Springs-Fireplace Corridor Study Says Future Development Must Be Dialed Back by East Hampton

Consultants who have been studying the Springs-Fireplace Road corridor since 2020 are recommending that East Hampton Town officials make sweeping changes to zoning rules to commercial properties along the busy and dusty roadway to substantially curtail the extent of potential future development and redevelopment.

Among the recommendations the consultants told the East Hampton Town Board would be needed to improve aesthetics, address a long list of “major headaches” and keep development from overwhelming the roadway and its surroundings would be reducing the amount of building allowed on a property, from 50 percent of the total lot area to just 15 or 20 percent, rethinking some of the allowed uses on commercial properties in the area, requiring more detailed regulatory review of commercial development, and mandating that more open space be set aside in any new subdivisions of land.

The consultants also recommended the town mount a campaign to purchase undeveloped land in the corridor for parks and open space, create bike and pedestrian paths and devise incentives for property owners to protect open spaces and buffers along Fireplace Road-fronts.

“What people experience driving down Springs-Fireplace Road … is defined by the traffic that is created by the businesses along that road,” said Peter Flinker, the head of the consulting team that conducted the three-year study and crafted the 100-page report that was presented to the town this week. “It’s going to be affected by future changes, so we tried to estimate what those would be.”

The study looked at conditions along Springs-Fireplace Road south of its intersection with Abrahams Path — a stretch defined by industrial and light industrial uses, including two sand mines, the town dump and Highway Department yard and a broad variety of businesses scattered with residential homes, few of either shielded from the roadway, or vice-versa.

There are more than 275 acres of land zoned for commercial and light industrial uses along the roadway, Flinker noted, about 182 separate parcels in all.

The most prominent property, both currently and in the forward-looking crystal ball the consultants applied, is the Bistrian family’s two sand and gravel mines on the roadway’s western side — which makes up the bulk of the total acreage and could be subdivided into as many as 30 new lots under current zoning.

Flinker said the statistics, under current zoning, would allow for some 1.75 million square feet of new commercial development within the already congested and grungy corridor — a deluge that will need to be contained if the town has any hope of remaking the aesthetics, environmental conditions and congestion along the roadway.

A 50-unit housing complex currently under construction by the East Hampton Housing Authority off Three Mile Harbor Road, the new East Hampton School District bus depot, a golf course and some small remaining farmland sites lie within the corridor study area as well.

The consultants — Flinker’s company, Dodson & Flinker, who worked with local consultants Lisa Liquori and Raymond DiBiase — said the town’s goals are to tame traffic issues, improve environmental conditions along the corridor and balance necessary growth with reducing ancillary impacts.

DiBiase, a traffic specialist, said that the intersection where Three Mile Harbor Road and Springs Fireplace Road converge, at the southern end of the corridor, is a crucial junction that 80 percent of the traffic passing through it uses, and must be overhauled in the near future to relieve chronic congestion.

The full report is posted on the town’s website, ehamptonny.gov, and will be the focus of discussion in the coming months.

Councilman David Lys said the consultants’ report should be sent to all of those who participated in the 2020 workshops that kicked off the study just before the COVID-19 pandemic.

He also said the town needs to be careful with how much it constrains uses of commercial properties in the corridor — because they are a rare commodity that may prove a necessity down the road.

“We’re not making more of those,” he said. “If you remove one, how are you going to replace it with one? What does the town need, not just in five years but in 50 years, 75 years? If we’d asked that 50 years ago, we might not be here now.”