‘Future of Riverhead’ forum highlights key goals and challenges

The challenges facing Riverhead don’t outweigh the promise of a brighter future — according to a spectrum of community leaders at a Times Review Talks breakfast panel at The Vineyards at Aquebogue on Thursday morning — though the challenges are many.

A new and long-awaited town square that is set to break ground next year, coupled with more market rate housing downtown, are the first steps toward a Riverhead renaissance aimed at transforming downtown into a thriving, year-round destination, according to town officials. The panel also noted an ambitious expansion campaign in recent years at Peconic Bay Medical Center that has dramatically improved healthcare options in Riverhead.

But Riverhead’s growing concentration of affordable housing — as well as homeless shelters and sober houses — is taxing the school district, the police department and other vital government services.

Officials said the town’s planning department is busy devising new ways to preserve farmland and open space without raising taxes, a campaign that will require compromise — possibly including the revival of a highly-unpopular proposal to rezone land north of Sound Avenue for “agri-tourism” resorts. Meanwhile, rising property values and high interest rates are prompting an increase in the number of second home owners, undermining Riverhead’s history as the East End’s most year-round, working-class community.

Town Square

Describing it as a “dream that’s now coming to reality,” Riverhead Town Supervisor Tim Hubbard said that after years of planning, grants and public hearings, construction on the first phase of the town square project is expected to begin next year.

“We are truly anticipating having shovels in the ground by late summer next year, and that’s when everything is going to come to fruition,” Mr. Hubbard said. “When that happens … businesses downtown are just going to prosper, because the town square will be programmed [with events]. You’re going to have people around most evenings for different events and functions, and everybody’s going to benefit from that.”

Mr. Hubbard also said that a key component of the town square’s success will be more market-rate downtown housing.

“Market rate apartments have people that have cash in their wallet after they pay the rent, and they can then go down and service the establishments. So that’s the plan, and we’re really, really close to it, and really excited.”

In conjunction with the town square project, town officials are working on a new parking garage behind The Suffolk theater, since the new town square will displace some existing downtown parking. The supervisor also said plans are underway for paid parking downtown, and that Riverhead will be doing a “trial run soon.”

Affordable Housing

Mr. Hubbard said that Riverhead continues to build more affordable housing, even though the town is already home to more workforce housing than all of the other four East End towns combined. Mr. Hubbard called on his counterparts in East Hampton, Southampton, Southold and Shelter Island to step up and do their parts in fighting the affordable housing crisis.

“We would like to see more affordable housing out east, where the workers can actually afford to live in the town where they’re working.”

Southampton’s Riverside revitalization is expected to include hundreds of new affordable units, but Riverhead officials say those new units, in a community largely serviced by Riverhead, will further strain the Riverhead Central School District and other government services like the police.

Mr. Hubbard said that construction on new affordable housing and a community center on the grounds of the First Baptist Church on Northville Turnpike could begin as soon as next year.

Hospital Expansion

Peconic Bay Medical Center executive director Amy Loeb said that the ability to offer high-quality healthcare to the Riverhead community has dramatically improved since the medical center merged with Northwell Health in 2016, and that now more medical center employees are locals.

“If someone has a cancer diagnosis or a stroke, they should not have to leave their community [for treatment], because outcomes are impacted by that.”

The executive director said that expansion plans continue, including new designs for the upcoming Emilie Roy Corey Center for Women and Infants. Ms. Loeb said the expansion has turned the medical center into a “magnet” for local hires, including Riverhead high school graduates, and that the majority of hospital employees — about 60% — live here.

“That is something that is special about Peconic Bay Medical Center, is most of the people who work there, live there and are taking care of their friends, families and loved ones.”

The hospital treats an average of 40,000 patients a year, Ms. Loeb said, and treated 44,000 in 2023.

She said there are a lot of “really good jobs” available to local high school graduates, and room for growth — citing an employee who began in housekeeping and is now working in the hospital’s radiology department.

Second Home Market Growing

Real estate veteran Ike Israel said that rising prices and high interest rates are fueling a transformation of the town into a second home community.

“Now you look at the prices in Aquebogue, Jamesport, Calverton, Wading River, and they’re very out of reach for local families to be able to afford to live in those communities,” he said, adding that he’s seen Wading River houses selling for more than $1 million.

Mr. Israel said a year-round community in Riverhead is vital to its overall success.

“I’ve seen people who are commuting all the way to New York City two or three days a week, but still choosing to live here and raise their families here. On the flip side, I’ve seen a lot of houses that had year-round local residents turned into second homes. And all this plays a factor on our commercial districts, restaurants, downtown, Route 58.”

