K.O. Southampton P.D.D.s

Planned development districts, or P.D.D.s, which were designed to allow flexible use of residential, mixed use, commercial, and industrial areas in the Town of Southampton, are no more. The Southampton Town Board repealed the highly controversial law by unanimous vote on July 11. 

P.D.D.s allowed unique zoning regulations for specific properties in exchange for community benefits. More than 20 such districts had been approved since the law was adopted in 1995 and dozens more had been requested. The vote was 4 to 0, with Councilwoman Christine Scalera unable to attend the meeting. 

“I believe the P.D.D. law to be fundamentally flawed,” Supervisor Jay Schneiderman said in a statement following the vote. “It’s not the spirit of good planning. Proper planning allows property owners reasonable confidence as to how development will unfold over time.”

The law, the supervisor wrote, was intended to allow “more creative and imaginative design . . . than was presently achieved under conventional land-use techniques and zoning regulations.”

In 2013, the law was amended to require a supermajority of the town board — four of five members — to approve a P.D.D. project. The law authorized the town board rather than the planning board to make P.D.D. decisions.

When Mr. Schneiderman campaigned for supervisor in 2015, he said the community benefit component of the law allowed special-interest groups to lean on town officials and that proposed community benefits tended to be unrelated to the projects themselves.

After his election, Councilman John Bouvier, the supervisor’s running mate, sponsored a year-long moratorium on new P.D.D. applications. It had been in place since June of 2016. The board continued to process applications already submitted, however, like a mixed commercial and residential use project in Bridgehampton, called the Gateway, and the Hills at Southampton in East Quogue, a resort and golf development. The developer of Gateway canceled the application, however, leaving the Hills the only remaining P.D.D. application under consideration.

Mr. Schneiderman had proposed repealing the P.D.D. law in May. Fixing it, he said, proved to be too complicated. Carl Benincasa, a town attorney, said a basic principal of zoning legislation was predictability. The P.D.D. law “created a level of unpredictability that caused some concern for this board and the community at large,” he said.