Southold zoning update misses another deadline

The Southold comprehensive zoning update missed yet another self-imposed deadline to sign it into law by the end of 2025 — sparking criticism from Councilman Greg Doroski at the Town Board’s Dec. 16 work session.

Six years after the town’s Comprehensive Plan was adopted in 2019, and four years after the zoning update process began in 2021, Southold has fallen short of delivering the updates on time.

The zoning update aims to make land-use regulations easier to interpret, with guidance from the town’s Comprehensive Plan that began in 2009 and was adopted in 2019. Southold has continuously missed deadlines by weeks throughout the zoning update process.

Mr. Doroski, set to leave the board for the County Legislature at the end of the month, criticized the continuous delays at the Town Board work session. 

“We’re … years away from that information. That’s a lifetime,” Mr. Doroski said. “And we really almost need to look again at starting the comprehensive plan update. We still haven’t implemented those changes, so we’re almost lapping ourselves.”

Mr. Doroski said he regretted not pressing the planning department harder to meet deadlines.

“It feels like we’re losing momentum,” he said.

Supervisor Al Krupski said that with the amount of community input received during public sessions this year, that residents understand “this is a process and their voices have been heard.”

Residents have raised concerns with the planning department on a variety of issues throughout the past year, most recently at a Nov. 18 Mattituck-Laurel Civic Association meeting. There, business leaders aired their grievances about how long it takes projects to be moved through the planning department.

Planning director Heather Lanza argued that the comprehensive plan is “not stale yet,” when considering development rates and building permits issued in town — the numbers of which are relatively low when compared to the size of the town. 

“I understand there’s this feeling like we’re being overwhelmed, but it doesn’t have a lot to do with zoning,” she said.

Ms. Lanza said attention that would be given to the zoning update has been diverted to other projects such as the wireless service plan update and day-to-day building permit issues. The town is set to hold a public hearing on the proposed wireless plan updates in February. 

Staffing shortages have compounded delays, Ms. Lanza added. Assistant planning director Mark Terry retired in August after more than 20 years with the town, and the department has struggled to keep up with regular workload while managing the zoning overhaul.

Ms. Lanza said the planning department attempted to use artificial intelligence to process hundreds of public comments from summer workshops, but the technology couldn’t handle the volume of data. Staff are now manually reviewing and categorizing comments.

When pressed for a date she believes the planning department will have an update, Ms. Lanza posited the end of March as a target date. To be better equipped to hit the town’s deadlines, Ms. Lanza asked that the planning department get more staff. 

“I’ve always asked for more staff, never got it,” Ms. Lanza said. “When you don’t have enough staff, you can barely get by doing the regular stuff, nevermind extra projects.”

Work continues on the zoning update, as planning department staff evaluate data to create design standards for residential, commercial and industrial development.

The delays have angered members of the town’s Agricultural Advisory Committee, which Mr. Doroski serves as liaison to. Earlier this month, committee members came to a Town Board meeting upset that a proposed code change had been pulled from the agenda without notice to the committee.

“We’re in the same spot we were in four years ago related to agriculture,” Mr. Doroski said. “Business owners don’t have the luxury of ‘We’ll wait.'”

The Town Board’s decision to conduct the zoning update process in house was a “conscious decision,” Mr. Krupski noted. With that said, Ms. Lanza said the planning department has taken the project as far as it can go and is doing it in house “because we know we’ll get a better result.”

The Nov. 24 cyber attack, which rendered town servers unusable for more than a week, is a holdup Ms. Lanza commented should not be discounted when creating deadlines. 

“The firehose is still being directed at you, but we need to figure out how to get this done,” Mr. Doroski said.