Various residents, leaders of civic associations and even Greenport Mayor Kevin Stuessi attended Southold Town Board’s special meeting Tuesday morning and requested the board consider temporarily halting new commercial development throughout the town.

The board hosted the special meeting to continue its now month-long discussion on enacting a hotel moratorium. In its first work session discussion on the matter, board members briefly considered a broader moratorium on commercial development, but their focus has since narrowed to exclusively pausing hotel development. Tuesday morning, among other concerns related to the action, they discussed whether the moratorium should last six, nine or 12 months and how existing hotels could still seek approval for renovations and repairs during the moratorium.

After the board’s special work session and votes on a handful of unrelated legislative items, members heard from their constituents in the audience, the overwhelming majority of whom demanded the board take even stronger action against development.

“We don’t have the infrastructure to handle a lot more building, whether it’s commercial or residential,” said Anne Murray, president of the East Marion Community Association and the land use coordinator of the North Fork Environmental Council. “We have a number of issues besides hotels … We need a full moratorium.”

The comments Ms. Murray and various other speakers made Tuesday morning mirrored many of those the NFEC, a Mattituck-based environmental advocacy nonprofit, shared in a letter to the Town Board dated March 14. The letter said it is “vital” that the Town Board enact a “12-month carefully considered moratorium on all commercial development and subdivisions, excluding single-family homes that do not need further approval, including trustee permits.”

“With a moratorium in place, the town board, planners and the public will have time they need to fully focus on the zoning effort,” the letter read. “It will give us some breathing room to carefully evaluate what we want this place to look like 10 years from now. Without a moratorium, we face pages of plans from more developers who care little for our fragile environment or our fishing and farming heritage.”

The North Fork Civics coalition, which represents all seven civic associations throughout Southold Town’s many hamlets, sent a similarly worded letter to the Town Board. The civics requested the board “enact a very carefully defined development moratorium that would be limited to not only new resorts, hotels and motels, but also new commercial development, major subdivisions, special exception permit applications, zone change requests, and use variances. Such a pause will allow for a clear path forward for such developments in alignment with the goals of the Comprehensive Plan once the Zoning Update is complete.”

During the special meeting at Town Hall, Mr. Stuessi requested Southold consider pausing commercial development. A few weeks before he was sworn in as mayor, Greenport Village enacted a six month moratorium on development in three downtown commercial districts in December 2022. The move was extended another six months while he was mayor.

“I think the moratorium that the village enacted was enormously effective,” the mayor said in a telephone interview. “We had a well managed process and we were able to do some significant code updates during that process.”

Mr. Stuessi added that after attending various civic meetings, he believes the Southold community has reached a consensus and wants a broader moratorium.

“I think people have all experienced tremendous change over the last few decades on the North Fork, and they’ve seen an acceleration of that in recent years,” he said. “People have a variety of concerns, some of them are environmental, some of them are traffic related. We’re at a point where it makes sense to hit pause and reevaluate things and make certain that we’re going to follow the Comprehensive Plan.”

In a telephone interview following the special meeting, Supervisor Al Krupski said the town is not expanding the breadth of its moratorium at this time. He believes such a broad scope would impair both businesses and Town Hall.

“Businesses won’t be readily able to do something they were planning to do,” Mr. Krupski said if a broad commercial moratorium were passed. “The board would have to hear all those appeals, and there might be some unintended consequences there.

“If you hold up a lot of processes with a [commercial] moratorium, all those things are going to build up,” he continued. “The floodgates are going to open once the moratorium is over, and then it becomes a matter of what the planning staff can and can’t handle … It doesn’t seem the greatest urgency to hold everything up. We’re not losing an opportunity.”

The Town Board wishes to enact a hotel moratorium so the town may stop accepting new hotel applications until its comprehensive zoning code overhaul is complete. The town retained consultant groups ZoneCo LLC and Hardesty & Hanover to take stock of all allowable land uses outlined in each of the town’s 19 current zoning districts and make recommendations that will help the town implement 13 goals — ranging from land preservation to affordable housing development — put forth in its Comprehensive Plan.

The zoning review will clarify where hotels are currently allowed and at what density. Southold officials can then reassess where hotels should be permitted, the allowable number of rooms per acre of land and whether there should be a cap on the size of any given hotel. Concerns from officials and residents cover current infrastructure and the environment, ranging from traffic on Main Road and Sound Avenue, flooding on various roadways, water quality and access to sewer hookups.

Tuesday morning, Mr. Krupski said the zoning update project “is really running on all eight cylinders right now.” He projected the board could ratify the town’s new zoning code in March 2025. The supervisor said he was glad to see such a turnout Tuesday morning, as he believes it indicates the town’s community engagement efforts surrounding the zoning update have been successful.

“This is, I think, the ideal situation, where people understand that big processes are taking place and they can be a part of it,” he said Tuesday afternoon.

There are currently multiple applications for hotel development and expansion before the town. Plans for the new two-story Mattituck Hotel at the former Capital One building on Main Road, owned by the Cardinale family, call for 121 rooms, a 275-seat restaurant, a 300-seat catering facility and indoor and outdoor pools. Alexander Perros, an owner of the recently renovated Silver Sands hotel in Greenport, has submitted an application to transform an existing accessory boathouse on the property into a restaurant. 

At the start of last Tuesday’s regularly scheduled Town Board meeting, Mr. Perros requested that the board allow existing hotels to conduct renovations should it enact a moratorium. He said he received “overwhelming support” from the community to continue to renovate the hotel.

“A blanket type of moratorium that encompasses any type of construction on all hotel applications threatens the viability of establishments like ours to survive,” Mr. Perros said. “Our existing applications in front of the Zoning and Planning boards focus on updating existing structures, not introducing any new developments or expansions.”

In their letter to the board, the North Fork Civics requested that the board’s legislation “include a clearly stated exception and/or variance section that specifies the procedure and enumerates the findings required for granting such a request.”

As of Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Krupski said that the moratorium will focus on halting new construction, which the town attorney’s office will clearly define upon producing draft legislation, and include the mechanics for an appeal process that hotel owners may seek to undergo renovations during the moratorium.

At their regularly scheduled meeting on April 23, the Town Board may vote to schedule a public hearing on their hotel moratorium. Draft legislation for the motion was included on the agenda for the board’s two previous regular meetings, but it was tabled on March 26 and withdrawn on April 9. Town Attorney Paul DeChance told the board Tuesday morning that should they agree to schedule a public hearing on the matter on April 23, the public hearing would likely occur in June. The town would have to seek approval from the Suffolk County Planning Commission to enact a hotel moratorium. Should the planning commission deny this request, the Southold Town Board could override that decision with votes from five of its six members. Mr. DeChance told the board members that at this rate, a moratorium would not take effect until “maybe July or early August.”

“I think we have to consider everything that was said today,” Mr. Krupski said. “We’re setting the agenda tomorrow for next Tuesday’s work session. So I’m going to have to poll the board tomorrow or Friday and say ‘is everyone prepared to move forward with just new building, or does anyone have any other thoughts?’ And we’ll see from there.”