The PDD: A Lethal Tool

For 16 years residents of Southampton have engaged in one nasty, divisive battle after another on each and every planned development district, or PDD, application that has come into Town Hall since the adoption of the PDD zoning legislation in the 1999 Southampton Comprehensive Master Plan. The PDD has been dubbed a creative zoning tool to allow for uses in special zoning districts, aka floating zones, that would not be permitted under existing zoning. The town code classifications allow for PDDs for almost every occasion: residential, mixed use, commercial/industrial, recreation/tourism, maritime and even an agricultural PDD. The potential to invent even more PDD classifications still exists if a potential new use can’t conform to the existing underlying zoning.

Mired in controversy, developer-driven PDDs have been forced on the public to the point where locals and second-home owners alike just don’t want them, claiming that they aren’t needed because they offer little or no benefits or amenities to the public, and are a potential threat to the environment as well. Ironically, increases in density caused by residential PDDs are often cited as another reason for congestion on the roads. Most importantly, the use of the PDD has become so distorted that it actually flies in the face of the Comprehensive Plan, which noted that survey studies indicated the highest priority for members of the community was the preservation of the rural character of the area. The Town Board approval for the building of huge PDD projects is completely antithetical to the purpose of the Comprehensive Plan legislation.

This Town Board, to be fair, responds by insisting that they have to give applicants the opportunity to prove their case. However, they also admonish members of the public for behaving badly at Town Board hearings and criticizing residents for acting as if they were destined for a root canal. When the supervisor, Anna Throne-Holst, did not want to allow the seasoned and petite citizen activist Frances Genovese to express a point—to allow a previous speaker to finish regarding a proposed PDD, which seems to be allowed for speakers who favor the supervisor’s positions—Ms. Throne-Holst asked the undercover police in the Town Board room to have Ms. Genovese forcibly removed. That anyone’s First Amendment rights could be so violated is beyond comprehension. Yet nothing was done in any way to censure the supervisor’s actions.

So it should come as no surprise that there is such a hullabaloo about PDDs. The real issue here is all about the confiscatory power of zoning. One has only to read section 330-240 of the town code to see how successive town boards have failed miserably in adhering to the findings and purpose of the PDD legislation as well as the intent. While this legislation is idealistic on a contextual level, its implementation by the Town Board has been wooden instead of imaginative, impractical instead of inventive, and stymied by every problem posed instead of being resourceful in finding solutions. The legislation seeks to ”encourage the development, rehabilitation and improvement of identifiable and unique historic and architecturally significant areas and communities, ‘main streets’ and centers of residential, commercial and industrial activities.” Long-term goals for the legislation include the retention of open space for both active and passive uses, the preservation of farmland, “preservation and conservation of open space, natural resources, diverse ecological communities, species diversity, and groundwater quality and quantity, and preservation and improvement of existing smaller communities.”

Instead of following the preservation directive of the legislation, the Town Board after three years of hearings approved the privately owned Sebonack Golf Course PDD and sanctioned the 2004 demolition of the 298-acre Bayberry Land estate, a cultural resource and one of the last intact, spectacular, great estates on Long Island. While this estate not only encapsulated Southampton’s cultural history for more than 30 years, it also served as Southampton’s social epicenter because of the largess of its famed owners, Charles and Pauline Sabin. The Town Board rationalized this outcome by saying that the demolition, under the guise of a PDD, prevented an as-of-right subdivision of 65 houses. Never once did they encourage the developer, Michael Pascucci, to preserve the 19,000-square-foot manor house as a clubhouse. The public benefit of preserved open space seems a farce given that the land itself was completely torn up and reshaped to form the golf course. Because it is a private golf course the public has no viewing access to this open space unless a special tournament is open to the public. When the Town Board could have asked for a real public amenity in the form of a walking trail around the perimeter of the 2-mile-long property, which Mr. Pascucci would have accepted, they instead opted for practice sessions on the course for high school golf players.

The affordable housing PDD at Sandy Hollow was approved to allow a small number of housing units in an architecturally banal, manor house- and barn-style compound on a heavily trafficked road. Moreover, the Town Board was going to give preferential treatment to police officers, nurses and firefighters (a volunteer position) for the affordable housing units, and that is clearly discriminatory against other applicants who work locally in steady jobs that have the same income level.

The Canoe Place Inn canal and eastern properties maritime PDD has been another bone of contention, with residents on the east side of the canal in Hampton Bays entering the fray late in the game with concerns about density and the efficacy of using a nitrogen-reducing permeable barrier for wastewater treatment.

Robert Morrow’s Tuckahoe Center, originally proposed as a PDD featuring a 122,000-square-foot shopping mall with a supermarket, was abandoned and now sits in front of the Town Board as a zone change application for 58,000 square feet of commercial space including a supermarket. Again, approval hinges on yet another traffic study to determine the potential level of congestion on the roads and overflow traffic patterns on what are now quiet residential streets.

The traffic on the weekdays on County Road 39 in the summer now is bumper to bumper. Tuckahoe residents have voiced their opposition to this project for years and the board has ignored their concerns. Even a 5-year-old would understand how the addition of these commercial businesses will wreak havoc on the highway traffic situation and surrounding neighborhoods.

The Hills project in East Quogue is yet another massive PDD application—to develop 600 acres for houses and a golf course over a sole source aquifer in the Pine Barrens. This property had been targeted for open space preservation, but the developers wouldn’t sell it. How the project even made it through the pre-submission application, with Bridget Fleming casting the lone “no” vote on the Town Board, defies comprehension. So much for preserving rural regional character and natural resources.

Southampton’s Town Board may have talent in the realm of political science, but they are not experts on earth science, building science, planning, land use, architecture, engineering or preservation. Why does the law on the books put the Town Board in the position where they supersede the planning and zoning boards as the ultimate arbiter on large zone changes and PDDs that require legislation? There’s a movement spearheaded by State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. to eliminate PDDs from the town code. If they are eliminated, residents won’t have to worry about whether or not their water and neighborhoods will be impacted by a PDD where bulk and area regulations are made up on the fly by public officials who can’t even read plans. It’s time to sink the flotilla of floating zones for good.

Anne Surchin, an East End architect, is vice chair of the Southold Landmarks Preservation Commission, and is currently working on a companion book to “Houses of the Hamptons 1880-1930.”