Liberty Garden Developers Present Final Environmental Report to Southampton Town Board

In advance of its final Town Board meeting of the year on December 21, a work session on December 14 took up the latest step in a five-year effort by the Medford-based Concern Housing to build a combined workforce and veteran’s housing complex on land adjacent to the Southampton Full Gospel Church on County Road 39.

The nonprofit presented the board with its final environmental impact statement with an expectation that it would be on the regular December 21 Town Board meeting agenda for a vote — the board is meeting on a Thursday because of the holiday.

It was not.

However, on the morning of December 20, Southampton Town Supervisor Jay Schneiderman announced that a special meeting would be held before the regular meeting for the express purpose of voting on the updated environmental statement, a necessary step before any zoning change could take place to accommodate the facility.

Later that morning, he canceled the special meeting and said he would offer the item as a “walk-on” item at the regular meeting.

“It was supposed to be in the agenda packet,” Schneiderman said. “It got left out. If we are not able to allow for a vote tomorrow [December 21], we will have to do a special meeting next week.”

Concern Housing’s presentation to the board at the mid-December work session highlighted that the organization had addressed three key questions raised in its draft environmental impact statement, which was required under the State Environmental Quality Review Act when it was determined that the project could have significant environmental impacts related to traffic, sewage treatment, and the proposed use of the facility — all of which have been hotly contested by a small but vocal group of opponents of the project.

The upshot of the FEIS on those key points centered on limiting access points to the proposed compound and nearby church to one egress point; tying in the sanitation system to the under-capacity sewage treatment plant at the Hamptons Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing via an onsite pump station; and assurances from Concern that its scaled-down plan, reduced from 60 to 50 units split equally between workforce and veterans’ housing, could provide, along with on-site wraparound services, numerous potential community benefits with minimal, if any, downside to Southampton residents.

On that latter issue, Concern for Independent Living Executive Director Ralph Fasano assured the board that in other facilities run by the organization, veterans “are from the community and work at places like the nursing home” — a description that ran contrary to some community-based concerns that have been raised that the veteran community could come with significant mental health or psychiatric issues.

Fasano urged the board to not kick a decision about accepting the FEIS to the next board and to instead put it on the December 21 agenda. He further noted that Concern had already invested $2 million into the project and had done its due diligence with respect to the environmental issues, but also to community concerns over the size of the project, which was scaled back from 60 to 50 units following community push-back.

Of the work session, Fasano said, “I think it was a thoughtful meeting that led to our item going on the agenda for the final board meeting of 2023. We established that the FEIS is complete and that we have answered all of the comments from prior hearings. A vote accepting the study as complete will bring us one step closer to being able to develop this much-needed housing.”

The FEIS vote was not a part of the agenda for December 21 when it was released this week — only to appear in a notice of a special meeting to be held before the regular meeting.

To add the resolution to the regular agenda, Schneiderman will have to introduce it as a “walk-on” amendment to the regular agenda, a process that takes place at the beginning of some meetings when the supervisor wants to add an item that’s not already on it. That requires a vote from four of the five board members, and Schneiderman doesn’t appear to have had the votes.

Councilwoman Cyndi McNamara can be fairly described as a skeptic of the Concern plan, and who has historically highlighted some of the same issues that have been raised by opponents, who have cited increased traffic, decreased quality of life and various environmental issues as they’ve attempted to bat back this proposal. A common refrain among opponents is that they support veterans, they support workforce housing, but they just don’t support this project in their midst.

McNamara said she will vote “no” to add the resolution to the regular meeting and that Councilman Rick Martel had also pledged a no vote if it comes up as a walk-on. McNamara also pledged to fight the calling of the special meeting and said it required a two-day notification period to ensure the public was aware of the meeting.

Schneiderman said the two day notification requirement is why he pulled the special meeting.

On Wednesday, McNamara vowed to fight any special meeting held before the end of the year and said that the issue should have been left to the new incoming Town Board, given the raft of documents related to the FEIS she had to review and the limited time to do so under SEQRA rules.

Asked whether the work session presentation or FEIS had swayed her thinking on the project, McNamara said she would adhere to language embedded in the FEIS: “The Town Board is the decision-making body that must weigh and balance social, environmental and economic issues and render a decision,”

“At the end of the day,“ McNamara said, “I intend to do just that.”

A late 2022 letter from Southampton resident Jessica Diesing to the Southampton Town Board provides a fair representation of the arc of concerns raised by opponents. Diesing urged the board to turn back the proposal, since it “does not address the needs of our community” and would not do anything to solve the local affordable housing crisis. She additionally raised “traffic and safety concerns.”

Supporters of the project include local YIMBY activist and real estate developer Michael Daly, who lamented some opponents’ reliance on what he called “boogeyman” arguments about mentally unstable veterans moving, en masse, to the facility.

Daly said he has visited other Concern projects on Long Island and met with veterans, he said, who are working and contributing to their communities: “This whole boogeyman notion is really kind of sad and not reflective of the veterans who live there.”

Under SEQRA guidelines, if the board moves to accept the FEIS on December 21, that would set in motion a short time frame for any involved agencies in the process to issue their own findings. The gist, said McNamara, was that within 30 days of the vote, “findings for each agency must be filed with all other involved agencies and the applicant at the time they are adopted. Findings and a decision must be made simultaneously.”

In a nutshell, she said, “the timing issue with deeming the FEIS complete is a huge one. As the FEIS is our document, once we deem it complete and file it with the town clerk, it starts a 30-day clock. If this was done by the current board on the 21st, a third of that time would be expired before the new members are even sworn in.”

In light of the 30-day clock, said McNamara, who noted that she had reached out to SEQRA experts in the state to confirm her understanding of the process, she didn’t expect to see the FEIS vote “on our last agenda of the year this Thursday. The incoming board will need time to review all of the documents thoroughly so they can be confident in whatever position they intend to take.” She was surprised and dismayed that Schneiderman appeared to proceed anyway, using the special meeting as a fulcrum point to force the vote before the end of the year.

Fasano said that his understanding was that “the 30-day timeline can be extended at the request of the applicant. We are willing to extend it to give the new board more time to analyze our request.”