Town rejects lawyer's call for action on bid for Silver Beach house

The Town Board last week rebuffed a request for action on Andrew Gitlin’s application for a wetlands permit to build a house on his small waterfront lot on Peconic Avenue in Silver Beach.

Board members agreed that they had made it clear they would not make a decision on a permit for the house until Mr. Gitlin replaced bulkheading damaged when Tropical Storm Irene hit last August. The board expedited a permit for the bulkhead work, Councilman Peter Reich noted, by not requiring Mr. Gitlin to first obtain a DEC permit for the work but no work has been done.

Attorney Christopher Kelley of the firm Twomey, Latham, Shea, Kelley, Dubin & Quartararo in Riverhead wrote the Town Boad on February 16 saying his client’s bulkheading issues had been “resolved and the location of the bulkhead remains the same as it did before the submission of the application.”

He wrote that “all that is left is for the Town Board to render its decision. We hereby request that the matter be put on the agenda at the next Town Board meeting and that a vote be taken on the permit application.”

The Gitlin case was on the agenda of the February 28 Town Board work session. Mr. Reich, starting off the discussion, said the site of Mr. Gitlin’s proposed house might be closer to the shoreline now because of storm erosion andf it might lack the 75-foot setback required by the town wetlands code.

He added that, if the house were built without a new bulkhead in place, more of the yard could be washed away and the house could be lost to erosion.

“The bulkhead needs to be there before the house starts,” he said.

“We made that extremely clear” when the board granted the expedited bulkhead permit, Councilman Chris Lewis asserted.

Supervisor Jim Dougherty agreed. “Let’s see the bulkhead then we’ll act very expeditiously.” He added that the town would “communicate with Chris Kelley.”

A number of Silver Beach neighbors, many of whom have opposed to proposed house as too large for the small lot, attended the session. They made no comments and left after the matter was discussed.

Mr. Gitlin is proposing a two-story, four-bedroom house with a footprint of 1,400-square-foot-plus on a 14,000-square-foot lot, about a third of an acre, at 70 Peconic Avenue.

The Town Board granted a permit for the work in late 2008 but no construction took place before the permit expired at the end of December, 2010.

When Mr. Gitlin asked for a new permit last summer, the town’s Conservation Advisory Council — which had voted 4-3 in favor of a permit two years before — voted unanimously to urge the Town Board to deny it, saying the house would be too large for the property.

A throng of neighbors nearly filled the Town Hall boardroom during a Town Board hearing on the application last summer.

“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.”

At a subsequent work session, a majority of board members said they felt they could not reject an application for a permit for the same proposal the board had previously granted.

Supervisor Dougherty disagreed. He argued the Town Board was not bound by “anything that happened in the past” and commented that he hadn’t heard “the hardship yet” that would justify granting the permit.

Later, when Mr. Gitlin came to a Town Board work session with his wife and two of his three children, Mr. Dougherty reaffirmed his opposition. “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.

He was referring to scientific studies that indicated residential septic systems were the primary cause of nitrogen pollution in the Peconic Bay system. Mr. Dougherty called septic leachate and other pollution threats to the bay system “death by a thousand cuts.”

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.