James Larocca, a Sag Harbor Village trustee who is running for mayor in the June 15 election, will, if elected, create a comprehensive plan to protect the village from overdevelopment, he said on Friday. Mr. Larocca is running against Mayor Kathleen Mulcahy, who has held the office since 2019, when she defeated the two-term incumbent Sandra Schroeder.
"Mayor Mulcahy ran on the promise of developing an overarching master plan, and the absence of such is one of the biggest problems we have in combating this wave of money and developers that are now swarming all over the west side of town," Mr. Larocca said.
In an effort to manage waterfront development, Ms. Mulcahy has been overseeing the development of a new zoning code for a proposed "waterfront overlay district," an initiative Mr. Larocca said is too limited in scope. "Calling it a waterfront plan is a misnomer," he said, because the new code would apply only to a small section of the waterfront that does not include such properties as Baron's Cove and the Sag Harbor Inn. "If developers cast their eye on other properties not within the overlay district, we still would not have a plan to defend against it."
The village board's focus on the new code has actually endangered the waterfront, Mr. Larocca said. He maintains that it gave Bay Street Theater a chance to try to impose its own vision for the site of its new theater complex and other properties nearby. He cited several recent developments: Bay Street's purchase of the West Water Street Shops Building for a new theater; National Grid's award of a lease to a municipal parking lot that it owns to the Friends of Bay Street, a nonprofit organization formed to develop the complex; Adam Potter's (chairman of Friends of Bay Street) personal purchase of properties on Bridge and Rose Streets to make room for businesses displaced by the complex, and the fact that a for-profit entity associated with the theater is seeking to purchase and tear down 2 Main Street to create an extension of Steinbeck Park.
"While we [the village board] have been in conversation, a master plan has been developed, just not by us," Mr. Larocca said.
The loss of the National Grid lot is particularly bothersome, he said. He himself had negotiated a five-year lease for the site in 2016, and was trying to renew the lease last year when the company was seeking to sell the property. But, he charged, during that same time, Ms. Mulcahy wrote to National Grid in support of Bay Street Theater's effort to purchase the site for its new theater. "This purchase would provide a permanent home for the organization and continue to allow for much needed parking in the village," Mayor Mulcahy wrote in a June 29 letter.
Ms. Schroeder, who appointed Mr. Larocca to a trustee seat in 2015, issued a statement recently criticizing Ms. Mulcahy for that letter. "The mayor had secretly worked in favor of Bay Street interests over the interests of Sag Harbor," she said.
The mostly negative public reaction to Bay Street's plans point to a growing fear among residents about a demographic change happening in the village, Mr. Larocca said. "What people are seeing in their everyday lives is an increasing number of second-home owners who are living here this year because of Covid, and that changes the economic stratification of the village," he said. "Working families wouldn't put it this way, but there's a sense of threat that people feel."
"Something that's been under my skin for a long time is that we don't do enough for the people who work here in the downtown. A lot of them live over the stores, and they pay very high rent, and a lot of them park in the [National Grid] lot." As someone with a long history in government service, including as the state's commissioner of transportation and head of its rebuilding New York infrastructure renewal program, Mr. Larocca said he has the experience to tackle longstanding issues such as the lack of affordable housing.
The mayoral candidate also criticized Ms. Mulcahy for not prioritizing the development of Steinbeck Park. He had helped Ms. Schroeder acquire the land for the park in 2018, he said, and "in the last two years, we have not advanced the park one inch, and we've missed a lot of opportunities," he said.
Last spring, when businesses were shut down because of the pandemic, Edmund Hollander, the landscape architect who developed plans for the park, and other landscape and construction companies had offered to work for free on the project, Mr. Larocca recalled. "They all basically said, 'We'll do this pro bono, but the minute the governor lifts the ban on construction, you will lose us because we've got a backlog.' " Although certain elements of the plan were still under discussion, "Everybody had embraced the concept of seeing Long Wharf, Windmill Park, and Steinbeck Park as a unified whole connected by a walkway," Mr. Larocca said. "Unfortunately, the mayor did not sign off on that until it was too late. By the time she agreed to do the walkway, these guys went back to work."
In addition to finishing the park, he said he would love to "claw back" the National Grid property from Friends of Bay Street and work with the theater to find a different, "mutually satisfactory" site for its new home. He has encouraged the theater to build the complex on the Bridge Street property Mr. Potter now owns. If that were to happen, he said, he could envision a scenario in which the village takes ownership of the West Water Street Shops property and incorporates it into Steinbeck Park.
"I'm in this race because I don't feel we've had an effective response, and there are ways to fight back," Mr. Larocca said.
