No one would argue that downtown Hampton Bays needs to change if the business district is to survive.
It’s just a question of how to get there.
Southampton Town officials, members of the hamlet’s civic groups, business owners and even private developers have been talking about the revitalization of the business district for years, coming close to a framework a few years ago before the plan was challenged and tossed out by the courts.
There have been plenty of missteps along the way — including an unfortunate faux pas by a consultant that included language in a contract with the town that it would seek to “neutralize” opposition to the revitalization plan by painting opponents as NIMBYs and spreading misinformation about their motives. The Town Board signed off on the document, either missing the language or agreeing with it.
So it’s no surprise that there is mistrust about the town’s current efforts to draft a “pattern book” to be included in the town’s Comprehensive Plan that would set the framework for downtown improvements. Civic leaders are concerned — as they have been all along — about building heights and plans for multifamily housing, and they want a guarantee that access points to Good Ground Park from Main Street won’t someday be transformed into actual roads.
Certainly, their concerns must be addressed. But at the same time, the town — and developer Alfred Caiola, who owns a huge portfolio of properties in the area and shares the town’s vision for a reinvigorated downtown — must be engaged with rather than simply blocked. Everyone is going to have to bend a little if a final plan is going to be reached. The civic groups will have to learn, again, to trust that town officials have the best interests of the community at heart, and the town will have to continue — as it has since revitalization efforts were renewed — to address and ease the concerns of the area’s residents.
And Caiola, too, will have to temper his expectations. The developer, at a recent meeting, noted his significant financial investment in the community and said that if the community wanted to “see the kind of investment” that would lead to everyone’s shared vision of a walkable downtown, “the numbers need to add up.” But he must remember that this is a community project, not strictly a business endeavor.
All the parties would do well to remember that a reinvigorated downtown benefits the entire community — a community that has said over and over that it wants to see a positive change.
So it’s time to work to move out of the current holding pattern, adopt a planning document and move on with the necessary code changes to get things moving. The community deserves no less.