Southold Town Planning Director Heather Lanza briefed the Town Board at a work session Thursday on the latest draft of the town’s zoning code overhaul, walking members through proposed changes to the table of uses and previewing what she called a “working draft” that will soon be posted online for public review.

Elsewhere in the session, Planning Department analyst Lillian McCullough outlined a plan to update the town’s Community Preservation Fund Project Plan and Zoning Board of Appeals chair Leslie Weisman suggested revisions to the town’s gross floor area code.

Lanza noted that public input collected so far has already been uploaded to the town’s Laserfiche system and will also be added to the zoning update website, which is being updated with new features such as a progress report page to help residents track the project. She said the planning department has been focused on revising the use-permission tables — the core documents that outline what residential, agricultural, industrial, commercial and marine activities are permitted in each zoning district.

She said her staff has also met with the town’s building department and the Southold Zoning Update Advisory Committee.

“It’s still a work in progress that can still change, but we want to go through some proposed changes to see if you agree, and then we could post this online for people to review what some of these proposed changes or revisions to the code should be,” Lanza said.

Among the highlights, Lanza said the draft restores the two-household dwelling category at the request of the town’s building department. She also explained that the draft introduces a new “community center” category — covering places like American Legion halls and private membership clubs — to be allowed in any zone.

“Those are allowed now just about anywhere, so we added that back in to be allowed in any zone,” Lanza said.

Another key change is the addition of accessory uses that the Zoning Board of Appeals has routinely been asked to adjudicate: personal art studios, home gyms, home offices and workshops.

“For some reason, these are going to the ZBA a lot. And so they said we should just add them specifically, instead of relying on the customary and incidental use,” she said.

Accessory uses would be for personal use only.

“It’s not something where they’re holding classes or selling memberships. It’s the same as a personal home office,” Lanza said.

Nonresidential zones

On the nonresidential side, Lanza said the draft proposes several name changes and restored uses.

At the urging of board members, the draft distinguishes between a “dry cleaning establishment” — a drop-off location — and a “dry cleaning plant,” where the work is done on site. “The places that are doing both would just become nonconforming,” Lanza said.

Banks would return as a permitted use, but with new standards restricting outdoor ATMs because, she said, “outdoor ATMs are a problem with lighting. They can’t really meet our lighting code, and they cause a lot of light pollution. Well, the new standard would be something like ATMs being indoors.”

Nursing homes, she said, were missing from the draft entirely and are now being added back into several business districts, including General Business, Limited Business II and Hamlet Business. Restaurants and bars, initially removed, are also being restored in General Business zones.

Limited Business, Hamlet Business and Light Industrial

Several zoning district names are also being reconsidered. The draft proposes reverting from “Corridor Business” back to “General Business,” and from “Industrial” back to “Light Industrial.”

Supervisor Al Krupski noted that the frequent renaming had caused confusion.

Councilman Greg Doroski suggested keeping the “Limited Business” name.

“Maybe just because people are conversant in Limited Business, you just keep it … We’re making a change by splitting it between one and two, that’s enough change for people to wrap their heads around,” Doroski said.

The same debate surfaced over “Hamlet Mixed Use,” which had previously been “Hamlet Business.” Krupski said Hamlet Business seemed sufficient.

“People know what a hamlet is. We have clearly defined hamlets … so the uses make it clear that it’s mixed use,” Krupski said.

Microbreweries, laundromats and dormitories

Board members flagged several additional categories. Doroski asked about microbreweries and micro-distilleries in Limited Business zones, which Lanza acknowledged she had missed.

She also said “laundry facilities” would be re-labeled simply as “laundromats,” and retail restored as both “large” and “small retail stores.” Theaters, cinemas and vehicle sales are also being restored in some districts, along with new definitions for fish markets to cover both wholesale and retail operations.

On Plum Island, dormitories will remain permitted for research staff, but Lanza and board members discussed the possibility of broader employee housing standards for seasonal or industry-specific workers.

“What we can do is look at what other places do and see if there’s some good models for that,” Lanza said.

Lanza told the board she intends to post both the redlined and clean versions of the use tables online as soon as technical corrections are made.

“Next, what we want to do is … to create a whole new working draft of the code. Using what we know about the public input, it would be sort of an interim draft … with the names restored.”

Krupski said the public’s continued interest in the zoning overhaul made it important to maintain transparency.

“People are really engaged in this, and they have — the community’s been engaged in this for a couple of years, so I think this will keep that engagement going,” he said.

Doroski agreed.

“I think having this tiered kind of approach where we’re going to put this out there now and then have the code after that … I think that will help,” he said.

Lanza closed by noting that she has added a progress report tab to the zoning update website.

“I’ll try to post something there more often so people can see this is what we’re doing, instead of wondering what’s happening,” she said.

Community Preservation Fund update

Also at Thursday’s work session, Southold’s planning staff laid out a step-by-step path to refresh the town’s Community Preservation Fund Project Plan — the policy roadmap that determines what kinds of projects can be paid for with the 2% real estate transfer tax voters approved in 1998.

McCullough told the Town Board she’s aiming for a “rolling” update that moves the obvious pieces first and reserves thornier policy choices — like whether and how to use CPF for water-quality work, historic preservation and working waterfront easements — for follow-ups as guidance emerges from Albany and the East End’s newly required regional advisory body.

