
I can't see that five acre zoning
is going to help Ehe sustainable food
movement. I can't see they're going 5o put
food in our ssomachs. It's hard enough to
farm 30 acres. What are you going to do if
you split 30 acres in half and move around
five acre parcels?
It just doesn't make sense. It's
never made sense. Unfortunately, I don't have
the Wickham children's chance to come back and
farm my family's farm. I5 was given away in
'86. The development rights and the rest of
it was left to Hallockville who sold the land.
Is's in grapes because my family fel5 so
ssrongly about farming. This document does
not feel strongly about farming.
SUPERVISOR HORTON: Would anybody
else care to address the Town Board? At this
point I think it's appropriate amongst 5he
members of 5he Board -- I'm sorry, it's not
appropriate yet. Yes, sir.
MR. BOOTH: I'm sorry about that.
My name is Ed Booth, B-O-O-T-H. I live in
Southold.
I'm a lucky guy. My father was a
farmer. My mother and father were married
about 1921 I guess, and between them at one
point they owned about 200, 300 acres of land
around here. After ~he family split up my
fauher went back to farming, and he did pretty
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well during the war years. Finally he decided
he was going to take it easy. I wish he kept
it up, I'd be rich beyond the dreams of
average, but you know how it is, he wanted to
retire at the age 55, and so he began selling
off the family land. And we got down to
about, by the time he died he was down to
around 60 or 70 acres, and he specified in his
will that that should be sold off and the
money split among the kids. Unfortunately my
kids. But anyways, what happened then I
was -- I managed to acquire from his estate 28
acres from Mount Hewlitt. Then he gave me the
place on the Sound, which was five acres, and
I bought from my mother's estate another eighu
acres. And so finally we wound up wiuh 41
acres, finally.
Now at the age of 76 I have to
think about the end game. And the end game,
of course, is dying. And then you look around
and you have four children. And so what
you're going to do is you're going to try to
enable them to, if they can, if they so choose
to be able to enjoy at least some of that
property.
My father's idea, and mine too,
was to sell off the 28 acres in, you know,
lots the way my father did before he died and
to try to keep his place on the Sound. And
then about four or five years ago I was
talking to an attorney, telling him about this
stuff, and he said, you know, the Town might
buy, give you some money somehow, buy your
development rights. Well, slowly but surely
that idea grew and I began to hang out with
the likes of people on the Peconic Land Trust
and try to find out what that meant. And then
given to hang out wi~h some of the farmers,
and we'd meet from time to time every Monday
morning at 7:00 up at Fort Cutchogue and try
to understand what could be done.
And it finally got to a point
where I understood that I could almost nave my
cake and eat it too. That is to say, one
could preserve and have available to my
children and to myself while we were alive and
my wife, the majority of that land, that 41
acres, as open space. Have the Town purchase
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nhe development righns, have a couple of lots
set off to be able to pay the IRS when we
finally pass on, along with a few insurance
policies and things like that, and it seemed
like a wonderful opportunity. And working
with the Land Trusn and talking ~o the land
preservation committee and working with
Melissa Spiro, we have been able to just about
make that deal come through, and I'm very
pleased with it.
The alternative was clear. It was
going no be two acre lons until the
moratorium, and nhen it was going no be five
acre lots. And I'm so pleased than it turned
out this way, because I get - my children
also will get for some time certainly no be
able to walk around that 28 acres, and we're
going to put an easement on the Sound as well
for it and enjoy it, and it will be nhere for
the good people of Southhold - please don't
trespass -- but to go hake a look at in.
So than was very granifying, and I
sure hope this nhing finally goes through. I
don't know about these delays. I have not
experienced great delays. I think a year is
about a reasonable nime to happen. I think
it's going to happen about within a year.
So anyway, I became interested in
the whole subject, which is the less fun part
of this. Looking at the DGEIS document. And
I studied the finai~cial aspects i.e. how would
the families make out with nhis rather complex
conservation subdivision. And the answer is,
well, it looked bad. It looks as if you'd
about break even so, but you get no preserve
the land.
