Foxwood Village owner says Costco plans flawed
The approved drawings for The Shops at Riverhead shopping center under construction on Route 58 are incorrect, and would put the center’s parking lot six feet above the top of a fence that now runs along the property’s border with the Foxwood Village retirement community.
So said Peter Mastropolo, president of the corporation that owns Foxwood Village, at last Thursday’s Riverhead Planning Board meeting in Town Hall.
Foxwood residents have been up in arms ever since the developers of The Shops at Riverhead, which will feature a Costco as its anchor tenant, cleared the entire 41-acre site right up to the Foxwood property line earlier this year — even though the developers don’t have current plans to build on the entire property.
The Shops at Riverhead, owned by Manhattan-based Heritage-Riverhead Retail Developers, LLC, received Planning Board approval last year to clear the entire site so they wouldn’t need to import or export sand to grade the land. The approval requires the developers to create a 30-foot vegetative buffer and a four-foot-tall berm along the Foxwood property line to replace the trees that were cleared, but that buffer has yet to be constructed.
Foxwood residents have also complained about the quality, or lack thereof, of the six-foot-high wooden fence erected along the property line by the developers and requested last Thursday that it be replaced with a sound wall.
“When it came time to clear the land and the trees were removed, it became very obvious that the impact on Foxwood Village was going to be more severe and more than what was stated in the drawings that were presented to the Planning Board,” Mr. Mastropolo said at last week’s meeting.
He said that when he and other Foxwood residents were protesting a recent Zoning Board of Appeals applications filed by the developer seeking a variance on town lighting laws, “we did some actual surveying and found that the drawings showing the elevations were incorrect.”
Foxwood Village has since hired its own surveyors to review the developer’s plans, he said.
“When they installed the fence, we did a line of sight [analysis] and elevation readings and the fence came out to be actually six feet below the top of the parking lot,” Mr. Mastropolo said. “So when a berm is installed in there, the berm is going to be below the elevation of the parking lot.”
He suggested the Planning Board re-examine the approved plans for The Shops at Riverhead to see if the elevations are correct.
“There’s too much disparity between what they say we have and what the prints show,” Mr. Mastropolo said.
Planning Board members said they would take a look at the information provided by Mr. Mastropolo, but made no promises about reopening the developers’ application.
“I haven’t been supplied with anything by Peter [Mastropolo], so it’s hard for me to comment on it,” Peter Danowski, an attorney for The Shops at Riverhead, later said. Mr. Danowski was not present at last Thursday’s Planning Board meeting, as the project was not on the agenda but was brought up by residents during the meeting’s public comment segment.
“We’re pretty comfortable that what we put on the approved site plan is what will get built and [once it’s built] will show the elevations approved by the Planning Board,” Mr. Danowski said. “I find it hard to believe the parking lot is going to be above the fence. We’ve always said that when we built this thing, it will be consistent with the plans that were approved.”
Mr. Danowski said plans for the 30-foot-wide buffer include eight- to 10-foot arborvitae and other trees, some of which will be planted atop a four-foot-high berm along the Foxwood property line.
He added that, should someone in the Foxwood community stand against and look over the fence, “they would never see anything, because we have a slope from the fence sloping downward with arborvitae and other landscaping that was approved in the buffer area,” Mr. Danowski said, “You couldn’t see beyond the arborvitae.”
Mary Lee Feldman, current president of the Foxwood Village Homeowners Association, asked the Planning Board to require the developer to replace the wooden fence that is there now with a sound wall, something Foxwood homeowners had also demanded at previous board meetings.
The current fence, she said, is not high enough or strong enough to protect the community from pollutants and noise.
And Diane Barba, who lives in the neighboring Millbrook community, just east of The Shops at Riverhead, mentioned that residents there are getting only a chain-link fence. However, existing trees on the Milbrook land already serve as a natural buffer to the cleared shopping center property.
“The noise is unbelievable” since the clearing took place, Ms. Barba said. “I feel like I’m back in the Bronx.”
Mr. Danowski said in an interview that he doesn’t foresee the developer reopening the application.
“We’re going to build the approved plan,” he said.