“I just want to do a bit of a refresher on what the Community Preservation Project Plan is, what its purpose is, what’s actually in the plan, and why it needs an update,” McCullough said. “The [Project Plan] is the guiding document for most CPF spending and the town’s CPF policy … [and] the town can’t spend money on CPF projects unless that spending is captured in either the project plan or the management and stewardship plan.”

Southold is overdue. The plan is supposed to be comprehensively refreshed every five years; the last full rewrite predates the town’s 2016 Comprehensive Plan and a series of CPF amendments passed by the state between 2021 and 2024.

While state law anticipates five-year cycles, McCullough stressed that the town doesn’t have to wait between rewrites. “It is supposed to be updated every five years, but we could update it as often as we like.”

McCullough proposed starting with the parcel list — the map and table of properties eligible for acquisition or easements — because that work is straightforward and won’t hinge on pending state guidance. The department aims to remove parcels that are now fully developed or already preserved; add vacant or developable parcels adjacent to existing preserves, waterfront or other priority resources; and re-evaluate partially built subdivisions case by case to decide if meaningful preservation value remains.

Longtime GIS and land-management coordinator John Sepenoski, whom McCullough called “essential to marshaling the data and the actual creation of the plan,” noted there is an official CPF map already posted. “The last one was actually from 2019 … it’s hanging in Lilly’s office.” A link to the plan and map also lives on the town’s Land Preservation webpage.

As with past updates, staff will coordinate directly with Greenport Village and Fishers Island about their priorities, McCullough said. Krupski signaled that school-owned lands should be on the town’s radar if they ever become available. Sepenoski said staff previously kept “ongoing school” campuses off the list but have long tracked outlier parcels like the Mattituck-Cutchogue tract at Marratooka Lake.

The town planning department is also interpreting the Legislature’s recent requirement that 10% of CPF revenues benefit “disadvantaged communities” — a designation that currently includes Greenport Village and has been at the center of a year-long tug-of-war over CPF priorities townwide.

In a June joint meeting, village officials pressed Southold Town to deploy CPF funds inside village limits for water-quality and historic projects under the new state rules, while town leaders defended three decades of CPF-driven land preservation and argued that Southold has funded most water-quality work through other programs.

McCullough told the board Thursday that she wants to set up a focused working session on the DAC requirement and how it intersects with Southold’s long-standing emphasis on land preservation.

She reminded members that the DAC list is fluid.

“It’s flexible. Anyone could join the list, anyone could fall off the list,” she said, explaining that New York’s Climate Justice Working Group ranks census tracts across a basket of demographic and environmental indicators and tags the bottom 35th percentile as disadvantaged. “It’s not set in stone.”

Because the DAC scoring system was built for a different statute, McCullough said CPF towns need to align on what counts as a CPF “benefit.” Until the state’s new Regional Advisory Council is up and running, she suggested Southold proceed pragmatically: identify candidate projects and parcels that could deliver tangible benefits in and around Greenport while keeping the land-acquisition program moving.

“For purposes of the project plan update, maybe we can kind of look at what sorts of parcels might be interesting, and then basically have a placeholder in the plan saying we’re looking at this and we’ll develop a more direct policy,” she said.

Doroski said it would be useful to have a project list “whether we decide to move forward with incorporating [water quality projects] into CPF, or if we want to fund it differently.

“Not just in Greenport Village, because … if we’re going to open up water quality funding from CPF, it can’t be restricted just to Greenport. We need to look at this more broadly and set up a process in the rest of the town,” he said.

Gross floor area rules ‘punitive’

Also at Thursday’s work session, Weisman — the ZBA chair — delivered a sharp critique of the town’s gross floor area code, calling the rules confusing, unfair and “punitive to property owners.”

Speaking both as ZBA chair and a member of the Zoning Update Advisory Committee’s design subcommittee, Weisman said the regulations were well-intentioned — meant to keep houses in scale with their lots and preserve neighborhood character — but in practice have become “onerous, expensive and difficult to administer.”

Weisman pointed to inconsistencies in the code, noting that it contains at least four different definitions of floor area. She also criticized provisions that count cathedral ceilings and other double-height spaces twice in GFA calculations, which she argued unfairly penalize homeowners. In one recent case, she said, a homeowner’s request for a small addition was denied solely because an existing cathedral ceiling pushed the property over the limit.

Another flaw, she said, is the rule requiring comparisons to homes in the “immediate area,” a phrase she argued is vague and open to manipulation. The ZBA has since limited the definition to five houses in each direction plus those across the street, but the system still forces applicants to compile data that is often incomplete and costly to obtain. Even with professional help, Weisman warned, homeowners may still fail to qualify.

To address these issues, Weisman said she and her subcommittee colleagues are developing a simplified framework linking lot size to maximum house size, but acknowledged that kind of overhaul will take time. As an interim step, she urged the Town Board to strike language that prevents the ZBA from granting variances above the neighborhood average GFA.

Town Attorney Paul DeChance and Town Board member Louisa Evans voiced support for the change.

Weisman emphasized that reforms should preserve the intent of the code — protecting neighborhood character — while easing costs and confusion for property owners.