Other recommendations are big red flags. Among these would be exempting buildings and other appurtenances from stringent planning board site-plan review. Cutting the town’s architectural review board out of approvals for non-public barns would also be risky; part of why the A.R.B. was created in the first place was to maintain an agrarian sense of place, specifically to prevent the willy-nilly placement of farm buildings on land that in many cases the public paid to preserve long before the current crop of artisan farmers was even born.
Another bad idea making the rounds is allowing farm operators to erect plastic-covered hoop houses to extend growing seasons essentially wherever they like and for as long as they like. At a minimum, the right of neighboring property owners to weigh in should be retained. Troubling, too, was the Planning Department director’s recent suggestion that farming rules elsewhere on Long Island could be a model — really? Does East Hampton want to begin taking development cues from the rest of Long Island?
Just because the review process is lengthy, expensive, and document-heavy is no reason to water down zoning laws. As a rule, anything that relaxes land-use regulations, as these would, without very clear and broad community benefit should be a non-starter.