East Hampton ER Plans Downsized But Traffic Concerns Still Loom Large

Stony Brook Southampton Hospital has again shrunk the overall size of the planned satellite emergency room facility on Pantigo Road as members of the town Planning Board wrestle with how the new facility could be expected to fit into an already abysmal traffic condition on the congested roadway.

The hospital, which had already shrunk the size of the originally proposed facility from 33,000 square feet to 23,000 square feet, now says it is only planning about 22,000 square feet.

The facility will have just 56 parking spaces, rather than 72, as dictated by codified ratios to the number of staff and the size of the facility waiting room, which have also been reduced as expected functions of the facility were dropped from the plans even though the interior space of the amount of building has changed little.

Plans for a helicopter landing pad and connecting roadway to the Town Hall campus next door have been removed from the plan.

But members of the Planning Board continue to struggle with how to approve what will certainly be a focal point facility to be built in an area with what is already some of the worst chronic traffic delays in the town.

The Town Board last summer fast-tracked an approval of the emergency facility, issuing a finding that the application could proceed with only a basic review by the Planning Board if the facility would not have a substantial impact on the crawling traffic on Montauk Highway.

But a traffic study conducted by consultants when the planned facility was anticipated to be over 30,000 square feet shows that the real impacts will be on Pantigo Place — the road that will have the new facility added to flow from the 300 Pantigo office complex and the medical village next door.

Traffic conditions on Pantigo Road during peak travel times are already a grade “F,” town planner Eric Schantz told board members, and cars trying to turn into the eastbound lanes from Pantigo Place could expect to wait as long as five minutes or more during the heaviest traffic times, the study forecast.

Representatives of the hospital noted that the changes made to the plan can be expected to reduce those impacts, somewhat.

Planning Board members said at a meeting last week that they would like to appeal to the state Department of Transportation to consider some kind of traffic signal or, preferably, a roundabout at the intersection of Pantigo Plane and Rt. 27, to ease the flow of traffic from the feeder street.

Board members wrestled with balancing the implications that their planning training can extrapolate from technical details, with the broader community interests at stake in the facility creation.

“I have mixed feelings about this application,” Planning Board member Ian Calder-Piedmonte said during a discussion of the application on July 21, though he said he didn’t think it was the Planning Board’s place to overrule the Town Board’s clear desire to see the facility constructed on Pantigo Place. “The Town Board is clearly pushing for this project. They’ve got a lease, they changed the zone and we are, frankly, a lesser board. But it’s a concern and I have a healthy dose of skepticism on this project.”