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The proposed subdivision.
A former Zoning Board of Appeals member is suing the Southampton Village Planning Board for turning down his application to subdivide the Despatch Self Storage site on Hill Street.
The subdivision process has been going on for more than 10 years and made a significant stride forward in 2017, when the ZBA granted the variances required to subdivide the 2.8 acres at 550 and 554 Hill Street into three residential lots. The property owner, James Zuhusky, abstained from that decision, which his fellow ZBA members approved, 3-0.
Neighbors soon sued in an attempt to overturn the ZBA’s decision but lost their case in 2020. However, the subdivision still needed Planning Board approval to proceed — and last month a divided board rejected the proposal.
At the June 5 Planning Board meeting, where the board voted, 3-1, to deny the application, board member Alan McFarland defended the Planning Board’s authority to say no to a subdivision that the ZBA had said yes to.
“I believe that no ZBA member ought to receive personal or special ZBA ruling support that compromises other future decisions and plans in the village when subdividing the few remaining village lots,” McFarland said.
He also objected to the subdivision plan calling for one of the lots to be accessed via a right-of-way to Captains Neck Lane. The easement would run through another property that Zuhusky owns. McFarland suggested that in a subdivision such as this, typically there would be a single flagpole running from Hill Street connecting the three lots.
“Not to have a flag lot here is a fundamental mistake,” he said, warning that it would create a precedent, with other property owners asking for the same benefit that a former longstanding ZBA member requested.
“Subdivisions are the wave of the future,” McFarland said. “There are so many people. It’s going to be difficult for the village to run, and this board will be in the middle of it. I do not believe that this board is obsolete.
“According to the arguments made to us, once the ZBA decides and they get a court opinion, there’s nothing we can say — it’s all over. That’s not true. We have to do subdivision and planning. It is absolutely what we need to do.”
Planning Board member Willa Bernstein, who cast the sole dissenting vote, said she would be in favor of approving the application should certain conditions pertaining to precedent and protecting the environment be met. Among other concerns, she wanted to mitigate disturbance of former farmland and runoff from a hard surface driveway. However, she did not have support from other board members to approve the subdivision with her suggested caveats.
Bernstein noted that she disagreed with the ZBA’s earlier approval. “The least impactful method should be what all the boards in this village aim for in terms of granting the trade-offs that were granted in this initial application,” she said.
Planning Board Chairman Anthony Piazza and member Mark London voted in favor of McFarland’s motion to deny the application. Member Lisa Cowell abstained, saying she wishes to avoid the appearance of impropriety because she was recently involved in a transaction in which counsel for the applicant represents one of the parties.
In the lawsuit seeking to overturn the Planning Board’s denial, Zuhusky’s attorneys argue that the decision was “arbitrary and capricious” and “based on the vagaries of a single, admittedly biased member of the Planning Board,” namely McFarland. They wrote in a petition filed July 3 that the Planning Board usurped the authority of the ZBA “and effectively announced that it was denying petitioners’ application because one member never liked it in the first place.”
The petition also points out that Zuhusky originally asked the ZBA to green-light a four-lot plan before reducing the request to three lots to assuage the Planning Board’s concerns.
Eric Ruttenberg, the owner of a neighboring property on Captains Neck Lane, has long fought the subdivision. His attorney, Jeffrey Bragman, asserted in a May letter to the Planning Board that the subdivision application included drainage calculations that were “manipulated to understate runoff,” as confirmed by his engineer and the village engineer.’
The applicant then submitted a revised plan, which he said demonstrated that the originally proposed drainage infrastructure was 300 percent undersized. Bragman also wrote that the proposed driveway would disrupt the topography, speeding runoff into Heady Creek — and violating specific village subdivision requirements.
Bragman argued that the benefit to the applicant of obtaining a more exclusive Captains Neck Lane address for one of the three lots did not outweigh the “serious impacts from drainage and runoff.”
The two parcels include a warehouse and two residences. Zuhusky received permission in 2021 from the Architectural Review and Historic Preservation Board, in a 4-1 vote, to demolish the house at 550 Hill Street. Bragman had argued that the home was historic and worthy of protection, but a majority of the board did not agree.
