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The Montauk Yacht Club Resort and Marina’s plan to build an additional 48,000 square feet of luxury condominiums and a sewage treatment plant at its Star Island property provoked deep concerns when it was discussed by the East Hampton Town Planning Board last week.
The yacht club was bought for $34 million in 2007 by Island Global Yachting, a company from Florida that owns marinas around the world. Its listed owners are the MYC Resort LLC and Island KZL LLC. Last year, the new owners undertook multimillion-dollar renovations of the club and in June, the club celebrated its 80th anniversary with a grand opening party weekend followed by several more huge parties throughout the summer.
The yacht club’s application likely signals the final wave of development to Star Island that began when Carl Fisher built the club in the 1920s and created Montauk’s first protected port and a yachting haven for New York royalty like the Astors and Vanderbilts.
“This applicant holds all of the cards on Star Island,” said John Lycke, the Planning Board member who is overseeing the application. “This is all the vacant and significant space that’s available, and I would hope that in the nature of good planning we could really get it right.”
JoAnne Pahwul, the East Hampton Town assistant planning director, presented an 18-page memo on the yacht club’s application to the board, outlining its proposals for four parcels of land on both sides of Star Island Road and explaining what the yacht club needed to include next in its preliminary site-plan application.
On the east side of Star Island Road, 48 units averaging 1,000 square feet—for either condominiums or resort use, which both require a special permit—are proposed for a parcel of 5.86 acres. This lot also has two of the four leaching fields for the sewage treatment plant and all the parking spaces that could fit on the property. The application notes that the plan would be able to provide only 283 of the required 344 parking spaces, leaving it short 61 spaces.
On the west side of the road, the plans call for a sewage treatment plant and two other leaching fields across 5.24 acres.
The yacht club would give the rest of the land, 9.2 acres of woods, to the town for conservation, which some Planning Board members said they were happy about. The applicants propose no changes to the parcel that the yacht club sits on.
Jeremy Samuelson, an environmental advocate with the Group for the East End and a consultant for the Concerned Citizens of Montauk, addressed the board at the meeting regarding the importance of keeping in mind the formal relationship between the yacht club parcel and the ones being developed. He urged the board to direct the yacht club in its proposal to share exactly what its overall action would be, including how the parcel’s use would coordinate with the new development. He said the site plan should cover all the details about the yacht club parcel, even though it was not undergoing any changes.
“We want to know what the flows will be, know and understand the relationship between the boat slips on the two properties and relationships for parking,” he said, adding that the Montauk Yacht Club’s website advertised that it could hold weddings for up to 1,000 guests.
Mr. Samuelson said that despite it being such an early stage in the review process, he wanted to get on record that the applicants should be required to complete an environmental impact statement for the project.
Richard Kahn, an attorney and one of the directors of the Concerned Citizens of Montauk, also told the board that the applicants should have to complete an environmental impact statement. He referred to an ongoing study of Lake Montauk by his group that had just made a determination three months ago that the lake “was maxed out.”
“It can’t take anymore pollution,” he said. “And when I hear that you’re going to think about adding 48,000 square feet plus parking and that’s a good thing for the lake, give me a break. This is a massive development in a very fragile and extraordinary place.”
Ms. Pahwul, in her planning memo, emphasized that the development should have no negative impacts on the natural resources, views or historic nature of the buildings that exist on the island including the yacht club, the Caleb Bragg estate, which was also built in the 1920s, and became the home of the Florence Ziegfeld of Ziegfeld Follies fame, and an old Coast Guard station. She said the property also needed to be flagged for wetlands. Sufficient parking to accommodate the new units and somehow remain within the setbacks of the parcels was also an important issue, she said.
Most board members expressed concern about the amount of vegetation and tree clearing and asphalt that the plans called for in order to fulfill the parking requirements of the new units within a relatively small space.
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