Surf Lodge Submits Plan for More Food Service
The owners of the Surf Lodge in Montauk, who have accrued more than 640 alleged town code violations over the past four months, submitted site plans to the East Hampton Town Planning Board on Sept. 21. The board will discuss them at its meeting on Wednesday.
The applicant, Edgemere Montauk L.L.C., with the principals Jayma Cardoso and Rob McKinley, wants to put a 5-by-8-foot hot dog “cart” in a parking area and a 7-by-12-foot seasonal covered wait service area on a pre-existing deck. The Surf Lodge has permitted commercial uses as a restaurant and motel dating from before town code restrictions on such uses.
In a Planning Department memo dated Monday, an initial site plan evaluation reveals that at minimum, a natural resources special permit is required for the project, as both proposed structures are within 150 feet of Fort Pond, which is in a harbor protection district. While a diagram for the wait service area has not been submitted, it would need a variance because the rear deck is only 31 feet from the bulkhead.
The site plan indicates that the hot dog cart would be in an area reserved for handicapped-accessible parking, the memo said. There is no approved site plan for parking on record, but because of the big crowds the Surf Lodge attracts, the number of parking spaces there is well below the requirements of the town code.
The Planning Department suggested that eliminating a parking space to make room for the hot dog cart would not be ideal and that a parking variance could be necessary. It was recommended that the applicants put the cart somewhere else.
According to the memo, aerial photographs show that there are structures at the Surf Lodge that have not received site plan approval. Some small accessory structures — patios and sheds, for instance — appear to have been moved, taken down, or built without site plan approval or variances, according to the Planning Department. In addition, since the most recent certificate of occupancy, which dates from 1998, a patio was added to the south of the deck, the memo says.
The Planning Department advised the applicants to formally add those structures to the proposal.