Miller Place Civic Concerned Over Carmans River Plan

Certain aspects of the Carmans River Protection Plan, received by the Town of Brookhaven in February, have raised concerns with the Miller Place Civic Association, and those concerns were voiced at Monday's civic meeting.

Miller Place Civic Association President Woody Brown spoke of the concerns, which focus around the Transfer of Development Rights Program in the plan. This involves revamping the Town’s Multi-Family (MF) Code, redirecting multi-family residential projects to non-residential areas.

"It [the housing] can go on our business and industrial lands, and we were concerned for two reasons; one, why would we lose that as a tax base? Second, we are looking at...high density, multi family housing coming to Miller Place," Brown said.

The TDR would bring in more housing on lands that were otherwise set aside as commercial land, thus taking away the commercial property while bringing more families to Miller Place.

"We have foreclosed houses, Pipe Stave Hollow and others, we've got boarded up houses, why are we creating more housing when we don't have the problem of housing already here?," Brown asked. "Multi family is an issue, and it's an issue for the schools."

Civic member , who was also just re-elected to the Miller Place Board of Education, voiced concerns about the plan at an April Board of Education meeting.

"We love kids in the district, that's what we do," O'Brien said at the April meeting. "However, if you add apartments with lots of kids into this district it's going to cripple us. It's the perfect storm already with lower state aid and high mandates, if you add high density housing with our current assesed value, that's a real drain on our system."

The civic is also concerned with the "use or non-use" of community based civics to be a part of the planning. Some groups, Brown said, are also concerned that 90 days is a very short time period to come up with such a detailed plan. Still, the main concern remains the addition of the high density housing and the many issues it would bring to the community.

"I've heard from our town planning that those same people would walk to our downtowns, they would not clog our roads with more cars, that they would work and shop and the local area," Brown said. "I said 'wait a minute, we can't work in the local area, there are not enough jobs for us and you're going to have more people?' Where are they going to work, or are they going to take away our jobs?"