Southold Town will shift its long-delayed Comprehensive Zoning Update to a piecemeal approach, officials said Tuesday, abandoning plans for a sweeping overhaul that staff now say is unworkable.
Planning department director Heather Lanza told the Town Board a segmented approach would be more manageable, with priorities set by theZoning Update Advisory Committee, Town Board, other departments and the public.
“That approach of comprehensively revising the whole code all at once has proven to be impractical because we have limited staff time,” Ms. Lanza said of the200-page draft code document originally released last April. “It just became really clear we don’t have the resources to do that all at once.”
Thezoning update, underway since 2021, aims to make land-use regulations easier to interpret, guided by the town’s Comprehensive Plan, adopted in 2019 after a decade of work. The process has repeatedlymissed deadlines.
Councilwoman Jill Doherty said the Town Board’s 2022 decision to pursue a full overhaul made sense at the time.
“You need the whole structure first before you start picking at the little things,” she said at the work session. “Now we need to get into detail on the individual sections.”
Ms. Lanza attempted to use artificial intelligence tools to parse through the extensive public input and the 200-page draft code, but said the effort proved fruitless.
“AI wasn’t really helping us because it was too much data for the level models that we had, and we even tried a higher-level model but it couldn’t churn all that data for us,” she said. “So we’re just going to go back old school.”
To shift gears, the advisory committee and planning staff will pull “good ideas” from the 2025 draft and apply them to the existing code.
Community members packed meetings on specific issues and hamlets,prompting revisions last September.
Source: The Suffolk Times