But as I read the DGEIS, I was
quite surprised to find that this same old
point; that the land values are supposed to be
unaffected by zoning. It certainly didn't
seem the case to me. It didn't seem logical
on the surface, that a five acre lot would
sell for five times the amount of a one acre
lot. And so I went to the data of what places
sold for over the period October 2000 to
October 2002 and broke it down into the price
sale per acreage, plotted it up -- I'm a
physicist. I plot things, you know, plot per
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acre versus acres. It's a simple plot, which
I happen to have here, and I'll pass it up.
Of course, the problem is there's
not enough five, six acre lot sales to make
good statistics. There's 121 sales I looked
at, and as I broke them up into groups of one
acre each, I found that I had to extrapolate
from 3.3 acres towards the five acre mark, and
I came up with a basic equity loss of 40
percent plus or minus 12 percent. So that
seemed to cover most of the estimates we heard
around here, in other words, as much as 52
percent attached to equity loss. That's a
little homework I did. I was trying to find
out whether I was getting to a good position
or not. It was a very selfish thing.
However, it brings up some
questions that I would like to ask the
committee who wrote up the document, DGEIS
document. Le~'s see, we'll go to the last
one. Why did the writer not perform a simple
analysis of lot sales prices in Southold as a
function of lot size before concluding there
was no loss of equity in two to five acre
upzoning? That's the firsm question.
Then, given the assumption that
actually there is a big difference, that there
is an equity loss, we follow that with this
question: If we look into the future, and we
have five acre zoning, my question is, if five
acre zoning is insmituted, what guarantee is
there that the Town would buy the developmen~
rights at a fair, appraised value? They don't
have to. It's over. You've got five acre
zoning, and we don't pay you for that.
Then we come on to a little, a
smaller detail. If you look at the sizes of
lots in Town -- I particularly looked at the
open space lots - there's somemhing like 300
lots around between five and ten acres, and if
you think abou~ the impact on the people winh
say six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 11, 12, 13
acres of five acre zoning, ~hey're the ones
that take percentage-wise the biggest hit; 9.9
acres you could have one lot. You thought you
were going uo have four and-a-half lots if
that's a possibility. Bum you get one. Now
that's got to be a big loss of equity for that
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particular subset.
I bring that up in this way as a
question, why did the DGEIS nee determine how
many owners fall into this most-injured
category and estimate their financial losses?
Okay, enough. You see, I'm not
crazy about the five acre zoning. I think
it's going to be very dangerous, and some time
when we have more time at our disposal I'll
tell you what I think about the tree
preservation.
The only reason I bring i~ up,
in's a small thing. It's tucked away in the
DGEIS. It's a couple of paragraphs, but there
are many things in the DGEIS, and ~hey all
have to be considered. And we have to think
about the nree inspectors. There I am firing
up my chain saw, and I look over my shoulder,
and there's a jack-booted tree inspector
looking down my neck, and that's going to be
unpleasant. Thank you.
SUPERVISOR HORTON: Thank you,
sir.
MS. NORTON: Good evening, Angela
Norton from Southold. I'm a little tired bu~
I'll do ~he best I can.
I have no~ had the opportunity to
read the DGEIS, bu~ I have attended all ~he
these meetings and all the Blue Ribbon
Commission meetings. Since Mr. Booth brought
some of his history to play, I would like to
do ~he same.
ApproximaEely five and-a-half
years ago I had the opportunity to purchase a
large parcel of land. It had a very long
farming history, but unfortunately had been
unattended for many years. Fields lay to
rest, buildings deteriorating and a playground
to ~hose who trespassed upon it without
permission or regard no iYs natural resources.
The parcel I own contains 84 plus
acres, part on nhe Main Road and a long
portion on Long Creek and Arshamonaque Pond.
