News

Town Board: Causeway rules — not done

RICHARD KELLY PHOTO | Standing water on the First Causeway side road to Coecles Harbor on Sunday afternoon..

Even before anyone from the overflow crowd that packed Town Hall last Friday said a word, the writing was on the wall. The Town Board would go back to work on its proposed rules to control development on the Ram Island causeway and it would extend its moratorium on construction there to the end of the year.

“I’m comfortable there’s more work to be done,” said Supervisor Jim Dougherty before opening the floor to speakers at a public hearing on the board’s plan to create a Causeway Overlay Protection District, “and we can comfortably extend” the moratorium “another five months. That’s my recommendation.”

About 90 minutes later, after 15 people had addressed the board — most urging the board to block any construction at all on the causeways and find a way to buy any buildable parcels — the Town Board followed through on Mr. Dougherty’s recommendation, agreeing to vote at its next formal meeting on July 8 to extend the causeway moratorium.

At its next work session, on Tuesday, June 14, board members debated how far to extend the moratorium, with Mr. Dougherty pushing for the end of the year, Councilman Ed Brown pushing for early January, and Councilwoman Chris Lewis calling for a shorter extension. No final decision was made. Also, Mr. Dougherty announced he had appointed two “task groups from the audience” at Friday’s hearing: Connie Fischer and Alfred Kilb Jr. will work to seek private funding for a preservation effort; and Linda Holmes and Richard Kelly will look into the causeway’s flora and fauna, with an eye to determining if existing regulations already protect much if not all of the causeway.

Board members on Tuesday also discussed causeway issues with audience members, including Planning Board member Emory Breiner, who said the board should determine how many parcels are not be buildable because of existing wetlands and code constraints. “There is no such thing as an unbuildable lot,” Mr. Dougherty told him.

CARRIE ANN SALVI PHOTOS | Ed Barr shows a photo simulation of a house constructed on a causeway site under the terms of the Town Board’s proposed causeway rules.

“What are we creating here?” asked Ed Barr, one of the many polite and respectful yet impassioned speakers at Friday’s hearing. The proposed regulations, by allowing any building at all, were setting the town up for trouble, he argued.

He showed a photo of a causeway building lot flooded almost up to the road. FEMA estimated storm tides as high as 12 to 13 feet in the area, he said, yet the Zagoreos house — the only structure now on the causeway, the permits for which started the current controversy and push for preservation in 2010 — stands on pilings at an elevation of six feet.

Mr. Barr, an attorney, warned that future homeowners might hold the town liable for storm damage if it allowed further construction on the causeway. He said that’s what happened to the Town of Southampton after houses on the ocean beach in Hampton Bays were washed away in a hurricane.

He urged the board to go back to work and develop “the most rigorous regulations” it can and then move aggressively to acquire the whole causeway.

Mr. Barr drew enthusiastic applause from the packed meeting room; the applause was even more robust for former Supervisor Al Kilb Jr., who called for preservation of the entire causeway.

That had been the town and county’s intent in the late 1980s when it moved to preserve the property known as Section 9, he said, telling the board that the town had conducted research, and filed documentation at the time, to establish that the whole area was unsuitable for development. The paperwork included easements to bar construction on some of the privately held properties there, he claimed.

“I believe someone should buy it,” he said of the entire causeway. “We should have bought it instead of other properties” that were given a higher priority by the town’s Two-Percent Committee over the years. He noted that the Brandenstein property had been preserved to protect Crab Creek; likewise, the causeway should be preserved to protect Coecles Harbor, which he called “a sacred place” for Shelter Islanders.

Al Kilb Jr. calls for causeway preservation at Friday’s hearing.

“You’ll be in court a long time unless you settle this out of court” by buying the entire causeway, he asserted, calling for a community effort to raise funds, like the one that helped the Nature Conservancy preserve Mashomack. “Everybody’s got to step up to the plate,” he said.

Among other speakers on Friday, Richard Kelly said the area was full of spartina grass, which he asserted was “off limits” anyway to construction because both state and federal law use it as a marker to indicate wetlands where no construction is allowed. Wouldn’t it “create problems down the road” to enact a local law that is less strict than state and federal rules, he asked.

Linda Holmes said the proposed rules lacked a provision to set a minimum grade , or elevation above sea level, for any building site. She suggested six feet, which would eliminate much of the causeway as suitable for construction. A previous town zoning code set a minimum height above natural grade for any building site but, over the years, that rule was written out of the code, she said. That allowed people to use fill, such as for the 1960s house that later burned and has now been replaced by the new Zagoreos house.

Kim Nolan, like many speakers, praised the board and the committee that developed the proposed regulations, but called for the moratorium to be extended and more work to be done. She said existing regulations and wetlands setbacks may already bar all construction.

Bob DeLuca, executive director of the Group for the East End, and Andrew Rafter, an attorney he introduced from the Northern Environmental Law Center in Sag Harbor, urged the board to consider allowing the transfer of any development rights out of the causeway to more suitable sites: there may be only a few buildable parcels there and the town should find out for sure exactly what is the actual building “yield” of the privately held properties there.

Mr. Dougherty, referring to the idea of using a transfer of development rights (TDR) to preserve causeway parcels by allowing an increase in density elsewhere on the Island, said, “It just doesn’t work on Shelter Island” because there’s no public water system to support more housing than zoning allows under county Health Department rules. He called TDR “a pipe dream.” At Tuesday’s work session, he said that he’d heard from the Group that it had decided to drop TDR as an issue.

Donald Bindler, like others, warned the town was opening itself to liability for storm damage if it allowed any construction on the causeway. Stan Church warned that global warning threatens the causeway and if there were a breakthrough between Coecles Harbor and Gardiners Bay, tides will be 3 to 4 feet higher on the harbor shoreline permanently.

Richard Denning said people who had purchased land on the causeway had taken a risk and so the town should bear no liability for storm damage or any drop in real estate values. “On that basis, it should be on them,” not the town, he said. “If there are more regulations, it’s a responsibility they took on” by gambling on the purchase in the first place.

Mark Wein said “the causeway makes Shelter Island Shelter Island” and warned of all the moorings in Coecles Harbor that might follow from residential development there.

Tim Hogue, president of the Shelter Island Association, said the SIA was developing an alternative proposal for the board to consider. As mayor of the Village of Dering Harbor, he said, he and the trustees sometimes worked hard to develop legislation that, only late in the process, they realized was “the wrong direction” to go.

“It’s difficult to back off when all this time has been put into it,” he said.