Sag Harbor Weighs Clearing Restrictions, Rental Registry

When the Sag Harbor Village Board meets at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, June 13, it will resume public hearings on two measures, a new rental registry and tougher clearing restrictions for village properties that has been tabled for tweaking three straight months.

Under the clearing measure, when a property owner wants to clear a lot for construction, they have to submit a survey to the Building Department that shows the existing and proposed clearing. If more than 35 percent of the lot is proposed to be cleared, the matter gets referred to the Board of Historic Preservation and Architectural Review.

The law also includes a new table that imposes restrictions on the amount of a property that can be cleared, from 100 percent for those properties of 10,000 square feet or less to 60 percent for properties larger than 20,000 square feet.

Mayor Jim Larocca, who will be presiding over his final monthly meeting, said he was hopeful, but not certain, that the board would be ready to act on the measure, which was originally brought to the board by two members of the village’s Tree Committee, Jayne Young and Eileen Rosenberg.

“What has happened is, we have tried to scale it back from how ambitious they wanted it to be,” Larocca said. “I’ve had a lot of experience writing legislation, and the more complicated you make it, the less likely it is to be successful.”

In an interview this week, Rosenberg and Young said they had been enlisted by former Mayor Sandra Schroeder to help craft a new clearing law and just happened to be the members of the Tree Committee who were most committed to the idea. “We became the team,” said Rosenberg.

Both women said they would like to see a stricter measure, one closer to the law North Haven adopted earlier this year that prohibits the removal of healthy large trees in most cases, requires homeowners to plant large trees to replace trees that have been removed, and contains punishments, including the suspension of building permits for property owners who violate clearing restrictions.

“Sag Harbor is behind the curve,” Young said, but both agreed it was better to have something on the books that is more restrictive than the current code. “We need greater penalties, better enforcement, stop-work orders,” Rosenberg said.

Young added that part of the effort is to educate residents about the beauty of Sag Harbor’s existing streetscapes. “A lot of people will cut down trees and just pay the fine,” she said. “Replanting with saplings is not the same.”

She added that many people replace existing trees with arborvitae and Leyland cypress trees, which contribute to the transformation of the village to a monotonous suburban landscape.

The Village Board will also continue a hearing on a proposed new rental registry. The measure was first proposed with the goal of ensuring rentals were safe in the wake of a house fire that killed two young women in Noyac last August.

The registry will require that those who want to rent their homes, seasonally or year-round, as well as their tenants, must sign affidavits confirming that they have reviewed village laws and ordinances related to rentals. Landlords must also complete a notarized checklist indicating that the unit has fire safety protection and other measures in place.

The law authorizes the village to go to court to stop a property owner from renting a unit if violations of the code are found. Violators would be subject to fines of up to $1,000 per day.