Meadow Lane Project may be jeopardizing neighbors, village

An environmental attorney representing a pair of Southampton Village residents in a dispute with their Meadow Lane neighbors says that a building permit issued in April puts the whole village at risk of losing flood insurance.

Now that Commack attorney Frederick Eisenbud is trying to get the village’s building inspector or Zoning Board of Appeals to issue a stop work order on 81-83 Meadow Lane, where Drs. Arthur and Joan Katz are combining a house and carriage house into one, Mr. Eisenbud is arguing that the work at the Katz property will cause flooding on his clients’ adjacent property, 99 Meadow Lane. As a result, he says, the issuance of the building permit violates the village’s own ordinances designed to qualify for and maintain participation in the National Flood Insurance Program.

Mr. Eisenbud’s clients, sisters Ann Carol Madonia and Susan Madonia, have opposed the Katz plan for a year and have filed a petition asking a state court to overturn the Southampton Village Board of Historic Preservation and Architectural Review’s approval of the project. Besides the potential for causing floods on their property, the Madonias have also opposed any alteration to the Katzes’ two buildings, which are said to be historic. Katz attorney William Esseks of Water Mill said that one of the Katzes’ buildings is more than a century old and the second is close to that age.

On Thursday, Mr. Eisenbud brought an engineer and a former Federal Emergency Management Agency associate general counsel to a Zoning Board of Appeals work session to make the case, on behalf of the Madonias that if the Katz project is not halted, the Madonia property will be flooded at least once a year after a severe storm, despite planned drainage systems designed to mitigate up to 2 and a half inches of rainfall. The former FEMA attorney, Robert Sokolove, said that because the construction poses a potential for flooding, a building permit never should have been issued, and FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program would frown upon it.

“If this was the situation I was looking at at FEMA, I would be looking at this community’s suspension,” Mr. Sokolove told the appeals board. If Southampton Village was suspended, all residents and business owners would be ineligible for flood insurance.

Mr. Sokolove said the village actually holds itself to higher floodplain standards than FEMA holds it to, but the village failed to apply its ordinance. “You didn’t meet your standard,” he said. “You didn’t even come close to meeting your standard.”

Mr. Esseks said Friday that he would assemble his own experts and return to the Zoning Board of Appeals in a month to refute the claims. He said that the claim that Southampton Village risks losing flood coverage is just a way of obstructing the Katz project, and he said all residents on Meadow Lane, which is between the ocean and the bay, accept and expect the risk of flooding.