One would consider a diversified parcel wi~h
many outstanding components. Our first, task
was to put the fallow lands back into
agriculture. And berry crops went in season
a~ter season, year by },ear. A thousand trees
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were planted. A wildlife habitat which
naturally existed was improved upon. The farm
had no equipment other than a small white
tractor, and a prush hog, made all the work
impossible. So piece by piece we bought the
equipment and the tools we needed to practice
farming. The efforts were huge and the
rewards slow but wonderful, with a 300 year
old farmhouse restored where several local
farming families have lived, and over 50 acres
of fallow laird now back into active
agricultural, it feels good. And I have to
mention ~hat I did no~ come from a farming
background and many of ~he local farmers have
really guided us patiently along the way. I
give you this history because I am in the
conservation program, subdivision program,
opportunity program to preserve this land.
The property is zoned R-80. We
could build 25 to 30 new homes but plan to
build five over the next 15 years. My husband
is a builder and has the means to do so, but
it is not in our spirit. We want to preserve
this land. We knew it before we purchased it.
I'd like to give you some
statistics as to the conservation efforts that
we're attempting. The reduction in density is
80 percent, reserving over 75 percent of the
parcel and 90 percent of the farmland. You
see, there are many landowners who are doing
the COS's. They are working in our community
now passionately.
It is a shame that so much of the
farmer's time is being consumed by protecting
our property rights with respect to Ehe five
acre upzone. We jump off our tractors, leave
our fields, walk away from our greenhouses to
attend all these meetings. Len us do our work
without all these current threats. Let's
continue to use the tools that are so
successfully working now.
On one other note, I hear of so
many people complaining about the cost of
preserving this land. Now, call me stupid, I
probably am, but when I originally purchased
this property, I had a partner. Two years
ago, I bought him out. I paid the two percent
transfer tax uhe first time I boughE the land,
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and then I paid it again on the land than I
already owned when I bought my parnner oun.
So, I'm okay with it. I have no regrets
because it goes into a program that protecns
the rural character of Southold than we all
love, and come to nhink of it, the rural
character and open space that the farmers gave
to us in the firsn place. Thank you.
SUPERVISOR HORTON: Thank you.
Would anyone else care no address
the Town Board? Mr. Van Bourgondien.
MR. VAN BOURGONDIEN: Bob Van
Bourgondien, Southold farmer in Peconic.
I can kind of agree with Angela,
when we moved out here 30 years ago, we moved
next to Pop Chick, and I don'n know if any of
you knew him. I'm sure nhere's a few of you
up on the Board that did. Tom Wickham
probably is one, but I doubn if -- maybe Craig
maybe knew Pop Chick.
But when we moved oun he kind of
looked a~ us like we were nhe new kids on the
block, didn't know whan we were doing. Put up
greenhouses in a farm nhan he had rented sod
on, bun whenever we needed a nracnor, a
bulldozer, a helping hand, he was nhere.
That's what the farming communiny is all
about. To this day, his grandson, if there's
anynhing I need, he is there to help, same
winh his son Dave and his son Frank. So
nhat's the spirin of the farm community.
Bun I want to address nhe
moratorium group again tonight. I see 43
tools here, bun nhere's a couple of tools nha~
I think could be missing. There's something
called a local tax abatement in exchange for
term conservation easements, authorized by
Section 247 of the General Municipal Law. It
may be used for conservation easements, on AC,
R-40 and R-80 land. What I want to know is:
Is that something we are actively progressing
as a tool for preservation? And whan
consequences will it have on preservation?
What can we accomplish with adding that tool
instead of 43 of these others than are really
pretty sad?
The other tool that I'd like to
ask about and I think it was just probably
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used recently on the Rukoski farm, I could be
wrong, bun it's purchase of development rights
grants. Grants means not taxpayer's dollars,
that's grants. 1996 New York State
Legislature amended Article 25AA_A, is Southold
eligible? Have we applied? Can we continue
to apply and get preservation done? Thank you.
SUPERVISOR HORTON: Thank you,
Mr. Van Bourgondien.
Would anybody else care to address
the Town Board?
Going to, one thing that I've
heard, it's been a recurring -- not just a
theme, but reoccurring comments that pertain
to the document specific, regardless of the
varying points of view, is that there is a
sense amongst the public, and I'm doing my
best here to digest and to closely listen to
what everybody's saying, and one thing thaE is
coming through loud and clear is that the
large portion of the public that has attended
these public hearings is requesting more time
in the draft portion, the draft section of 5he
EIS, ~o have more opportunity to input. And I
would like to honor that.
