Letters

A developer, Discovery Land of Arizona, received approval to build a 600-acre golf course resort in East Quogue called the Lewis Road planned residential development, or PRD.

To recap: Discovery Land’s resort is governed by a zoning vehicle known as a PRD, which allows a landowner to cluster houses on a parcel. The remaining open space is then unbundled from the cluster housing and may be separately used, subdivided. Houses may not be built on the open space, because the development rights were used to build the cluster housing.

When the Lewis Road PRD was approved, Discovery Land didn’t describe how 240 acres of open space on the PRD would be used. But just recently Discovery Land filed an application to create a conservation easement on these 240 acres, the ownership of which will be transferred to a homeowners association, assumably consisting of homeowners who live on the clustered housing component of the PRD.

A conservation easement may be able to be used in a similar fashion as open space on a PRD. In the case of the Lewis Road PRD, use of the conservation easement would in all likelihood have to be approved by the homeowners association. However, regardless of ownership, use of the 240 acres still has not been defined.

To put it another way, Southampton approved an application that did not fully describe how the parcel would be used.

Susan Cerwinski

East Quogue