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Chick Voorhis. FILE PHOTO
The negative fallout over language that promised to “neutralize” opposition to a Hampton Bays downtown planning study in a contract with Southampton Town continues to hound the environmental consulting firm Nelson Pope Voorhis, or NPV.
This week, Sag Harbor Village Mayor Jim Larocca said the firm would not represent the village in the environmental review of the proposal put forth by Adam Potter and Conifer Realty to develop a 1.44-acre site in the heart of the village with 79 affordable apartments and approximately 30,000 square feet of commercial space.
Larocca said he had met with Chic Voorhis, a principal in the firm, which serves as the village’s chief environmental consultant, and “we mutually agreed that this assignment would be discontinued.”
“I explained to him we were also doing a case-by-case review of all their current assignments — we are starting that now,” Larocca added.
The mayor promised to name a replacement as soon as possible, and at Tuesday’s monthly meeting, he announced that Sean McLean of MPact Collective, a New York environmental consulting firm, had been hired for the job.
The Potter-Conifer project would combine several properties off Bridge and Rose streets, raze existing buildings, and replace them with a three-story building with commercial space on the ground floor and apartments on the second and third floors.
NPV had just begun the initial environmental review for the project, which involved determining whether the application as submitted was complete — that is, whether or not it contained all the information required to be in hand before the process could go forward. The firm had advised the Village Board that additional information was still needed.
The proposal, which was unveiled last June, has been panned by critics in the village for trying to shoehorn too much development into a small and constrained, low-lying area behind the village business district.
“Since we are a small government with no planning staff, we are dependent on external staff,” Larocca said. “The role it plays is critical. It is the first line of review for incoming applications.”
NPV got into hot water last month when a $209,000 contract it had signed with Southampton Town to oversee a Hampton Bays downtown revitalization study contained language that said the firm would “neutralize” opponents and paint them as “traditional NIMBYs who consistently present misinformation to promote their own limited agenda.”
The language slipped through in a contract that was supposed to have been vetted by NPV, the Town Planning Department, the town attorney’s office, and members of the Town Board, who ultimately signed it. It was brought to the town’s attention by opponents of the town’s plans for their hamlet. The Town Board quickly revised the contract to remove the language.
But, last week, after the public uproar, NPV took responsibility for the oversight and backed out of the contract.
At the same time, Larocca, citing what he called the firm’s “unprofessional conduct,” said he wanted to review the firm’s status with the village.
He said asking the firm to recuse itself from reviewing the Potter-Conifer plans was a “direct, appropriate, and necessary response that would take away any cloud hanging over the largest application we have reviewed in the last 20 years.”
Stephen J. Kotz on Sep 13, 2022