Given a chance to make comments on recent legislative suggestions about the zoning code in East Hampton Town, the planning board, at its Sept. 25 meeting, chose to focus instead on a suggestion that wasn’t made: changing the least flashy but perhaps most consequential zoning tool at the town’s disposal, the table of dimensional regulations.
Residents in East Hampton have this idea that what makes the town special has been slipping away, and that the process only accelerated during the Covid building boom. So, a little over a year ago, the zoning code amendment working group was formed to offer suggestions on how to combat these changes via zoning amendments. The group comprises town employees, elected officials, but also key players in the building industry. The town board liaison to the group is Councilwoman Cate Rogers.
Among the dozen or so changes proffered by the group, those that have received the most talk, at three town board work sessions at which the topic was featured, have been reducing the maximum house size from 20,000 square feet to 10,000 square feet and including a portion of finished basement and finished attached garages in the gross floor area of a building. Right now, no matter the size, no part of a basement or attached garage, finished or not, is included in the calculation.
While those changes could help decrease house size on large lots, the planning board was concerned about smaller lots where a 10,000-square-foot house couldn’t be built anyway, but where the presence of a house a fraction of that size could loom large.
Louis Cortese, a planning board member, said that with the dimensional table as it stands, on a half-acre plot, a 3,778-square-foot house can be built. He believes the average size of a house on a half-acre lot in town is about 1,400 square feet. The dimensional table sets the maximum house size for a lot at 10 percent of the total lot area plus 1,600 square feet. He said that while he agreed with all the suggestions made by the group, “I think they haven’t gone far enough.” It’s the dimensional table, he said, that’s allowing builders to buy properties, knock down moderate homes “and build huge monstrosities.”
Using some back of the napkin math, and fiddling with the numbers, he said even if the table were adjusted to 7 percent of the total lot area plus 1,200 square feet, it would still yield a home of 2,724 square feet, roughly double the average size at present. “That’s still an enormous amount of additional square footage you can add,” he said.
“Lou’s point is well taken,” said Sharon McCobb, the vice chairwoman of the planning board. “Down in Clearwater [a neighborhood in Springs] it’s getting crazy. I’m surprised there is still a majority of 1,400-square-foot homes, because the houses are looking huge on those properties. I’m in favor of having the working group explore changing the formula.”
Samuel Kramer, the board’s chairman, summarized. “There’s general support on the board for a reduction of 20,000 square feet to 10,000, and general support for the changes as suggested. There’s not quite unanimous support for exploring further reductions in the formula. I think these changes are sending the town in the right direction.”
At the town board level, in early September, Councilman Ian Calder-Piedmonte, who was a member of the planning board for 12 years before he was appointed to the town board in January, said he wanted to see the table addressed with the other proposed changes. While the dimensional table will ultimately be addressed, Councilwoman Rogers said in a text Monday that the town board changed the formula during the Cantwell administration without reviewing “exemptions to the zoning code.” Without tackling the invisible square footage now left uncounted, “we will see the same type of development that exploits the exemptions and allows much larger structures than the formula allows,” she wrote.
After a public hearing on the current recommendations, she said “we will address the formula and have an effective formula that is in compliance with the comprehensive plan.”
