For Wainscott Commercial Center, Public Input Is Key Ingredient

After more than three years of work by engineers and innumerable consultants and back-and-forth wrangling between the seasoned members of the East Hampton Town Planning Board and professional representatives, the most important part of the review process for the Wainscott Commercial Center is about to begin, an attorney told the Planning Board last week: seeking input from the public.

With the project, the largest commercial development ever proposed in the town, about to enter a critical phase for the Planning Board, some members of which have never sat in judgment of such a sprawling project with such potential wide-ranging impacts, one of the town’s outside legal advisors, Albany attorney Dan Ruzow, gave the Planning Board a “refresher” on how to apply the guidelines of the State Environmental Quality Review Act, or SEQRA, — the overarching handbook of weighing the benefits and detriments of any proposed project or policy.

In December, the Planning Board deemed the draft version of the environmental impact statement, or EIS — the comprehensive analysis of a project that is the most in-depth level of review under state law — complete as far as its addressing of the various components of the project identified early in the process as needing detailed analysis and comparisons with alternatives. The public review will now be the step in which both the project applicant and the regulatory reviewers hear what they might have missed or failed to come with an adequate justification for and, ultimately, whether the project passes muster of a fair balancing of benefits and detriments.

“Many public comments you will use to ultimately reach your decision — they are equally as important as what’s contained in the EIS,” Ruzow told the seven Planning Board members on February 1, a week ahead of the start of the public comment period. “SEQRA requires the lead agency, the Planning Board, to consider and respond to the comments from the public in the final EIS,” he added. “The agency is not allowed to ignore comments without risking, basically, annulment of their actions and going back to square one.”

For all the mountains of data and statistics and scientific analysis that goes into the creation of a first draft — the Wainscott Commercial Center’s draft is over 2,000 pages — and then a final EIS, it is the public comments that are expected to serve as the guide and arbiter of whether the applicant and reviewing agency have captured the potential impacts on the surrounding community and natural environment the project may have, and whether any impacts have been adequately addressed or mitigated, the attorney said.

In a sense, the state law does not expect the regulatory agency to come up with all the issues of concern on its own, Ruzow said — the members of public are to be the ones expected to fill in the gaps.

“The lead agency has an important role in shepherding the oversight of the EIS, but you can never assure yourself that everything has been addressed to the extent that you would like it to be addressed,” he told Planning Board members. “The SEQRA regs … urge lead agencies to not extend forever the review of a draft EIS to make it perfect, but to simply get it to the point where it adequately provides insight and information to the public, so the public can get into the formal process of reviewing it.”

It is possible, he said, that the comments offered will lay bare that some critical issue of concern has not been raised in the draft EIS at all and that the Planning Board could be compelled to order a new supplemental EIS to tackle new matter, or matters, of concern.

The Planning Board was to have held its first open hearing on the project — a 77-acre, 50-lot light industrial subdivision in a former sand mine behind Wainscott’s business district — since the EIS was completed on Wednesday, February 8. The board has said it will keep the public hearing open until at least February 28, and for 10 days after it is closed for additional written comments to be submitted.

Opponents of the project, led by Wainscott residents, have been lining up their evidence against the project being a wise approach for months — fears of water pollution in nearby Georgica Pond and traffic tie ups on the already chronically congested Montauk Highway corridor and along the residential streets that serve as unofficial relief valves, lead the list of objections.

Ruzow had some guidance for members of the public wishing to present their comments in the most impactful way — starting with the advice to the planners that many of the comments received at the hearings will be categorized as “general objections” that can be noted and set aside, but not “substantive comments” that should be considered in relation to how the EIS addresses the specific point raised.

“It’s not enough to say it’s too big, or I don’t want this here,” Ruzow said, speaking abstractly to any potential commenters on the project who may have been tuning in to the February 1 discussion. “You want specifics. The more specific someone can be about their concerns and what’s driving it and their suggestions about how to improve things, the better.”