Town Board: Gitlin says he asks for nothing the law does not allow

It makes no difference that the Town Board gave permission for a house to be built on a tiny parcel on the Silver Beach waterfront more than two years ago.

Because the controversial house was never built and the wetlands permit for it expired seven months ago, the builder needs a new permit.

“I missed it by two days,” builder Chris Fokine said at a hearing on the proposal Friday evening, August 19. “I’d appreciate it if the Town Board would renew” the permit, he said, adding that nothing had changed in the proposal.

But this time the town’s Conservation Advisory Council — which voted 4-3 in favor of a permit last time — is 100 percent against it, as was a throng of neighbors who nearly filled the Town Hall boardroom Friday. The CAC voted unanimously on August 15 to advise the Town Board to reject the proposal as too large for the property.

CAC Chairman Ed Bausman said in a phone interview with the Reporter this week that the board had changed its mind because of new evidence presented by a SUNY scientist last year showing that residential septic systems around the Peconic Bay system are a major threat to its environmental health

Mr. Fokine is representing Andrew Gitlin, the property owner at 70 Peconic Avenue, who wants to build a two-story, four-bedroom house with a footprint of 1,400-square-foot-plus on the 14,000-square-foot lot or about a third of an acre.

“The plans, as they are, are massive,” said neighbor Jean Francois Bernheim. He argued its “mezzanine” level constituted a third floor, although in 2008 the Zoning Board of Appeals ruled that it did not.

Neighbor Martin Mayer said, “Nobody has the right to grandfather in the ruination of somebody else’s well.”

Supervisor James Dougherty said the Town Board was not bound by “anything that happened in the past” and would discuss the case at its work session on Tuesday afternoon. He commented at the end of the hearing that he hadn’t heard “the hardship yet” that would justify granting the permit.

GITLIN MAKES HIS CASE

Mr. Dougherty hung tough on Tuesday, when Mr. Gitlin came to the Town Board work session with his wife and two of his three children. “You’re treading on interesting ground,” Mr. Dougherty told him, saying that “circumstances on Shelter Island have changed” since the board had granted his permit.

Mr. Gitlin said he had asked for “not one iota more than what the town allows” and that nothing had changed in the town code since the board had approved his application for a wetlands permit in 2008.

From the audience, he introduced himself and his family after Councilwoman Chris Lewis had commented that the board legally would ignore some opinions that had been expressed at Friday’s hearing about Mr. Gitlin’s “character.” One speaker, Jim Colligan, president of the Silver Beach Association, told the board he’d met Mr. Gitlin and felt he was a “shrewd” businessman.

“Here are the characters,” Mr. Gitlin said Tuesday, motioning to his wife and children. “I’m the character,” he added, calling his two young children the “little characters.”

Mr. Gitlin said he wouldn’t have invested in the property if it hadn’t been clear the parcel was a “buildable lot.”

He said he’d invested time and money in making sure it was a “buildable lot” before buying it. The estate of the previous owner, he told the board, had the waterfront parcel and the larger lot across the street on the market for two years. Of the smaller lot, the estate “said it was buildable” and gave him “a piece of paper” that indicated it had been taxed by the town as buildable. Mr. Gitlin bought both properties.

“We’ve been on this Island 10 years,” he said, adding that he and his wife had been married on the Island. “I did the work for five years,” he said, hiring environmental consultants, lawyers and others to develop a plan that would fit the allowable building envelope for the property.

Councilman Peter Reich asked if he didn’t think he could propose something smaller.

Mr. Gitlin said he had made sure his proposal met code requirements when he filed for a wetlands permit in 2008.

“If I thought the law stipulated a smaller home, I would have had the chance to decide whether I should buy” the parcel, he said. When he bought it, he said, his proposal conformed to the code and still does. If he had known only something smaller would be required, he would have considered the parcel impractical.

Mr. Dougherty said the town assessed the parcel at $730,000, which he called “very low” for a waterfront property.

Mr. Gitlin replied that town assessor Al Hammond had told him it was a “buildable lot.”

Mr. Dougherty said it was a “pretty tall house” Mr. Gitlin had proposed. Chris Fokine, Mr. Gitlin’s builder, noted that it was below the 35-foot height limit set in the town code.

The town’s maximum lot coverage rule, Town Attorney Laury Dowd told the board, was 25 percent. Mr. Fokine pointed out that Mr. Gitlin’s plan called for lot coverage of 10.3 percent.

“It’s not that big a house,” Mr. Gitlin said. “We can all fret about it but it really isn’t. You have to have a standard and I don’t ask for anything special.”

TheCAC Chair Bausman said in an interview the CAC’s change of mind about the Giltin case was not so much the result of changes in membership on the panel, which Supervisor Dougherty mentioned as the cause at a Town Board work session before last week’s hearing. At an environmental conference Mr. Bausman attended last fall, a SUNY scientist made the case that leachates from septic systems posed the greatest threat to the health of the Peconic Bay system and that protecting the bays was a serious concern for the CAC.

Supervisor Dougherty, at Tuesday’s work session, referred to the leachate and other pollution threats to the bay system as “death by a thousand cuts.”