The board members tabled a resolution on the agenda that would have granted the special permit.

Councilman Tim Hubbard, who had advocated moving forward with the special permit, said he would make a motion to table the resolution because of numerous calls and letters he’d gotten asking him to do so.

“A lot of people are away because of the holiday,” Hubbard said.

The issue will be put on the agenda of the the March 1 work session for further discussion, Supervisor Laura Jens-Smith said.

Northville Beach residents turned out in force at a town board public hearing last June to oppose the proposal for six tanks that would store a total of 108,000 gallons of biofuel. The plant operator says it seeks to add the biofuel storage tanks at the facility in order to comply with a state law requiring heating oil wholesalers to sell heating oil blended with 5-percent biofuel as of July 1, 2018.

URT representative Victor Prusinowski said the applicant has agreed to do everything the community requested. It completed a new traffic analysis. It will put the new tanks behind a containment wall. It will also pay for improvements to the intersection of Penny’s Road and Sound Avenue, to allow for trucks entering and exiting Penny’s Road to be able to maneuver the turn without encroaching in the oncoming travel lane.

The town may have to acquire private property to improve the intersection and the owner of the land on that corner is opposed to selling any land to the town. Northville Beach Civic Association president Linda Prizer read a letter from the property owner, Eve Kaplan, at the town board meeting Wednesday.

“If this is passed today, I will be pursuing legal remedies,” Kaplan said in the letter read from the podium by Prizer.

“The highway superintendent has been working very closely with URT,” Councilwoman Jodi Giglio said. “This has been a problem intersection for many years,” she said. “But it’s going to have to go back to the drawing board because I don’t believe in eminent domain,” Giglio said, referring to a legal process that allows the government to buy property from an unwilling seller through a condemnation proceeding.

Prizer also called the traffic analysis “flawed,” arguing that it was done in November, “the one quiet month” after tourist season ends but before heating oil season gets underway in earnest.

“The study was done by a company that was laughed out of this forum a few years ago” because a previous traffic study was so flawed, Prizer said.

As an expansion of a pre-existing nonconforming use, the proposed tanks require a special permit from the town board.

The 286-acre waterfront site in Northville facility has 20 storage tanks, some of which date back to the 1950s when they were built by Northville Industries. Other tanks and the off-shore platform date back to the 1960s.

The facility was constructed before zoning was adopted by the Town of Riverhead in 1965 and as such operates as a pre-existing, non-conforming use. It has since been zoned residential. As such, the addition of new storage tanks is considered an expansion of a pre-existing, non-conforming use and requires a special permit from the town board.

United Riverhead Terminal has owned and operated the petroleum storage facilities and offshore platform in Northville since 2012.

In a phone interview Feb. 15, Hubbard said he understood the residents’ concerns but thought some of their complaints about traffic were “unfounded.”

“The additional traffic is not because of URT,” Hubbard said. “It’s WAZE and Google Maps sending people onto Sound Shore Road. It’s the pumpkin pickers.”

Hubbard noted that the current proposal “has nothing to do with gasoline or anything like that.” URT in 2014 made an application to build two 19,000-gallon tanks to store ethanol at the site, which the company said it intended to use for gasoline it planned to begin storing and distributing from the site.

The facility was previously used for gasoline storage and distribution until roughly the year 2000, general manager Scott Kamm said in 2014. That application also met with stiff opposition from residents, civic and environmental groups and URT subsequently withdrew it. 

—————————-

TankTerminals.com – Research, Market and Expand Your Presence within the Tank Storage Industry. Learn more.