Town Board: Sore point for business community on the agenda

A topic that has frayed nerves among the business community for more than a year is headed back to center stage before the Town Board.

A committee appointed by the board has unveiled its proposal for clarifying some of the rules for pre-existing, non-conforming uses in residential zones — particularly when they may be expanded and when they must be considered to have been abandoned.

Presented by the committee chair, Councilwoman Chris Lewis, at Tuesday’s Town Board work session, the committee’s proposed amendment to the zoning code would for the first time specifically prohibit non-conforming uses from being expanded onto properties and into structures beyond the confines of their own original lots. It also would bar the use  for non-conforming purposes of any residential property merged onto an adjacent non-conforming parcel.

Also new, the amendment would consider any non-conforming business in a residential zone to have been abandoned after one year of “substantial discontinuance” but allow owners to file a notice of their intent to reinstate the use sometime within two years. The notice could be renewed up to five times, allowing an inactive non-conforming use to remain legal for a decade.

The current code says that a nonconforming use “that has been voluntarily discontinued” for a year loses its legal status.

Both issues have come up in recent years, when the owner of La Maison Blanche inn and restaurant bought an adjacent residential lot and installed a driveway on it to provide access for his customers; and when the Shelter Island Nursery ceased daily retail operations and fell into foreclosure proceedings. Neighbors have been complaining ever since about a neighborhood eyesore.

So far, efforts during the past year to clarify the rules have been met with an outcry from the Chamber of Commerce and individual businesspeople, who claimed they were a threat to the Island economy and its way of life.

The Town Board was expected to schedule a public hearing on the committee’s proposals for later this winter. The committee’s proposal was to be posted on line (click here) soon.

The committee that developed the proposal included Town Attorney Laury Dowd, local business owner Mike Anglin, a resident and a member of the Zoning Board of Appeals, which asked for the code language on non-conforming uses to be clarified in early 2011, when it ruled that La Maison’s use of a residential lot constituted an illegal expansion of a pre-existing, non-conforming use. Owner John Sieni is challenging that decision in a lawsuit.