The Riverhead Town Board voted 5-0 on Wednesday to approve its comprehensive plan – with a last minute change that removed a plan for agritourism inns and hotels.
Agritourism hotels alongside Sound Avenue were originally part of the plan, in addition to a planned industrial park and golf cottages in the Town of Riverhead. However, after it faced much pushback from the community, the Town Board removed it from the plan on Tuesday ahead of Wednesday’s vote, and sent out a press release.
“Supervisor [Timothy] Hubbard and the Town Board are committed to land preservation that upholds the integrity of Riverhead’s rich agricultural heritage and soils and will continue its commitment to Land Preservation efforts,” the release said. “That said, after careful consideration of the proposed Comprehensive Plan Update, specifically the language related to Agritourism Inns & Resorts, the Town Board, by majority, has determined that those provisions should be removed from the Comprehensive Plan Update.”
The Board also canceled a Sept. 18 forum aimed at discussing agritourism.
Agritourism, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is “is a form of commercial enterprise that links agricultural production and/or processing with tourism to attract visitors onto a farm, ranch, or other agricultural business for the purposes of entertaining or educating the visitors while generating income for the farm, ranch, or business owner.”
Several residents came to the Town Board meeting to express satisfaction with the removal and updated plan – although the issue appears to have highlighted a deeper concern within Riverhead about land preservation.
“The Comprehensive Plan is supposed to be the community’s vision for Riverhead over the next 10-20 years, and I think it’s pretty clear we don’t want resorts,” Kathy McGraw, of Northville, said to the Board. “I thank you for doing the right thing. But that said, there’s still a whole lot of work to be done. We have to come up with alternative ways to preserve agricultural lands. Sadly, the expensive, seemingly never-ending plan that you are about to adopt doesn’t come up with any really good ideas for preservation. I think it’s really important that the summit, like you had scheduled for [Sept.] 18 for agricultural resorts, should be initiated, but it should be initiated to get input from the community.”
The previous Comprehensive Plan argued that agritourism hotels could “balance support for agritourism, conservation, and the active preservation of agricultural lands,” and Hubbard lamented its loss from the plan at the meeting, while supporting the update. He also addressed McGraw’s concern about a public task force.
“Part of our discussions, when we came to the agreement to remove this out of the [Comprehensive] Plan, was to form a task force of the public to work on land preservation, and especially farm preservation,” Hubbard said. “That’s the one thing out of this whole agritourism that I’m sad that it’s not going forward, because I did like the idea of how it could preserve land. But there were too many other factors with it that we had to give up in order to preserve that land, and I think there has got to be better ways to preserve the land without disturbing or ruining it. Maybe ruining is not the right word, but we try to keep it as rural as we can.”