As someone who has served on the Riverhead Zoning Board of Appeals, I can tell you from experience that the ZBA’s job is not to decide which hospital has the better stroke protocol. That is not what the board was created to do, and it is not what the law asks it to do.
The ZBA exists to interpret zoning code, evaluate whether a proposed use belongs in a particular district, and, when a variance is sought, to weigh the benefit to the applicant against the burden on the community. It is a deliberate, community-centered process designed to protect the character of our neighborhoods and the integrity of our land-use planning.
The proposal before the board — Stony Brook Medicine’s application to locate a 14,236-square-foot ambulance storage and service facility inside the former Big Lots space at Staples Plaza on Route 58 — is not a close call when viewed through a zoning lens. It is a straightforward land-use problem.
Staples Plaza sits in a Shopping Center zoning district. An ambulance storage and service facility housing up to eight ambulances, along with maintenance and operational functions, is not a permitted use in that district.
That is why Stony Brook’s attorneys are before the ZBA seeking either a code interpretation or a use variance. The burden falls on the applicant to demonstrate that what they are proposing belongs there.
Setting aside for a moment all the medical debate, consider the basic land-use questions. Is an ambulance garage an appropriate anchor for a busy commercial shopping center? What does high-frequency ambulance traffic, vehicles that must enter and exit rapidly in emergency conditions, mean for the safety of shoppers, pedestrians and adjacent businesses on an already congested stretch of Route 58? Does this use align with the Town’s comprehensive plan for that corridor? And critically, does approving it set a precedent that opens the door to similar proposals at other shopping centers throughout the town?
More than 100 community members have signed a petition raising exactly these concerns. They are not opposing stroke care. They are opposing an ambulance garage in a shopping center… a distinction that matters enormously and that has gotten lost in the medical back-and-forth.
The ZBA’s own counsel, Deputy Town Attorney Annmarie Prudenti, raised important questions at the April 2 hearing on whether the proposed use is consistent with Riverhead’s comprehensive plan, and whether there are outstanding code and site plan compliance issues at the shopping center itself, including a pending Supreme Court matter involving the property. These are exactly the right questions for a zoning body to be asking.
The ZBA should do what it was designed to do. Evaluate the application on its zoning merits, weigh the burden on the community against any benefit to the applicant, and consider the precedent that approval would set for every other shopping center and commercial corridor in Riverhead. When it does that clearly, without being distracted by the medical debate that belongs in a different forum entirely, I believe the answer becomes straightforward.
An ambulance garage does not belong in a shopping center. The code does not permit it. The comprehensive plan does not contemplate it. And the community, which has already spoken loudly, deserves a board that listens not to the loudest medical voices in the room, but to the zoning principles it was entrusted to uphold.
Source: RiverheadLOCAL
