Featured Letter: Officials must guarantee no housing at EPCAL
To the editor:
Your readers are naturally engaged with the debate over the proposed sale of EPCAL land to Luminati.
We do not as a coalition of civic and neighborhood associations take a position on the Luminati sale. However, we believe it is essential that the letter of intent and any other agreement or contract with Luminati must explicitly forbid housing construction at EPCAL now or in the future.
This should not be a problem since Luminati’s representative told the News-Review that the company, “has no plans to build housing or retail at the site … Housing has no place in that realm.”
Riverhead citizens and taxpayers must also be protected over the long term in case the Luminati deal does not go through. “Supportive Use No. 1” and any other language in the Planned Development Zoning that permits housing construction at EPCAL must be completely repealed.
More than a dozen neighborhood associations already agree that housing at EPCAL would violate its intended purpose of generating economic development and growth and be a burden on taxpayers.
Individual citizens are invited to join us in sending that message to the supervisor and members of the Town Board by signing our petition letter at http://tinyurl.com/nohousing. Our website is thecaeh.com.
We are gratified that a majority of the Town Board have informed us that they will support language in any agreement or contract with Luminati that prohibits all housing construction.
Rex Farr
coordinator, Coalition Against EPCAL Housing
president, Greater Calverton Civic Association
