The Huntington Planning Board held a regular meeting on May 6, 2026, at approximately 11:15 AM. The agenda included a pre-application discussion for a subdivision at 27 Dunlop Road, public hearings for the Nawabi plat and the Cold Spring Hill development, approvals of minutes and performance bonds, a transfer of density flow rights, introductions of new applications, and recommendations on several zoning board referrals.
That's mine. Okay. Good evening once again, everyone. Please rise and join me for the Pledge of Allegiance. Thank you, everyone. Before we go into our regular agenda, we have an appointment and two public hearings. We're going to begin with the appointment 27 Dunlap Road Platte. And if there's a representative for that application wants to address the board planning board. One was to create a separate driveway for the rear lot. And the alternate was to uh to create turnarounds on the shared driveway so that there wouldn't be any case where Mr. Judge Lipson brought up that anyone anybody backing down in the road. So we came up with a revision to the map. If you can go back to the proposed PSM plan. We showed the uh turnaround on lot one so it connects to the driveway that goes to lot two. We created a teardrop turnaround at lot two so cars can turn around and head back down. We also create a little bit of a pull-off on the lot two driveway, so if two cars were passing, one could pull over. The whole idea of the shared driveway here is to preserve what is extremely steep slopes along Dunlop Road. You can see the tightness of those contours in that picture. And to preserve all that, the existing natural wooded area, the grades in that area, and provide a reasonable driveway to the rear lot. The driveway on the north already exists for the existing house that's on lot one. Uh and we feel that this is the preferred method. We saw the uh comment here from uh Miss Walsh indicating we should add a couple of short retaining walls on either side, which would make a lot of sense and make the grading work a little bit better. Uh the alternate plan that specifically uh Ms. Marin asked for creating a separate driveway. We spoke about it that evening that it would denute all of the vegetation and the excavation require an extremely amount large amount of excavation in order to build it. The retaining walls on the west, which is the bottom of the screen, those retaining walls are over 20 feet high for almost 60 percent of that driveway, and the retaining walls on the upper part of that driveway, the uh the uh easterly side are eight to ten feet high. Uh I put a letter together to the board to show what we would do. The the the retaining walls here based on actual 2026 bids we have on some walls in Northport would cost over 1.2 million dollars to build. Excuse me. In order to create a separate driveway, we would have to put in about 1.2 million dollars worth of retaining walls that exceed 20 feet in height along the west side in order to create a driveway and wipe out all the existing vegetation. Okay, if I may, my name is Ronald Goldstein. I'm the law from Goldstein Road to Goldseed, the Fazio PC. The original plan that we placed before this board in an informal setting, um, did not have as many turnaround areas as Judge Lifson brought to our attention. So the revised plan has greater turnaround areas. We have removed pools and outer structures on the second lot. We have provided for we're amenable to have a conservation easement on the front of lot one, in addition to one that we have proposed um before we came in the other night. The alternative, Ms. Baron uh planning board member Marin asked if we would study and we could put in a second driveway. It is that second driveway that is cost prohibitive. It would cost greater than a million dollars to put it in. It would require tearing down vegetation, it would require retaining walls, we'd have to go before the zoning board as well, and it disrupts the aesthetics of the plan that we want, which is to have but one driveway. So pursuant to 1981 2A, which is why we're here before the board, one of the items of the board is to take into account is the topography. So the topography warrants what we were suggesting. And the aesthetics, the aesthetics for this plan far exceed or far better than the alternate approach. And so Mr. Robinson was describing the alternative approach, which the applicant has no desire to participate in, but because the board asked about it, we're presenting information. Well, we were always interested in preserving the vegetation and you know that that's a very large, really long stretch of vegetation and slope there. I I you know I think I don't think I think it's the safety of the ingress and egress greatly outweighs that. I'm very sympathetic to the cost prohibitive uh net extreme amount of money, and of course it would make it almost impossible probably for you to do your subdivision. So um very sympathetic to that.