The Sports East application, which got a green light last week from the Suffolk County Planning Commission, has taken an unexpected detour on its path to approval by the Town of Southold.
The Southold Planning Board, which was conducting an environmental review of the application to build an 82,500-square-foot indoor sports facility on a 21-acre Main Road site in Mattituck, is now questioning whether the proposed use qualifies for a special exception as an “annual membership club” in the R80 zoning use district, which applies to the site.
Reacting to concerns and questions raised by residents at its May 2 hearing on the site plan application, the Planning Board formally asked the Zoning Board of Appeals for a code interpretation and has put its review of the site plan application on hold.
The planning board “heard concerns about whether the use, as proposed, is permitted as a special exception on this parcel,” Planning Board chairman Donald Wilcenski wrote in a May 31 memo to ZBA chairwoman Leslie Weisman.
“In the Planning Board’s record are questions from the public about whether the use, as described by the applicant, is truly a membership club,” Wilcenski wrote. He cited questions raised by residents about possible “tournaments or special events” that would involve “teams that aren’t members….Would this then make the facility public and not an annual membership club?” he asked.
Wilcenski also asked whether the special exception use would allow members to join for less than a full year and whether it would be permissible for the club to offer “day care or child care.”
The Sports East proposal requires both a special exception from the Southold Zoning Board of Appeals and site plan approval from the town Planning Board. Both applications have been pending for months and were the subject of public hearings before each board — the ZBA on Feb. 4 and the Planning Board last month.
The developer filed applications for both approvals months ago. The ZBA on Feb. 4 opened a public hearing on the special exception request and adjourned it pending Planning Board review under the State Environmental Quality Review Act. The Planning Board convened a public hearing May 2 and must determine whether to require the developer to have a full environmental impact statement prepared. With this latest action, kicking it to the ZBA for a code interpretation, the SEQRA decision is on hold.
Though a ZBA code interpretation is not necessary for the Planning Board to make its SEQRA decision, the Planning Board says it “would like to avoid having the applicant invest any more funds into this application until that question is answered definitively by the Zoning Board of Appeals,” Wilcenski wrote.
“I’m dumbfounded,” said developer Paul Pawlowski when reached for comment today on the Wilcenski memo.
“We’ve never once said we’d have any tournaments. We’re not introducing buses, tournaments or school competitions. We never once said we plan to do day care. We will be having children’s camps, exclusively for members’ kids. We will comply with the letter of the law in every respect,” Pawlowski said. “This was answered very early on.”
When members of the public raised questions about the possibility of tournaments — which they did at the Planning Board meeting, as well as at Chamber of Commerce and Mattituck-Laurel Civic Association meetings, Pawlowski steadfastly maintained each time that the facility would not host tournaments and outside competitions or do anything that violated the limitations and conditions of the special exception.
The planning department’s initial staff review of the application found the proposal to be consistent with the zoning code and comprehensive plan.
That was also reflected in the Planning Board chairman’s Jan. 25 memo to the ZBA, requesting comments from the ZBA for purposes of SEQRA review. In that memo, Wilcenski wrote that the “use is considered by the town’s building department as fitting under the special exception section of 280-13 as a membership club.”
The building department found that the proposal met the conditions of the special exception, Wilcenski wrote in his Jan. 25 memo to Weisman.
“It’s extremely concerning,” Pawlowski said today, “because that was the first question I asked. It’s very late in the game for that letter to happen.”
The developer was expecting to receive a SEQRA determination next.
The county planning commission unanimously approved the proposal June 1 — the day after the Planning Board kicked it over to the Zoning Board for an interpretation.
