The chance to learn about moratoria and charrettes drew about 40 people out on a cold January night to a forum hosted by the Mattituck-Laurel Civic Association at the American Legion Hall yesterday.
Concern has mounted among Mattituck-Laurel residents about the future of their hamlets, as land use proposals for major projects move forward while the town continues work on its comprehensive plan update. It will likely be more than a year before a new zoning code, drafted to implement the plan, is adopted by the town, Supervisor Scott Russell told SoutholdLOCAL in an interview this month.
“With seven building applications pending, should Mattituck consider a moratorium?” the civic association asked in its announcement of last night’s meeting.
The answer is no, according to the supervisor.
It’s “untenable,” said Russell, one of three panelists convened to discuss the use of moratoria and charrettes at last night’s forum.
A moratorium generally halts new land use approvals for a defined period of time, while particular issues are addressed by code, he said. To stop all new approvals while the comprehensive plan is finished and new zoning adopted — a more general goal — is “not likely,” he said.
Russell recently proposed a moratorium on approvals for new wineries, breweries and distilleries while the town addresses what he sees as specific deficiencies in a decades-old code. The suggestion drew fire from the Long Island Wine Council and Long Island Farm Bureau and had no support on the town board. “It’s a dead issue,” he said last night.
The supervisor reviewed moratoria used by the town since 1985 for specific reasons. There were a total of seven, he said. One, from 2002 to 2004, resulted in the adoption of zoning that created the conservation subdivision, which Russell hailed as “a very successful tool” to achieve land preservation and open space. Another “stemmed the tide of box stores,” he said. All of them had specific purposes and were narrower in scope than a blanket halt on all development.
“Moratoria have to be a little more clearly defined, a little bit narrower in scope,” he said. “You can’t just declare a moratorium and then figure out what you want to do with that moratorium. You have to know pretty much in advance.”
Russell urged the group and the wider community to be “engaged in the process” as the town moves forward to finalize and codify its comprehensive plan update. Community engagement is crucial in the review of pending applications, too, he said.
Panelist Eric Alexander of Vision Long Island explained the concept of a charrette, an organized planning tool his nonprofit group has led about 25 times in communities across Long Island, he said.
The idea of a charrette is to bring various segments of the community together to discuss and agree on goals — developers, landowners, civic groups, the chamber of commerce and government officials.
“Charrette means literally ‘put everything in’ — all stakeholders,” Alexander said. It’s a way to come up with a plan that works for everyone, he said.
The Southold Town planning department, in an effort led by planning director Heather Lanza, convened stakeholder meetings for such discussions in every hamlet of the town during the past two years, inviting residents, landowners, business owners and anyone with an interest to attend and participate. Those meetings led to proposals for each hamlet that were then incorporated into the land use chapter of the comprehensive plan. The town planners are now working on the plan’s final chapter, on the topic of transportation. Once completed, the town board will be asked to adopt the plan and codify it by means of new zoning codes and revisions to existing code. The process of adoption and codification is subject to review under the State Environmental Quality Review Act.
On a parallel track, civic groups in East Marion, Orient and Mattituck-Laurel led their communities through a separate process of defining goals for their individual hamlets.
The third panelist last night was Dan Gulizio, of Huntington, the executive director of Peconic Baykeeper, and a former planner for the towns of Islip and Brookhaven. Gulizio presented an overview of the town’s powers in the planning process, which he said ultimately serves to “balance a set of competing interests.”
After the meeting, the town supervisor said he hopes people become more engaged in the process, “even when things are abstract, before there are concrete proposals on the table” — something that’s hard to achieve, he said.
“I don’t know what the goal tonight was,” Russell said. “If the idea was to somehow define whether a moratorium can be declared to bring everything to a stop in Mattituck, that’s not a likely scenario.”
Mattituck-Laurel Civic Association founding member and president Mary Eisenstein said part of her group’s mission is education and one of the goals last night was “to really be more informed in a broader way,” she said.
“Now we can go back to people who are participating and say, ‘How do we move forward? and ‘What next steps do we want to take?’ I am a firm believer in people from different parts of the community coming together and having a well-organized agenda and laying out next steps,” Eisenstein said.
“That’s why I am promoting this public forum” — a charrette — “where we want to have the chamber, the wineries, the school district and town government, so we can have that conversation,” Eisenstein said.
“There are two layers,” she said. “We have our civic answer what next steps would we like to take and then have the broader community forum, the charrette.
“Everybody works hard but we are all in our own silos,” Eisenstein said. “We need to come together and hear each other.”
