East Hampton Embarks on Sweeping Update to Zoning Laws, With Reducing Development in Its Sights

East Hampton Town will embark on a sweeping update to its zoning code in what will likely be a multi-year process of review, analysis and much public debate.

It’s an undertaking with an eye toward remaking the town’s development guidelines to more efficiently mesh with the goals of constraint and long-term sustainability espoused in the town’s Comprehensive Plan.

A working group that began laying out a road map, and destination, for the reboot of the zoning statutes — Chapter 255 in the town code book — presented a long list of new goals it envisions as being the foundation of the effort and the vision for the impacts that the town should want zoning rules to have in steering development in the coming decades.

In the “Purposes” chapter of the zoning code — the foundational section that lays out the reasons zoning rules are imposed — the group introduces a number of new value judgments and goals for constraining development, both in scale and breadth.

While the new goals make no specific mention of building codes, like the gross floor area formulas, the clear direction is that there is a pressing need to substantially reduce the pace and scale of development and, especially, redevelopment of existing neighborhoods.

The goals in one subsection, labeled “Orderly Growth,” says codes should be tailored to “reduce overall build-out to minimize adverse impacts on infrastructure and municipal budgets” and “prevent disorderly growth for the sake of growth.” Another says the town must “ensure that growth does not overwhelm the carrying capacity of human-made infrastructure.”

Another harks to the need for protecting affordable housing: “To provide for and protect in perpetuity economically accessible community housing of the type and in locations where [it] will be most beneficial to people who wish to live and work in East Hampton.”

Other subsections prioritize more general goals: protecting water quality, open space and cultural resources, ensuring that farming and fishing remain viable industries, and protecting vibrant commercial corridors and local businesses.

The effort itself was born barely two months ago, when Councilwoman Cate Rogers seized on months of prodding, primarily by an Amagansett resident, Jaine Mehring, who had regularly presented the board with reams of examples and data about how development patterns were remaking neighborhoods around the region, in compliance with local building codes that were loosened as recently as 2016.

The impact of construction on both the ability of local infrastructure to keep up with development growth and keeping housing affordable is among the chief missions of the effort, Rogers said this week.

As more and more houses built in the 20th century are torn down and redeveloped with structures two or three times their size, or more, the new development both pushes those homes forever out of the reach of middle and working class local residents, and also adds to the demand for manpower and vehicle-intensive property maintenance services.

While spurring economic growth in the local service industries has always been the main secondary benefit of the construction trade, the ability of local business to provide the services demanded had long ago been out-paced, leading to the crippling congestion on local roads, and the decline in affordable housing has pushed more of those workers to communities off the South Fork, only to join the “trade parade” of commuting workers causing that congestion.

“We need so many people to work on all these houses, but we’re not keeping housing affordable, and then we lose people coming here to work because of the traffic,” Rogers said on Monday. “It’s a domino effect. We have to find a balance. You don’t stop everything, but we can’t just keep adding to the demand for more trucks and larger and larger equipment.”

Rogers presented the first steps of the proposal at the Town Board’s work session on Tuesday afternoon, July 11, where it was met by applause from a chorus of residents who said that overdevelopment is rapidly changing many corners of East Hampton in ways that can’t be sustainable in the long term.

“A home is not a 10,000-square-foot house; a home is not a mansion in the dunes. Every year, one lot after another, a home is swallowed up and transformed,” said Kai Parcher-Charles. “I ask you to consider the needs of the year-round community … Current land-use practice is unsustainable for the local economy. It pushes the year-round workforce and business owners out farther and farther. I hope today we can be the ones to make the choice that we can look back on and be proud to have created a path to a strong and thriving community.”

Perry Burns, a teacher at the Hayground School, said that 75 percent of his colleagues at the school live off the South Fork because of the cost of housing here. Many of them leave home at 4 a.m., arriving at work hours before the school day begins, just to avoid getting caught in the traffic backups that begin to build by 5:30 a.m. Just reining in the size of homes being redeveloped could slow the breakneck pace that housing costs are widening the gap with incomes of local workers.

“You cannot stop people from coming out here and wanting homes out here,” he said. “But we can check development and how development is done.”

Mehring, who is one of two citizen members of the working group, which is otherwise made up primarily of town staff and regulatory board members, said that in the long term, checking the pace of development now will pay dividends — economic, environmental and cultural — in decades down the road.

“The legal and legitimate purpose of the zoning code is to balance the rights of the individual and interests of a few with the responsibilities of stewardship and protecting the well-being, resiliency and sustainability of the community, and to sustain the value of the land over generations to come,” she said on Tuesday. “So the task is to find the appropriate and rational way to ensure that the as-built environment aligns with the actual environment and town purposes.”

“Who would say no to natural resource protection?” she added. “Is there anyone here who really doesn’t care about the bees and the breeze and the trees and fish in the seas, and you and me?”

Rogers said she was decidedly not in favor of any sort of moratorium related to the zoning code revisions — as some suggested should be implemented while the code is updated.

“We want to make sure we are not hurting the people who pay their mortgages in this community” she said. “The people that live here and work in construction shouldn’t be penalized.”

The process will be a long one, she noted. The working group plans to go through the entire zoning code chapter one section at a time, analyzing the current allowances and limits and comparing the real-world impacts of their application to the goals espoused in the comprehensive plan. With each step, the group will present its thinking in detail to the Town Board and the public at large.

When the overall package of amendments is ready, Rogers said, the town would present it in a similar manner to how the hamlet studies were developed, with a series of public meetings and workshops on each section, during which interest groups could weigh in on the details of each section before the Town Board publishes a package of amendments.

Fellow board members voiced support for the overall effort.

“We’ve started with the comp plan and we’ve added the hamlet studies, the coastal assessment and resiliency plan and community housing plan, and it’s a long time coming that we need to use those plans,” said Councilwoman Kathee Burke-Gonzalez, who also sits on the code revision working group.

Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc praised the overall effort and mission and said he saw it as critical that the zoning code be updated to ensure more protection of access to shorelines as erosion and rising sea levels threaten the ability of residents to move along public beaches.

“It’s crucially important to our town to have continuous access and passage along our waterfronts and shorelines — it is critical to our economy,” he said. “That is an area we will really need to focus on to ensure that we will have public access along our ocean and bay fronts in perpetuity, because that is one of the most precious resources that we have here.”