Public Safety

Riverhead Police Chief Ed Frost said that downtown is safe, that violent crime is a tiny fraction of his department’s service calls and that most criminal offenders get rearrested over and over again — frustrating law enforcement. He described new policing technology and said that better lighting and more cameras are coming to downtown.

The chief said that from May to Sept., there were just nine incidents of assault or robbery and in nearly all of them the victim and the aggressor knew each other — meaning tourists, visitors and residents are not being targeted.

Those nine incidents were only a tiny fraction of 973 criminal incidents town wide, he said.

“That only makes up 9% of my total crime for the whole period … and if you look at all incidents, criminal and non-criminal, it makes up only 6% of the town wide calls for service,” he said. Mr. Frost also said that cameras are being installed in the parking lot behind Digger’s Ales N’ Eats and that key areas downtown would be getting better lighting soon.

The chief said the department’s new records management system is going to give detectives better mapping power to identify areas prone to crime.

“So I can direct resources to that area.”

Another of the department’s big challenges is policing in an era of state bail reform, which in 2020 began severely restricting the use of cash bail and jail for misdemeanor or low-level offenses, including shoplifting.

“We have a lot more repeat offenders that we arrest several times a month. I have one individual that I’ve arrested 14 times since June for various crimes from town code violations … to larceny and drug possession. They pretty much know it’s a revolving door.”

Agriculture

Rob Carpenter, administrative director of the Long Island Farm Bureau, talked about the many challenges facing the farming community in Riverhead and across the North Fork, as well as the town’s limited ability to preserve more land.

Between intense regulation and growing competition, Mr. Carpenter said, local farmers are being forced to adapt in a variety of new ways.

Instead of traditional farm crops like potatoes, “you’re seeing things such as greenhouses, hops … controlled environment agriculture, specialty crops, ‘you pick’ operations and a little bit more retail … that’s the way that farmers have transitioned to be able to survive.”

Mr. Carpenter said that farmers “have to be one of the most heavily regulated industries that I could think of, between the Labor Department, the [Dept. of Environmental Conservation] and [the Dept. of Agriculture and Markets] and local codes. So they face a lot of regulatory pressures on how they farm, and everybody is telling that ‘we want you to farm this way’, not the way that may be the best for growing your crop.”

Mr. Carpenter said that a global economy means the North Fork’s farmers are competing with not just with international markets, but regional markets as well.

“We see wines coming in from Chile and Australia that are cheaper than what our growers can produce them for here. Even thinking internally in the United States, farmers compete against farmers in Pennsylvania and Ohio that have lower costs of doing business.

“With a high minimum wage, high taxes, high land values and high labor costs — all of that is a big pressure on [local] farmers.”

Mr. Carpenter also urged the community to keep its mind open about agritourism, another way the farming industry is trying to remain viable.

Earlier this year, town officials were met with fierce opposition when they considered a zoning change to allow for agritourism resorts on unpreserved land north of Sound Avenue. The zoning change would have allowed for such resorts on minimum 100-acre plots, provided that 70% of the acreage be preserved for agriculture use in perpetuity with a maximum 30% used for the resort and amenities like restaurants and spas.

Land Preservation

Mr. Hubbard took the opportunity to quantify the challenges to farmland preservation, and enunciate the price of failure.

“There’s about 6,500 acres [in Riverhead] that are under pressure for residential development,” he said, resulting in as many as 3,000 more new homes being built on existing open space or farmland.

He said the cost to purchase the development rights for all the unpreserved land in town would be $385 million, “with real property taxes increasing about $1,000 a year just to cover the bond.

“It’s just not possible. Our [Community Preservation] fund does not collect anything near what it would cost to buy this acreage.”

He said that even clustering this development would still result in the same number of new homes — meaning potentially hundreds of new students in the already overcrowded school district.

“So the planning department has been working hard to find creative ways to extend opportunities [for preservation] … this resulted in the concept of an agritourism resort.”

Mr. Hubbard said he thought community outreach for the original proposal was executed poorly.

“It got unraveled to the public in not such a good PR way, and it wasn’t explained well.”

The supervisor seemed to indicate that a new zoning proposal for agritourism resorts could be on the horizon.

“If the public understood the development pressure that we are experiencing, as well as the need to be really creative with the [transfer of development rights] program, they might be able to better weigh the pros and cons of a project,” he said. “So we’re working hard to expand access to information and provide better public engagement, to be really open in our discussions.”

Thursday’s forum was made possible in part thanks to the support of event sponsors Suffolk Security Systems, Big Rock Advisors and Cardona and Company.