Riverhead seeks inspiration to help Calverton thrive

Riverhead Town officials are looking 150 miles northeast to an old Army base outside Boston for ideas on how to redevelop the former Grumman defense plant in Calverton.

Fifteen years ago, plans for industrial parks and housing at Fort Devens, Mass., and Calverton were unveiled.

Today, Fort Devens is home to more than 75 companies employing 2,900 people, homes for 106 families and acres of conservation land. Calverton also has businesses, a rail spur and two runways but remains far from what planners had envisioned.

"The site once was an economic engine and now lies fallow," said Ken Schwartz, planning director at Vanasse Hangen Brustlin Inc., a Watertown, Mass.-based consulting firm that helped redevelop Fort Devens and now is studying Calverton.

"We have our challenges ahead of us but there are also opportunities," Schwartz said, referring to the East End site. VHB, hired by the town for about $400,000, has been examining Calverton since March and organized a trip to Fort Devens for local officials in January.

Schwartz and two other VHB executives offered a preliminary assessment Tuesday to 80 business people at the Long Island Business Development Council meeting.

With an office in Hauppauge, VHB has many local clients, including Huntington and Brookhaven towns, Molloy College and the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System.

VHB officials said Tuesday the 2,900 acres where Grumman once tested Navy jetfighters should be attractive to businesses. One million square feet of space is now an industrial park that's 95 percent occupied. The sewage treatment plant is being upgraded and the runways could support private aviation, said VHB's Terri Elkowitz.

Still, the Calverton site lacks direct access to the Long Island Expressway and 2 million square feet of space is undeveloped. There also is uncertainty about town approval of projects, Elkowitz added.

She and others pointed to Fort Devens, where 4,400 acres are home to 8.5 million square feet of industrial space and 282 housing units. The officials urged Riverhead to establish a clearinghouse where developers can obtain the necessary project approvals in about 75 days.

Such a process helped Fort Devens win a Bristol-Myers Squibb pharmaceuticals factory over North Carolina and Florida.

Much work remains to be done before VHB officials present a development plan for the site in 2012. The property has been called Enterprise Park at Calverton in recent years.

However, Town Supervisor Sean Walter Tuesday signaled willingness to remove one hurdle. He said the town would act within 75 days of applications being filed if projects meet the criteria in VHB's plan.

Marie Zere, a commercial real estate broker based in Ronkonkoma, questioned the veracity of some of VHB's research.

She said a number of businesses had recently left Enterprise Park at Calverton. She also said she was having difficulty securing town approval for signs to advertise the vacant space. "You don't know what the market is," Zere told the VHB officials. "I'm very disturbed by that."