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Riverhead Planning Board Notes: Retail centers, medical offices proposed

A proposed 60,048-square-foot shopping center on 12 acres just east of M&T Bank on Route 58 was granted final site plan approval Thursday.

The proposal is located adjacent to the Riverhead Center shopping complex and also abuts the Riverhead Town Highway Department yard to the east.

The applicant is Apple Honda owner Irwin Garsten, who died earlier this year.

The plans show five proposed retail buildings ranging in size from 10,008 to 14,976 square feet and a parking lot with about 240 parking stalls closer to Route 58.

Access to the site will be from both Route 58 and Osborn Avenue.

Wading River office plan

A plan to build four medical office buildings on six acres on the north side of Route 25A in Wading River received preliminary Planning Board approval Thursday.

The property is best known as the location of an annual carnival to benefit Peconic Bay Medical Center, and also as one of the properties that were rezoned in Riverhead Town’s 2012 Route 25A commercial corridor study.

Property owner Kenney Barra had filed a lawsuit, along with the owner of another property, seeking to overturn the new zoning.

That case is still pending in state Supreme Court.

The medical office application called for three 6,544-square-foot buildings and one 11,549-square-foot building.

A 2002 proposal from Knightland, for a 50-room country inn with a 100-seat restaurant on the same site, was approved but never built and the town maintains that approval has expired. The town subsequently changed the zoning on the property so that a country inn is no longer permitted.

Rolle Brothers

The owners of the former Rolle Brothers site on the north side of Route 58, across from Firestone, have dropped plans for a new retail center and are instead seeking to build medical offices there.

Applicant Richard Israel said there is more of a market for office buildings. The application, called Riverhead Commons, calls for four buildings, ranging in size from 2,500 square feet to 20,704 square feet, on the six-acre site.

The application proposes retail use in the smallest building, with offices in the other three.

Rolle Brothers sold farm equipment there for more than 50 years until the early 2000s.

The land was briefly owned by ExxonMobil, which sought to build a gas station there. The town rejected that plan in 2004.

Mr. Israel’s company bought the land from ExxonMobil in 2009 and filed an application in 2011 that called for one restaurant and three retail stores.

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