I think it's important that in
moving forward here, not only at the Town
Board work as a team, but understand that the
public is our partner and the public is not
only our boss, but it is our team, in pursuing
this as articulately and carefully and
meticulously as possible. And I think the
first step in achieving tha5 would be to
extend the public comment period on the DGEIS.
And I would like to put to the Board that we
extend it to 90 days at minimum to have input
on the Draft Generic Environmental Impact
Statement. And then at the July 8th meeting
we could discuss the effects that might have
on the moratorium of suDdivision that is
currently in place.
So I make that motiorl than we
extend the public comment period of Ehe DGEIS
by 90 days. And I offer it for discussion.
MR. MOORE: As a practical matter,
you said yesterday it would be an appropriate
discussion for the July 8th meeting. I asked
it be put on for discussion, as a proper
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maybe a
extend.
resolution as this is not actually a Town
Board meesing. So there would be no place for
a resolution tonight.
SUPERVISOR HORTON: I can respect
that point of view and your comments there. I
think the one thing that concerns me though is
that, I believe that July 8th, for what we
have scheduled now, the public comment period
will have expired at that point. So if we can
take steps prior ~o a closing Eo extend it and
keep it open. Iu would behoove us as a Board
in honoring tha5.
MR. MOORE: I'm sure on the 8th
we can do that. We can give ten days of
written comment from today where we do nothing
at all, but procedurally speaking, the Board
is not to do resolutions tonighE. But bring
it up on the 8th, and we bang it out. You
know, I heard the comments too. I'm no5
saying no to that.
MR. WICKH~LM: Do we have the sense
of this Board?
SUPERVISOR HORTON: This is a
question for Counsel, which we discussed
briefly in my office ~oday. And Counsel has
advised us that the scheduled time for the
closing of this public comment period is July
75h. We have a scheduled Town Board meeting
work session that commences at 9:00 a.m. on
July 8Eh, at which point we can bring this up.
Bu5 I'd like to get a sense from the Board,
show of hands ayes or nays.
MR. WICKHAM: I woL~ld like to
SUPERVISOR HORTON: You would like
uo extend the public comment period.
Councilman Richter.
COUNCILMAN RICHTER: I need time
to digest.
Moore.
SUPERVISOR HORTON: Councilman
COUNCILMAN MOORE: I'll wait.
SUPERVISOR HORTON: Councilman
Romanelli.
the 8th.
SUPERVISOR HORTON:
quite a sense of the Board as to how
MR. ROMANELLI: Talk about it on
There is not
this will
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proceed, but there is definitely willingness
to discuss the viability and the importance of
extending the public comment period.
That being said, this was the
third -- Mr. Keil, still have a question.
Please step up to the podium.
MR. KEIL: My name is Eric Keil.
I'm a resident of Mattituck my question is,
can the public hearing be held open? Instead
of adjourning the public hearing tonight, can
the public hearing be held open?
SUPERVISOR HORTON: Yes. It can
be, and also, the period of public comment is
still open as well. So we can hold this
hearing over. We can leave here tonight
without closing this public hearing. But do
understand that we do have in place ten
additional days for written public comment.
MR. KEIL: I understand that. But
I think it would be good if the public hearing
could be held open instead of being adjourned
tonight, so it might be possible to schedule
more public hearings to give more people in
the town an opportunity to digest the document
and make comments on the record.
SUPERVISOR HORTON: I'll honor
that --
MR. KEIL: Thank you.
SUPERVISOR HORTON: -- and move
recess the meeting as opposed to adjourn
We'll be leaving this public hearing open.
Our legal counsel was just giving us some
advice as opposed to the formal and technical
ins and out of this process.
We're going to leave this public
hearing open. We're going to recess, and the
Town Board will be reconvening at a work
session on July 8th, at which time there is
also a regularly scheduled Town Beard
meeting.
