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Alpacas on the Butter Lane property.
Alpacas on the loose, an oversized children’s playhouse, and a greenhouse design that appears to include stone fireplaces are a few of the complaints from Butter Lane residents and their lawyers about a years-long battle with neighbor Adam Shapiro at 625 Butter Lane, who is accused of ignoring or manipulating restrictions on an agricultural reserve when he purchased the property, formerly a tree farm, about eight years ago.
The ongoing dispute over Shapiro’s uses for the property to date is coming to something of a head on Thursday, September 28, when the Southampton Town Planning Board is having a public hearing as the board considers a proposed “covenant amendment” to the original covenant that created the agricultural reserve — created some 25 years ago during a subdivision of Butter Lane properties.
The amendment would reconfigure the footprint of the reserve to accommodate animal husbandry already underway there.
Attorney John Bennett is representing Shapiro and says his client has “suffered all these ad hominem slings and arrows” as he set out to buy and restore the tree farm, while also bringing in the alpacas and a flock of chickens, too.
Bennett said Shapiro hired a full-time arborist when he bought the property, and “now there are 1,000 trees up there, up from 400,” and that complaints about, for example, the jumbo playhouse are misplaced if not uncaring.
“The guy, during COVID, put a playhouse on the property for his daughter. Oh my God! How many farmers would just go and do something for their child — to provide for them? That is supposed to be appalling?”
He further noted that Shapiro has, in any event, “moved or removed” the playhouse.
As for the alpacas, they escaped last year and had to be herded back onto the reserve.
Bennett says the reason for going to the Planning Board this week is to address the fact that when the reserve was set up more than two decades ago, “the zoning setbacks were not as extensive as they are now for certain agricultural uses, so certain agricultural uses don’t fit” on the reserve.
He’s seeking relief, either from the Zoning Board of Appeals, to allow for further setback relief, or for the Planning Board to accept the covenant amendment to allow him to keep the alpacas and chickens.
If the ZBA won’t go along, Bennett said, the Planning Board could “change the area where we can have agricultural structures.”
“Either the Planning Board gives it to us or the ZBA — it’s a rather mundane zoning application, which has been whipped up by distortion and really cruel ad hominem attacks,” Bennett said.
Martha Reichert is representing Shapiro’s neighbor, Dr. Michelle Green, and says Shapiro has blown past normal town processes while playing one town agency off the other through a “duplicitous” strategy, where Bennett has deliberately sown confusion while his client continues to do whatever he wants on the reserve.
She’s not alone in that criticism.
“This is what happens when you have an applicant who is intent on getting what they want,” said attorney Jeffrey Bragman, who represents two residents in the Butter Lane neighborhood. “This is a very powerful person and apparently willing to stretch and stress normal procedure to his will.”
Shapiro is the managing partner of East Rock Capital, a New York City financial services firm “managing over $3 billion on behalf of a select group of high-net-worth families,” according to a company profile.
Reichert and Bragman each highlight as a main sticking point that Shapiro never submitted a full site plan to the Town Planning Board.
“It comes down to the necessity to file a site plan and the failure of the applicant to ever do that,” Bragman said. “The law is pretty clear that when an easement is created via a subdivision approval, any construction on the easement requires town approval via the site plan process. The easement itself required it — any application, for any structure, requires site plan review.”
“There’s no reason to do that,” Bennett countered.
Reichert noted that a ZBA hearing “keeps getting adjourned because the applicant made a separate application to the Planning Board,” to change the so-called “covenant envelope,” wherein any agricultural-related structures would be built.
Reichert added that “the applicant bought knowing that the lot was undersized for animal husbandry,” she said, noting that he’s “basically asking for a full zoning variance” without having submitted a site plan.
What happens, she asked, if Shapiro builds his greenhouse without first submitting a site plan review, and the town then deems it an inappropriate structure for the reserve? “The greenhouse is not before the ZBA, but if it was a part of a comprehensive site plan, there would be a review — is it an actual greenhouse? You can have a lovely greenhouse, but is it bona-fide ag?”
Bennett shot back that “regardless of what the structures are, they are agriculturally applicable. Why file a site plan if it’s besides the point? I’m doing stuff that is permitted in the ag easement on the property. It specifically allows structures. The opposition just doesn’t like it.”
