This fall, Southold officials plan to release a revised version of the town’s draft zoning overhaul — one that rolls back some contentious proposals, streamlines the building permit process and aims to codify clearer protections for legacy businesses, residents and small property owners.
The revised zoning update proposal will be presented to the community in a new, more abbreviated round of public information forums, likely organized by issue into several meetings, officials said.
The second draft proposal will then be amended again to reflect additional public consensus and a final proposal will be the subject of public hearings, which officials hope to schedule later this year.
At a Southold Town Board work session on Tuesday, Planning Director Heather Lanza provided an update on a massive effort to catalog months of feedback.
“We are still compiling and organizing all the public input,” she said. “We’ve had 11 public forums. We did several industry-specific meetings. Those were really useful. We met with a small focus group of attorneys who deal with zoning in the town, and that was also really useful.”
Lanza told the board her team has transcribed all the comments from the forums and is sorting letters and emails by last name and date into a Laserfiche file.
“We’re also going to catalog them into categories, and one of the categories will be specific parcels,” she said, underscoring the granular level of engagement the project seeks to engender.
Lanza said the Town Planning Dept. has created a new static PDF map of existing and proposed [zoning] in response to community requests for a version that could be easily printed out. While the interactive maps have been “okay,” she said they’re “a little glitchy.”
The planning director said her team hopes to have an organized, categorized breakdown of all the issues raised by the community in the hands of the Town Board by the end of this month. That would give the board all of August to incorporate desired changes into a new proposal.
Lanza also echoed a sentiment that members of the Town Board have expressed in the wake of complaints about the first draft from the North Fork Chamber of Commerce. The veteran planner, who has served in her current role for 18 years, said that the initial proposal was always intended to be a starting point, not an end unto itself.
“This is normal,” she said of the ongoing debate over the first draft. “When you’re doing something like this, it’s going to be iterations, because there’s no way you’re going to get it right the first time, the second time.”
‘A long list’
The town’s proposed zoning updates aim to modernize a code that has remained largely unchanged for a half century, replacing a piecemeal system with a more coherent, streamlined and user-friendly framework.
The effort is rooted in the town’s 2020 Comprehensive Plan, which emphasizes the need to preserve Southold’s rural character while addressing pressing challenges including affordable housing, land conservation, economic development and climate resilience.
The new code consolidates and clarifies zoning districts, removes outdated language and introduces more consistent rules to reduce the reliance on variances and improve transparency.
A key objective of the overhaul is to tailor land use regulations to better reflect the town’s distinct hamlets and environmental concerns. New overlay districts are proposed to protect critical resources including drinking water aquifers, coastal areas and preserved lands.
At the same time, new zoning districts seek to foster walkable, small-scale development near town centers while limiting suburban-style sprawl in more rural areas. Provisions for affordable and workforce housing are built into the proposed code, including opportunities for apartment construction, farmworker housing and higher-density development near commercial hubs.
Councilman Brian Mealy asked how many total responses had been submitted.
“It’s hard to say,” Lanza replied, explaining that her team is still reviewing website feedback forms. “We have a long list of those.”
Supervisor Al Krupski and several board members then waded directly into some of the policy issues that have been challenged.
Krupski said concerns about “business corridor” zoning designations had been raised repeatedly. Councilwoman Louisa Evans said that business owners felt the new “corridor” label would remove too many allowable uses.
Councilman Greg Doroski agreed, saying a proposal to restrict retail and restaurants to hamlet centers is “a real point of contention … raised at pretty much every single one of these conversations.”
Lanza responded that “retail and restaurant — that came from the comp[rehensive] plan. I think the idea was good, but maybe in practice, not so good.”
The board appeared to reach consensus on some points, and Lanza sought to clarify agreement where she sensed it.
“So everyone agrees [that] retail and restaurants will be off the table?” she asked. [They’ll] go right back into the business [corridor zone]. That’s great.”
Doroski also suggested that another proposal now poised for removal is the inclusion of impervious surfaces — like asphalt — in lot coverage calculations.
Lanza concurred.
“That never made sense to me.”
Councilwoman Jill Doherty said there was a widespread impression that new zoning would limit property owners to developing only a portion of their land.
“I don’t know where [that came from],” the planning director replied. “But send it to me.”
‘Grandfathered’
The conversation turned to legal protections for businesses that are already out of compliance with current or proposed zoning — so-called “nonconforming” or “grandfathered” uses.
