A Plan for Saving Riverhead's Farms

Katie Thomas. STAFF WRITER Newsday – 7/9/03

Most Riverhead residents agree on what they want their town to look like generations from now: not too different from the thousands of acres of open farmland that surround them today.

But few have agreed on how best to protect this beloved landscape in a town with the most up-for-grabs farmland on the East End. For years, environmentalists and farmers remained on opposite sides of the discussion until, perhaps, Monday afternoon.

At a public hearing on the town's draft master plan, a stream of environmentalists, farmers and builders appeared in front of the Riverhead town board and asked it to consider a plan that they have been quietly crafting for months.

The proposal, according to its supporters, would for the first time establish a viable program that would allow farmers to sell their development rights to builders, who would then use these rights to construct more intensive projects elsewhere in town.

“This is big time. Big time,” Aquebogue farmer Lyle Wells said yesterday. “I think what has come forward is something that everybody realizes will work.”

Eve Kaplan, who until recently served as the Riverhead coordinator for the North Fork Environmental Council, said the plan came about by finding common ground with farmers and builders. Speaking of the coalition, which calls itself the Stakeholders Group, she told the town board Monday: “Our hidden motive is to try and preserve land.” But not everyone, including Howard Meinke, president of the North Fork Environmental Council, was as sanguine. While his group generally supports the Stakeholders’ proposal, he said he has concerns that the plan will not live up to its claims, which include saving 10,000 acres of farmland and open space.

“To make the plan come out the other end of the municipal machine takes a lot of details,” Meinke said. “The document that the Stakeholders handed in at town hall was two pages.”

The program, known as transfer of development rights, or TDR, would allow the town to shift development from places where growth is not wanted, such as farmland, to areas where it is welcomed, such as downtown Riverhead. The town has had a similar program in place since 1997, but it has never been used, in part because builders have said the advantages were never attractive enough to entice them to participate.

Riverhead’s draft master plan also includes a TDR program, but the plan had been opposed by environmentalists because it encouraged development on bluffs north of Sound Avenue, land considered to be ecologically important.

The plan proposed Monday would expand the land eligible for preservation beyond an agricultural zone identified in the town's draft master plan to include all active farmland and “priority open space” in the town.

Like the proposed TDR program in the town’s draft master plan, the Stakeholders’ plan would change zoning on farmland from a maximum of one house on every acre to permitting only one house for every two acres. As an incentive to farmers, both the town and the Stakeholders’ plan would let them sell their development rights using the old zoning of one house per acre as a guide.

The Stakeholders’ plan would permit builders to use transfer credits to develop farmland at a higher density than is normally allowed, provided they build “adjacent or in close proximity to” existing development. Under the town’s plan, farmers worried that housing developments would be scattered throughout existing farmland. Under both plans, builders also would be able to use the credits to get a variety of exemptions to town zoning codes.

The cooperation encouraged Riverhead Town Supervisor Robert Kozakiewicz, who said he will seriously consider the plan. “I’m very happy with what this group of people did, the fact that they were able to set aside their differences and come up with a plan that adds to the town’s plan,” he said.

A second public hearing on the draft master plan will be held July 21 at 6 p.m. at town hall.