Time To Grow

The community and Southampton Town officials have been optimistic about the Riverside redevelopment plan for years. But residents of Flanders and Riverside are right to be concerned that its potential to transform the area into a vibrant business center has the potential to backfire and create monstrous residential density in a hamlet that needs growth but not necessarily growth in population.

A presentation last week in front of the Town Board should go a long way to ease some of those concerns.

The consultants formulating the plan for the hamlet center’s growth promised stakeholders that the amount of residential density in the project’s planned area would be capped at seven units per acre.

Community concerns had been heightened recently when the first development project had been proposed: a 40-unit affordable apartment complex. But the consultants and town planners reassured the board last week that development would be spread throughout the project area, adhering to smart growth principles as the plan seeks to create a walkable community.

Make no mistake, the overall redevelopment plan is aggressive. It calls for a complete redevelopment of a portion of the downtown area that will be transformed by a network of new streets southeast of Flanders Road and Riverleigh Avenue.

A new sewage treatment plant that the town is building on Flanders Road, with a capacity to treat 360,000 gallons of additional daily septic flow, will allow for 1,000 new residential units and 400,000 square feet of commercial space throughout the hamlet. That’s significant growth. But it’s needed growth if the area is going to flourish and keep up with the community across the river in Riverhead, which has seen its own redevelopment plan successfully transforming the downtown area for the past decade.

Calls for the redevelopment of the area are decades old. While those calls were not unheard, movement has been slow. Community members have, perhaps reluctantly, remained patient, and the town has been careful in its planning. But the time to move boldly forward is at hand.

And now that a Suffolk County judge has tossed a frivolous lawsuit filed by Riverhead Town seeking to block the sewage plant, hopefully, the project can move forward with some haste.

The sewage plant is key to the project, and a necessary first step, so it’s heartening to see the hurdles removed. Southampton Town should waste no time in getting it built, paving the way for a dynamic, and long-awaited, new and energized business district that the entire community can point to with pride.