Sports Bar’s Neighbors Cry Foul, File Suit
A proposed 200-seat sports bar at East Hampton Indoor Tennis may be headed for a time out, if five town residents get their way. On June 24, they filed an action with the State Supreme Court in Riverhead against the East Hampton Town Planning Board, which has approved both the bar and the expansion of the sports club, asking the court to annul the decision. All seven members of the planning board are named as defendants.
Scott Rubenstein, the owner of Indoor Tennis, said yesterday he knew nothing about the action and could not comment extensively. “I’ve never been served,” he said. “I wish I had known.” He said the club has been spending money on the planned changes.
The sports bar in question is part of a larger plan, in which two tennis courts on the property at 175 Daniel’s Hole Road would be replaced with a building housing the bar and restaurant, a 10-lane bowling alley, a miniature golf course, and other amenities.
The residents’ challenge calls the planning board’s May approval of the proposal, made after a public hearing at which nobody spoke, “contrary to law” and “arbitrary and capricious.” It attacks the board’s approval on several fronts, first stating that the proposal is a sizable expansion that should require a special permit before it can move forward and questioning a kitchen said to be 1,870 square feet in size.
Noting that the tennis club is in a water recharge district and also in a recreation overlay district, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Jeffrey L. Bragman, writes that recreational uses, as defined in the town code, “involve active sporting activities. Permitted uses do not include drinking and eating in a bar and restaurant.”
Further, he writes, the land is zoned residential, which would prohibit a bar and restaurant. Mr. Rubenstein did say yesterday that he believes the entire plan complies with the code.
The filing also questions the idea that the bar and restaurant is a natural extension of a bowling alley as an accessory use. “While the petitioners do recognize that a small bar may be ‘customarily incidental’ to a bowling alley, the applicant has not proposed a small, incidental bar,” it says, going on to call the restaurant “another primary use.”
“The sports bar and lounge will be one of the largest restaurants in East Hampton,” according to the action, which also criticizes the town’s Planning Department, stating that planners focused exclusively on the 10-lane bowling alley and miniature golf course while ignoring the presence of the 200-seat restaurant and the increased traffic it might produce. The residents’ action, formally known as an Article 78 proceeding, also points out that the Suffolk County Planning Commission had said in approving the plan that the East Hampton Planning Board should require a traffic study focusing on South Breeze Drive. The planning board did not do so.
The appeal also challenges the planning board’s “failure” to require sanitary calculations for the bar-restaurant, particularly because of its location in the water recharge district, “where disproportionately large volumes of rain water are recharged and stored in underground aquifers.” Beyond the town’s designation of the site, it is also in a Suffolk County Special Groundwater Protection area, key to East Hampton’s drinking water, the action notes, going on to warn that thousands of gallons of septic flow could result from a 200-seat restaurant with two bars.
The five petitioners, two of whom live on South Breeze Drive, are Joanna Grossman, Marie Zerilli, Barry Raebeck, Stephen Bernstein, and Dominique Weiss.
“I am disappointed,” Mr. Rubenstein said. “Neighbors were aware of what is going on. People have a right to develop their property under the zoning code.”
As of yesterday it did not appear that a judge had been assigned to the matter. The planning board’s chairman, Reed Jones, said that, like Mr. Rubenstein, he was unaware of the action, and declined to comment.