Town eyes new zoning for Calverton property

Riverhead is going to throw out 12 years of work aimed at developing the 2,900-acre property known as EPCAL at Calverton - efforts that included an indoor ski mountain - and start from scratch, Town Supervisor Sean Walter said Thursday.

At a news conference with the other members of the town board, DEC regional director Peter Scully and newly elected Assemb. Dan Losquadro, Walter called the town-owned site a place where "bad ideas go to die."

He said the board would vote Tuesday to hire a Massachusetts-based land planning and development firm to review the town's efforts to date, and perform tasks, including creation of a new zoning plan and an environmental review and the work necessary to subdivide and sell the property to individual developers.

The firm, Vanasse Hangen Brustlin Inc., will be hired for a period of 18 months to two years with payment capped at $448,000. Walter called the money an investment in the town's future.

Riverhead officials complain that because 1,000 acres are zoned for recreational use, no one wants to purchase it.

Walter said the property has become a magnet for unrealistic proposals and that the current zoning has made things worse. "Everyone with a dollar and a dream wants to come to EPCAL," he said. "It's been 12 years, and we can't seem to get out of our own way. If you could create a zoning [category] that is unusable, we have created it."

The EPCAL - or Enterprise Park at Calverton - property was originally used by Grumman Aircraft to build F-14 Tomcats and other Navy aircraft. It was declared surplus and sold to Riverhead for $1 in 1996, in part to help the town replace the 3,000 high-paying jobs lost with the plant's closing.

A decade ago, the town sold the existing buildings to a developer for $17 million and has since made a total of about $25 million by selling, leasing or renting small parcels. But most of the site remains undeveloped. In the past year, two multimillion-dollar deals fell apart: the Riverhead Resorts proposal for a themed entertainment park complete with equestrian trails, an indoor ski mountain, and a hotel and convention center; and an offer by Rechler Equity Partners to buy several hundred acres for a golf course and convention center. As real estate values fell, the developers and the town could not agree on a price.

Other members of the town board pointed to problems, including the absence of a comprehensive wildlife study or environmental review during the town's ownership of the site, which would allow a purchaser to avoid the lengthy State Environmental Quality Review Act process, and no subdivision of the site into individual parcels. Subdivision would help a potential developer avoid a lengthy subdivision process.

This year, the state Department of Environmental Conservation demanded that Riverhead return a $2.5-million matching grant for the upgrade of a sewer plant that serves the site because the money went unused for 10 years.The town board selected the firm after taking a tour of Fort Devens in Massachusetts, a former Army base that the firm helped redevelop for civilian use.