Year in review: The battle over the planned development of Riverside

Earlier this year, the Town of Riverhead sued Southampton Town in an effort to force the neighboring town to rethink its planned creation of a large-scale, high-density development project in the hamlet of Riverside, one of Suffolk’s poorest communities, which sits on the edge of downtown Riverhead but is in Southampton.

“All of the negative social and environmental impacts associated with intensive future development of Riverside will be exported into Riverhead far more than into the balance of Southampton,” Riverhead’s complaint alleges. “Put simply and colloquially, when Riverside sneezes, Riverhead catches the cold.”

At the heart of the uncommonly bitter dispute is Riverhead officials’ fear that the planned project  will overwhelm years of planning and new development in downtown Riverhead and overburden the town’s school district, which serves the Riverside community.

Also central to Riverhead’s complaints is the fact that the new sewer district planned for Riverside will not serve the county center and jail, which are  in Southampton Town but since the 1960s have  been serviced for a fee by Riverhead.

Riverhead’s own sewer system, which can process up to 1.2 million gallons of wastewater a day, is required to set aside 200,000 gallons of daily capacity for the county center — limiting Riverhead’s ability to extend its own downtown development efforts. The sewer district is currently processing about 900,000 gallons a day in total, according to the town’s website.

The original Riverside Revitalization Action Plan, forged nearly a decade ago, called for up to 3.2 million square feet of new, mixed-used development in Riverside that could include as many as 2300 new low-income housing units. The latter figure has been reduced to 1167 housing units overall, according to interviews with Riverhead and Southampton officials — though it remains unclear how many of those units would be high-density, affordable housing.

Southampton’s plan was created in 2015 but is just now moving forward because Southampton has secured roughly $45 million in funding for the project’s first phase, which includes creation of a new Riverside sewer district that could treat up to 400,000 gallons of wastewater daily. 

Yet a Riverhead News-Review investigation in November suggests that the development plan has broad support within the blighted Riverside community. In door-to-door, News-Review polling inquiries with 50 randomly-chosen Riverside residents over two days, 28 said they support the plan, six opposed it and two were undecided. The remaining 14 had no opinion — either because they weren’t aware of the project, had just moved in or, in one case, were about to move out.

For their part, Riverhead officials say they are as anxious as their Southampton counterparts to see Riverside developed, but contend they’ve been left almost completely out of the planning process and that conditions in Riverside have changed dramatically in the decade since the plan was initiated. They want Southampton to undertake a new study, and Riverhead Community Development Agency administrator Dawn Thomas said last month that the town has offered to split the costs of that initiative with Southampton.

“Ten years ago, the demographics in Riverhead and Riverside were not anything like what they are today,” Ms. Thomas said in a November interview. “In fact, I would say that the Southampton Town board has recognized this because they’re reviewing the plan and they’ve already agreed to lower the density substantially. That’s great, but it still doesn’t mean that Riverhead Central School District can fit another student.”

Original reporting by Chris Francescani.