IOff the record discussion.}
SUPERVISOR HORTON: Councilman
Wickham has asked me to poil the Board as to
whether the Board would like to meet earlier
than Jul}, 8th, sometime next week?
HR. ROMANELLI: We moved the
meeting to the 8th because I know myself
included would not be around next week.
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SUPERVISOR HORTON: We'll have to
keep to our rescheduling of July 8th. People
will be out of Town on personal business. We
will be, again, I'm trying to make this as
clear as possible. What we'll try to do is
allow for as much public input as possible.
We will be recessing this public
hearing. It will remain open until further
notice, that will be done through the proper
channels of communication.
Also at the July 8th Town Board
work session, we'll be discussing non only
ex~ending the period of public comments, but
as well as whether or non and to what extent,
if any at all, the Town Board will be moving
to add or extend the moratorium nhat affects
subdivision in Southold Town.
MR. KEIL: Eric Keil. One
more question I hope that you can answer in.
If this meeting is held open, and
we only have ten days for writnen comments and
you're not going no meet again until the
eighth, that's obviously going to go beyond
the ten days written comment period.
SUPERVISOR HORTON: I'm going to
clarify tha~ and I'm sorry I didn't make tha~
clearer in my previous statement. The ten day
written comment period that's required under
law will commence at nhe closing of this
public hearing.
MR. KEIL: Thank you very much.
SUPERVISOR HORTON: Mr. Dinizio?
MR. DINIZIO: I'd like to be clear
on this. I would like to ask that you not
close this meeting, or a vote not be taken to
close nhis meeting unless you publish it, that
you are going to take a vote.
MR. ROMANELLI: On when the
meeting is going to be closed?
MR. DINIZIO: Righn. I don't want
you on July 8th no decide to close the
meeting. I want you on July 8~h to have a
resolution that says you're going to publish
it and two weeks later everybody else can come
back out and comment on it and try no convince
you otherwise. Okay. I'm hoping that we're
clear on that. I believe it's legal no do so.
And I would like to have your word on nhat.
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SUPERVISOR HORTON: I think it's a
reasonable expectation. I will honor that
request.
Mr. Schreiver, would you like to
address the Board?
MR. SCHREIVER: My name is William
Schreiver, and I live in Orient.
My concern about this process is
that I believe the general consensus is that
the document is severely deficient. I
certainly feel that it is, and I would like to
see in the 90 days that you have contemplated
that the producers of this document start the
process of responding to the questions thau we
have proposed, maybe selectively. You
probably can't answer them all. But if you
could feed us back that information, then we
could make some progress, you know, winh
our - with the further public hearing.
I mean, one of the problems that I
have with this thing is that uhere isn't
enough information in uhis document to prepare
an argument. I mean, there is no cost
information about purchasing development
rights or any of these things the studies, the
economic studies. There's just not enough in
there Eo begin to comment, to base your
comment, without a resource, another resource,
I can't even come up with an intelligent
proposal.
So I would like to see some
feedback, some of these questions answered,
and then give us a chance to respond to ~he
knowledge ~hat we now don't have.
COUNCIL~L~N ROMANELLI: That's the
way the process will work.
SUPERVISOR HORTON: I'd like to
say in recessing the public hearing, I just
want to say again, a sincere thanks to the
public that is coming out and participating
from all walks of life and all points of view
in helping us achieve our goals. We do
appreciate it, look forward to seeing you at
more Town Board meetings in the future. So
thank you and have a good evening.
(Time ended: 10:15 p.m.)
COURT REPORTING A_ND TRANSCRIPTION SERVICE ~631) 878-8047
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CERTIFICATION
I, Florence V. Wiles, Notary Public for
the State of New York, do hereby ceruify:
THAT the within transcript is a true
record of the testimony given.
I further certify nhat I am not related by
blood or marriage, to any of uhe parties to
this action; and
THAT I am in no way interesEed in the
outcome of this matter.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunuo set my
hand this 24th day of June, 2003.
Florez~ce V. Wiles
COURT REPORTING A/qD TRA/qSCRIPTION SERVICE ~6~1) 878-8047