Southold shifts zoning update to piecemeal approach after overhaul deemed unworkable

Southold Town will shift its long-delayed Comprehensive Zoning Update to a piecemeal approach, officials said Tuesday, abandoning plans for a sweeping overhaul that staff now say is unworkable.

Planning department director Heather Lanza told the Town Board a segmented approach would be more manageable, with priorities set by the Zoning Update Advisory Committee, Town Board, other departments and the public. 

“That approach of comprehensively revising the whole code all at once has proven to be impractical because we have limited staff time,” Ms. Lanza said of the 200-page draft code document originally released last April. “It just became really clear we don’t have the resources to do that all at once.”

The zoning update, underway since 2021, aims to make land-use regulations easier to interpret, guided by the town’s Comprehensive Plan, adopted in 2019 after a decade of work. The process has repeatedly missed deadlines.

Councilwoman Jill Doherty said the Town Board’s 2022 decision to pursue a full overhaul made sense at the time.

“You need the whole structure first before you start picking at the little things,” she said at the work session. “Now we need to get into detail on the individual sections.”

Ms. Lanza attempted to use artificial intelligence tools to parse through the extensive public input and the 200-page draft code, but said the effort proved fruitless.

“AI wasn’t really helping us because it was too much data for the level models that we had, and we even tried a higher-level model but it couldn’t churn all that data for us,” she said. “So we’re just going to go back old school.”

To shift gears, the advisory committee and planning staff will pull “good ideas” from the 2025 draft and apply them to the existing code.

Community members packed meetings on specific issues and hamlets, prompting revisions last September.

Town Board members backed the shift at Tuesday’s work session, noting the town has already advanced updates on short-term rentals, accessory dwelling units and wireless infrastructure over the past year.

“We’re doing things outside of this already,” Supervisor Al Krupski commented.

“This is part of this bite-sized approach; we are moving forward,” Councilwoman Kate Stevens added.

Southold Town received $338,000 in state grant funds in 2023 for the effort, part of a $22 million regional initiative supporting 76 communities. The town spent about $172,000 on initial consultant work, reimbursed through that grant, Ms. Lanza said.

She added the zoning map and update website will be revised to reflect the new approach — with changes expected to roll out section by section rather than all at once.