A Law, But No Way to Apply It
Under the newly enacted gross floor area laws in Sag Harbor Village, the size of a house is tied to the size of its property — capped, for example, at 4,000 square feet on a 25,000-square-foot lot. However, larger houses on bigger lots can be built provided a special permit is granted by the village board. How to go about getting that permit remains a question.
The application process had not been mapped out by April 21, when the amendments to the residential zoning code were made. The board lost Fred W. Thiele Jr., the village attorney who had led them through the code revisions, on April 11, and only hired his replacement, David Gilmartin Jr., on Tuesday night.
Earlier that evening, Christy Ferer, who owns a property at 10 Cove Road in Redwood, pleaded with the board to figure out the process and do it fast. The first to ask for a special permit, she was hoping to air her plan to build a new 7,000-square-foot house on her 1.78-acre lot during an already scheduled meeting on May 31.
Brian DeSesa, Ms. Ferer’s attorney, said the proposal fits into the new law, and it was just a matter of the application process being established.
The request was made in writing in a letter dated May 2 and delivered to the board on Monday. However, the board declined to set a hearing date until the process is up and running.
“What we’re asking for is to try to get a speedy consideration from the trustees so I can deal with this property,” Ms. Ferer told the board. She went into contract in 2013, took ownership in 2014, and has been affected by two moratoriums — the wetlands moratorium and then the one on substantial residential building projects — ever since, she said. She asked for an exemption to the building moratorium in July and was denied.
She has been carrying a bridge loan of $15,000 a month, and said she was at the breaking point. “The process has not been kind,” she said. “I’m on the verge of jumping off a cliff.”
Officials told Ms. Ferer that Denise Schoen, the acting village attorney, had begun work on an outline of the application process on Tuesday after returning from a humanitarian trip to Greece. Ms. Schoen said she needed to go over it with a planner (the board also hired a consulting firm Tuesday night), but could not say when it would be done.
“I think there’s light at the end of your tunnel,” Ed Deyermond, a village board member, told Ms. Ferer, but, he said, “it’s not going to happen in 24 hours, and it’s not going to happen on May 31.”
Ms. Ferer asked for a special meeting in June and was again denied. James Larocca, a board member, said the board was moving as fast as it reasonably could under the circumstances. “This was a very big undertaking by your board, this government, to make better sense of the building code and the processes we have in place,” he said.
Mayor Sandra Schroeder said she didn’t want to estimate a timeline for when the process would be ready.
How the law was enacted but no process established remained unclear. “I would think the two should go hand in hand, but here it is clearly not the case, which in my opinion is the root cause of frustration for the applicant,” Mr. DeSesa said yesterday. “If a process was in place, then we would have a road map to follow. Here we are just shooting in the dark.”