Riverhead Town Board Approves Comprehensive Plan Without Sound Avenue Agritourism Resorts

The Riverhead Town Board voted 5-0 on Wednesday to approve its comprehensive plan – with a last minute change that removed a plan for agritourism inns and hotels. 

Agritourism hotels alongside Sound Avenue were originally part of the plan, in addition to a planned industrial park and golf cottages in the Town of Riverhead. However, after it faced much pushback from the community, with civic associations forming petitions with thousands of signatures, and the Town Board removed it from the plan on Tuesday ahead of Wednesday’s vote, and sent out a press release.

“Supervisor [Timothy] Hubbard and the Town Board are committed to land preservation that upholds the integrity of Riverhead’s rich agricultural heritage and soils and will continue its commitment to Land Preservation efforts,” the release said. “That said, after careful consideration of the proposed Comprehensive Plan Update, specifically the language related to Agritourism Inns & Resorts, the Town Board, by majority, has determined that those provisions should be removed from the Comprehensive Plan Update.”

The Board also canceled a Sept. 18 forum aimed at discussing agritourism.

Agritourism, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is “is a form of commercial enterprise that links agricultural production and/or processing with tourism to attract visitors onto a farm, ranch, or other agricultural business for the purposes of entertaining or educating the visitors while generating income for the farm, ranch, or business owner.” 

Several residents came to the Town Board meeting to express satisfaction with the removal and updated plan – although the issue appears to have highlighted a deeper concern within Riverhead about land preservation.

“The Comprehensive Plan is supposed to be the community’s vision for Riverhead over the next 10-20 years, and I think it’s pretty clear we don’t want resorts,” Kathy McGraw, of Northville, said to the Board. “I thank you for doing the right thing. But that said, there’s still a whole lot of work to be done. We have to come up with alternative ways to preserve agricultural lands. Sadly, the expensive, seemingly never-ending plan that you are about to adopt doesn’t come up with any really good ideas for preservation. I think it’s really important that the summit, like you had scheduled for [Sept.] 18 for agricultural resorts, should be initiated, but it should be initiated to get input from the community.”

The previous Comprehensive Plan argued that agritourism hotels could “balance support for agritourism, conservation, and the active preservation of agricultural lands,” and Hubbard lamented its loss from the plan at the meeting, while supporting the update. He also addressed McGraw’s concern about a public task force.

“Part of our discussions, when we came to the agreement to remove this out of the [Comprehensive] Plan, was to form a task force of the public to work on land preservation, and especially farm preservation,” Hubbard said. “That’s the one thing out of this whole agritourism that I’m sad that it’s not going forward, because I did like the idea of how it could preserve land. But there were too many other factors with it that we had to give up in order to preserve that land, and I think there has got to be better ways to preserve the land without disturbing or ruining it. Maybe ruining is not the right word, but to try to keep it as rural as we can.”

Development has been a hot button issue on the North Fork for some time now. In the neighboring Town of Southold, Greenport – the town’s lone village – enacted a moratorium in December of 2022, temporarily halting development in several of Greenport’s zoned districts.

Greenport Mayor Kevin Stuessi was elected in 2023, and had campaigned on the need to keep the moratorium in place, pending new zoning laws in the village. Stuessi had told Dan’s Papers in the past that he was not opposed to development in Greenport, but rather hoped to see development that upheld the waterfront village’s character.

“Over-development is one of the biggest sources of concern in the community,” Stuessi told Dan’s in September. “Before I ran for mayor, I had pushed for a development moratorium as a private individual and knocked on close to 200 doors in the village. That’s sort of how I got started in local politics. I was trying to push the prior administration to update our codes because I was concerned about things like our old historic movie theater being turned into a hotel, for example. We’re one of the few communities that still has a true historic working waterfront. So I’d like to see more businesses and educational facilities centered around aquaculture.”

Stuessi and the village board were apparently satisfied with the zoning changes that had been made, and the moratorium expired in October.

However, Greenport officials and residents took their concerns to the Southold Town Board in June, where the Town, too, adopted a one-year moratorium on commercial development, pending zoning changes in the town next March.

The moratorium blocks the review, approval and issuance of permits for new resorts, hotels and motels in the Town. Some representatives of developers – most notably John Armentano, an attorney with Farrell Fritz representing 9025 Main Street LLC, the former Capital One Bank headquarters, which had proposed a hotel in Mattituck – asked for exemptions, but none were granted.

Some residents of Southold, however, had called for an even broader moratorium, fearing irreversible changes to one of the Long Island’s last pristine areas.

“The size, scale, number, and complexity of development proposals now being discussed or coming before the town clearly have the capacity to negatively alter the town’s future character, resources, and infrastructure, and to permanently impact the way of life that is enjoyed and supported by town residents,” an April 10 letter from the North Fork Civic Association read aloud at the June 18 meeting said. “Such an outcome would be a travesty for the town and its residents.”

The moratorium was passed with its initial plans, and Southold Town Supervisor Al Krupski supported it.

“I understand the call for a broader moratorium. I think people understand the complications with that,” Southold Town Supervisor Al Krupski said. “The board is committed to completing the zoning update in March.”

Krupski and several civic and environmental groups from the North Fork had planned to hold a press conference ahead of the Riverhead Town Board’s vote blasting the provision in the Comprehensive Plan for agritourism hotels, but cancelled it when the town sent out the updated plan.