Letters

Kudos to the Southampton Town Board for rejecting the change of zoning for Liberty Gardens on the grounds that there was insufficient “mitigation” for adverse environmental impacts. I hope this is a trend that carries to the Hampton Bays downtown redevelopment.

Consultants have been known to justify whatever development their client wants. It is not out of the realm of possibilities to hear that only eight students will be added to a school district from 250 new apartments, or the development will pay a boatload of taxes and reduce the taxes for everyone else. Heck, they can probably come up with some justification that flying cars will mitigate the traffic congestion.

However, in my review of the draft Pattern Book for downtown Hampton Bays, which is up for a public hearing on July 9, I was disappointed to find specifications that allow for high-density multifamily housing and buildings greater than 2½ stories reaching 50 feet in height buried in a Pattern Book of pretty pictures of facades and window boxes.

These specifications are reminiscent of the Hampton Bays Downtown Overlay District annulled by the Supreme Court in 2021. The Supreme Court annulled the original HBDOD, which included the Pattern Book, on the grounds that the town failed to conduct a comprehensive environmental review.

Now, it appears that the Town Board is kicking the can down the road for any environmental review but opening the door for developers to propose high-density development in this revision of the Pattern Book, to be adopted as part of the Comprehensive Plan.

The Town of Southampton should not be for sale to the highest bidder with our fragile environment and constrained infrastructure.

I will give the Town Board members the benefit of the doubt that they missed this in the fine print of a hundred pages of design specifications and their enthusiasm to move the downtown revitalization forward. The opposition to high-density development by the residents is well-documented. The design specifications had the community support since the first draft of the Pattern Book in 2016.

I hope the residents of Hampton Bays will take the time to submit comments to the Town Board for the public hearing on July 9. The details for the public hearing are on the town’s website. We have come this far, and we should be able to start the downtown revitalization without succumbing to the pressures for overdevelopment.

Gayle Lombardi

Hampton Bays