“Can we qualify the phrase ‘grandfathered’ in?” Mealy asked, wondering aloud if there is “better terminology.” Lanza said that while the term is widely used as shorthand, “it’s not [used anywhere] in the [code] update.”
Doherty urged caution on the concept of grandfathering in existing businesses. “We have to be careful when we say, ‘Oh, we’re going to grandfather it,’ because we don’t know what future boards will do,” she said.
Krupski, who began overseeing the two and a half year zoning update project when he took office last year, said non-conforming businesses should be “given a status” to protect their investment in the future.
“We need a way to define the grandfathering part of it,” he said. “I can think of a bunch … of uses that are well-established in town that aren’t in the current [proposed] zoning for the use that they are. [People] were very concerned at all these meetings, saying ‘Hey, this is part of the fabric of the community. This is my business plan. This is our value and our equity.’ It’s a real business but it’s not currently zoned for that.
“We need a way of grandfathering those uses in, so if it burns down they can rebuild it or sell it,” he said.
Lanza said the town’s current draft, written in consultation with Town Attorney Paul DeChance, allows a structure to be replaced “if it’s destroyed,” but acknowledged concern about how the state building code might be interpreted in the future.
“That’s what I want to avoid,” Doherty said. “Because [a future official] might have to say, ‘No, you’re nonconforming … you need a special [permit].’”
Doroski suggested a new classification — “certified use” — that would “affirm” rather than merely “accept” nonconforming businesses.
Krupski agreed.
“We do have to address those uses that are nonconforming,” the supervisor said. “They will still be nonconforming, but I think they should be given a status that allows them to sell it as that business.”
“We’re going to try to give them a sense of certainty,” he added.
‘A deeper dive’
As the town looks to finalize revisions by the end of August, Doroski asked what a new round of public engagement might look like.
“This [will be] the first product that reflects some of the priorities of the board and the community,” he said. “What sort of public engagement does the public expect?”
Krupski said that given the extensive amount of feedback, the community had already done much of the heavy lifting.
“I think the community is going to be able to look at a refined draft and not have to start from day one,” he said.
Doroski and Councilwoman Anne Smith floated the idea of organizing the next round of public forums into thematic sessions — perhaps three meetings, each focused on a separate bucket of concerns, “so that we’re not going to be trying to run through ten different things,” Smith said. “This way, you can get into a deeper dive.”
Doroski also suggested that more time for question-and-answer sessions following future public forums would be instructive.
Mealy said that one of those sessions should be dedicated to the business community.
“That’s essential to the success of this — the success of the business community.”
Towards the end of the discussion, food trucks emerged as a potential flashpoint.
Doherty argued that the town is already informally allowing them under special event permits, mostly on local vineyards. “We’re saying yes 99% of the time,” she said. “Why don’t we just make it part of the code?”
Evans and Krupski said such a move would frustrate brick-and-mortar Southold restaurants.
“Somebody’s going to come in from out of town and out-compete me because they have no overhead,” Krupski said, channeling his experience with restaurant owners’ concerns.
Lanza suggested treating food trucks as a temporary, regulated accessory use so that “it doesn’t become a restaurant,” she said.
‘Many layers’
Town Board members also zeroed in on structural flaws in the planning process itself.
Doroski said applicants were waiting “two, three, four, five, six months just to get a denial” from the Building Department — a necessary step before applying to the Zoning Board of Appeals.
“As the process becomes more onerous and you need to hire attorneys and architects and engineers, you’re making it that much more difficult for small business owners to get into business,” he said. “And it’s really stacking the deck more and more in favor of big business out here who can afford to pay rent on a place for a year or two while they’re going through the process. There should be a way that, if someone wanted, they should be able to shepherd themselves through the process.”
Doroski went on to say he believes that “some of the criticism that we’ve received about the code and the process of updating the code potentially may reflect more discomfort with the process and not with the code itself.”
Lanza acknowledged the challenge.
“We try so hard,” she said. “But it’s a bigger picture effort … it’s more than one department.”
Krupski noted that many state and county agencies also play a role.
“They add another layer — many layers — to it,” he said.
Towards the end of the discussion, Doherty — the longest-serving member of the Town Board — said that she often hears that Southold is “not friendly to businesses.”
It’s not a new sentiment, she assured her colleagues.
“That’s been forever. It’s not just this board.”