Calverton land gets a fresh look

The long saga of Calverton, famously a burial place for ideas ranging from polo to an indoor ski mountain, has reached a new turning point. It's time to take a deep breath and rethink the best uses of the former Navy land, to be ready to develop it optimally when the economy heats up.

The latest idea to die was Riverhead Resorts, which could have made the town into a real destination, with multiple resorts, including the 350-foot-tall ski mountain. That one facet of the plan became its icon, provoking skepticism and even laughter. Whether the resort complex would have worked, we'll never know. Lack of financing in a sluggish economy has killed the deal. So, now what?

Supervisor Sean Walter, halfway through his first two-year term, and nearing a re-election campaign, is in the same position as his predecessors: He's stuck with the Navy's gift and its incompletely realized potential for private-sector jobs and government revenue. The idea behind giving 2,900 acres to Riverhead, a small town with topsy-turvy politics, was to let it replace the jobs lost after Grumman Corp. stopped assembling F-14 fighters there in 1992.

Now Walter has a new idea: Hire a consultant to do a top-to-bottom look at the plan that has been guiding efforts to develop Calverton. That's not going to be cheap, but it's well worth doing, if Riverhead is to gain major long-term property tax revenue from new uses of the property.

Market conditions have changed since the mid-1990s. So it's fair to ask whether there's a market for the hundreds of acres of recreationally zoned land where the resorts would have sat. It's also valid to wonder how strong the market is for more industrial uses. That's the role of the consultant: Figure out what the market is for different uses and work toward a new plan and a way to subdivide and sell the land.

The plan itself will be crucial, but so will the ability of potential developers to get approvals without waiting forever. So Walter has taken a hard look at a plan at Fort Devens, Mass. That document relied heavily on the consulting firm the town is hiring. Massachusetts created a new entity, the Devens Enterprise Commission, to oversee development under the plan. It seems to be working: Developers are guaranteed action on approvals in less than 75 days.

Learning the lessons of Devens could help Riverhead. But it's tricky. In return for help from Massachusetts in paying for environmental cleanup,the three towns involved gave the commission control over land use. But Walter realizes that Riverhead's culture of wanting to decide its own destiny would resist any loss of sovereignty. Yet he wants to explore a new development entity for Calverton, with seats for various stakeholders, to make permitting faster, but without giving up the town's control. That won't be easy to design.

So, before creating any new entity to fast-track permitting, the town should work on getting a smart, reality-based plan, then figure out where that leads.