Revised Beach Plum Meadows Proposal Meets Resistance In Southampton Village

Southampton Village residents have asked village officials to require an environmental impact study for a proposed 16-lot subdivision on Moses Lane.

The proposal currently before the Village Planning Board is a scaled-back version of an original plan for a senior housing complex, which would require the creation of a planned development district at the site, allowing uses not currently permitted by existing zoning. The Southampton Village Board denied that application for a change of zone, saying the site did not meet criteria for a multifamily residential district.

“There have been a lot of neighbors in front of the Planning Board raising different issues,” Village Attorney Beau Robinson said last week of the more recent plan. “The project has been moving forward, but the board is taking into account the criticisms from the neighbors.”

Submitted in December 2013 by Jim Tsunis on behalf of the property owners, Helen and Edward Corrigan and Beach Plum Meadows LLC, the original plan requested special zoning to create the multifamily district and build a 56-unit senior housing complex on 22 lots. Residents opposed that project, saying it did not meet a requirement that such housing lie within a half mile of the village business district. The project’s developers disagreed, but the Village Board ultimately sided with the residents, saying that the shortest possible walking path would be more than a half mile.

In September, Beach Plum Meadows LLC went before the Planning Board with a revised plan, one that will not require a multifamily planned residential district to move forward, since it complies with current village zoning. Now, the applicant is seeking to build 16 single-family homes on half-acre lots on the 11-acre property just south of County Road 39 and the Long Island Rail Road tracks.

But residents now say the subdivision will increase traffic in the area and create too much density.

“We would really like for an environmental impact study to be conducted,” resident Donna DeLeo said at a November 3 public hearing. “I really think this project requires a study.”

To address the density issue, the attorney for the applicant, Gilbert Flanagan, told the board at the November 3 hearing that the owners now plan to put a sewage treatment plant on one lot, which reduces the number of houses from 17 to 16, as well as making it possible to treat waste on site, rather than utilizing septic tanks.

According to Mr. Robinson, the Planning Board will vote this week about whether an environmental impact study is necessary and is expected to take as long as several months to continue to review the proposal. The project would also need approval from the Suffolk County Department of Health.