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02/13/2008
Southold Residents Fight To Preserve Town Character
By:Robert Wargas

For many, old-world Americana brings to mind stores that welcomed customers with the brassy ding of a bell hanging above the door. A "chain" was not the mega-store on the corner but something you used to lock up the barn. Streets were narrower and quieter, and "big business" was a concept reserved for large cities.
Now, as mom-and-pop shop owners continue to hand in their aprons, thanks to the retail blockbusters, those small towns are quickly becoming a novelty, according to the officials who are working to preserve them. And although the nine hamlets within the 369-year-old town of Southold have managed to hang on to their rusticity despite the commercialization happening just a few miles west, the threat of "commercial sprawl" is always looming.
But the town's 20,000-plus residents refuse to stand idly by. Several years ago, town officials appointed small groups within each hamlet called "stakeholders," residents who were put in charge of finding ways to safeguard the personality of where they lived. Now, officials are looking to gather the input they received from stakeholders into a comprehensive plan for all of Southold Town, which will be put together over the next year.
The stakeholders believe it's the small stuff that counts - having just the right number of trees on the streets, for instance, or putting up signs that don't just name the roads but welcome visitors to "Wine Country." To bring town officials up to speed on their observations, the stakeholders frequently draw up hamlet study reports, documents chock-full of suggestions and recommendations that range from using energy-efficient technology in streetlights to altering zoning regulations in an effort to preserve land.
"The purpose is to create a vision and a mini master plan for each hamlet," said Heather Lanza, director of planning for Southold Town. She called the hamlet studies "far-reaching" documents that find ways to stimulate local economic growth while making sure the hamlets stay hamlets and are not turned into large metro areas.
Even though economic growth is a priority, business in the North Fork hamlets is usually contained. Each hamlet has a "hamlet center," an area in which commercial property and business is concentrated. Southold Town's hamlets are set up very much like old-fashioned settlements, said Mark Terry, the town's senior environmental planner. If one walks or drives through any hamlet center in Southold Town, this immediately becomes apparent. Quaint, Main Street-style clusters of shops are surrounded by residential and agricultural property. There are no chain stores and very few large intersections. Family-owned farms line the road. But perhaps most noticeable is how every hamlet center looks as if it were hand-crafted and untouched, not altered by years of commercialization.
Making sure business doesn't creep beyond hamlet center boundaries is something that needs to be watched constantly, Terry said. For example, in Mattituck, where the hamlet center covers about 56 acres, stakeholders said in a report that "future business growth and development should be restricted and concentrated within the hamlet center and secondarily within the Route 25 business corridor."
Residents don't want their hamlets to turn into hodge-podges of corporate bustle, Terry said. For five years, Southold has been effectively warding off large retail stores and chains, and this will give small business the chance to grow but still allow them "to fit into the landscape without being obtrusive," he said. "It will open up opportunities for business as well as people to take a smart growth approach."
The reports, however, don't just focus on keeping big business out. Most of the time, the suggestions are more community-based. For instance, Southold hamlet stakeholders, in their 2007 report, suggested creating a network of biking and jogging paths. In Cutchogue, stakeholders are adamant that, despite the "ever-increasing volumes of traffic," the town should not widen roadways. They also recommended a street tree planting program, which urges "regular pruning and maintenance as well as the replacement of damaged or dead trees," according to the report.
East Marion stakeholders, in their report, stressed the importance of relocating bus stop terminals and enforcing lower speed limits to prevent crowding and promote safety.
One of the ways in which Southold Town is able to hold on to its history is through land preservation. Preserving open space is among Southold's top priorities and "retains the rural quality of Southold," Terry said. To date, the town has been successful in protecting more than 5,000 of acres of land from development, according to the town's Land Preservation Department.
As for what's next, Terry said the town now is drawing up a "comprehensive plan," a document that will coordinate how town funds are to be used in relation to what the reports and studies observe. This comprehensive plan will take into account all the suggestions made by the stakeholders so far, he said.
To help boost the study, Town Supervisor Scott Russell recently signed a grant application that will seek more than $300,000 in New York State funding. Ultimately, Terry said, the town wants "to prioritize short-term and long-term planning."