Letters

Regarding the massive 37-foot-high, 30,000-square-foot shopping mall with affordable housing proposed for Bridge and Rose streets in Sag Harbor:

The partners involved in this effort, Jay Bialsky and Adam Potter, have put this project forth as affordable housing. It offers no back or front yards for residents, no playground, and over 90 percent of the residences are 500-square-foot one-bedrooms. No enforceable parking or traffic solutions have been put forward.

The idea behind a development like this is that a developer will apply for funding, including grants, to defray costs. When state money is involved, a municipality cannot require that local first responders, teachers, health care workers, etc., have first access. That’s fair, but we’re left with a problem.

The location is in our worst flood zone. It is polluted and needs remediation. Extensive pilings would have to be driven to stabilize it.

Our village has yet, even after Sandy, to come up with a comprehensive plan for flooding, and that should happen before a massive structure is built on our worst flood area.

Thirty thousand square feet of retail immediately behind Main Street is a grievous threat to the success of our seasonally struggling and beloved Main Street. In addition, there is the possibility of big-box stores being established there, after our long struggle to keep Main Street intact. There is no plan in place for limiting stores to a maximum of 3,500 square feet like there is in the village business district, which is one of our only tools to combat big-box stores.

An economic impact study and a geotechnical report, both prepared by a third party not associated with the developers, should be done before any kind of building of this scale takes place.

The 37-foot proposed height of the buildings does not account for all the mechanicals that would have to be placed above ground, and therefore on the roof. No one has seen drawings for what that would look like.

On June 14, in one of the last open forums on the waterfront overlay district, I asked why the height of buildings had not been limited to 25 feet. Not a single village official replied. As proposed, the plan shows no sensitivity to the scale of this village and is an architectural affront to our history and character.

I wholeheartedly agree that the East End desperately needs affordable housing, and thank God our village and other officials are working on this. But must we have an out-of-character shopping mall, a beloved Main Street threatened with extinction, worse flooding, worse traffic and parking nightmares, and the character of this village lost forever to achieve this?

We need affordable housing solutions that don’t destroy our village.

April Gornik

North Haven