After a majority of the East Hampton Town Board seemed supportive of a law to change the timeline by which the town is expected to generate a building permit once a complete application is submitted, a public hearing will likely be held before Thanksgiving.
The code now specifies that a building permit should be reviewed and issued in 15 days, which has become unrealistic as projects have grown larger and more complex in the last few years. An earlier draft of the proposed legislation indicated that if a permit wasn’t issued in 90 days it would be deemed denied.
Jake Turner, the town attorney, explained the changes Tuesday, with Richard Normoyle, the chief building inspector, at his side.
One big difference: Within 14 days the Building Department will ascertain and notify applicants if their building permit applications are incomplete.
Town Supervisor Kathee Burke-Gonzalez said she had been meeting monthly with Michael Forst of Forst Construction, chairman of the Long Island Builders Institute, and that the building industry also requested the opposite: that the Building Department notify people within the two-week time frame if their applications are complete.
The other big change: The building permit will no longer be automatically denied if a permit isn’t issued within 90 days.
“If 90 days after the submission of an application, no permit is issued, then the applicant can seek appellate review to determine whether or not: one) the application is complete, and two) whether or not that 90 days has elapsed,” said Mr. Turner. He said the zoning board of appeals would be the proper forum to raise such inquiries and that it could compel the Building Department to issue a permit within 62 days of a hearing.
If that were not to happen, it seems an applicant’s next step would be to go to the Supreme Court of Suffolk County, where there is no time frame to hear an application.
Mr. Normoyle told the board that his department is on top of new applications.
“The plans examiners and the building inspectors are reviewing the applications that came in on Monday — Tuesday morning for completeness,” he said. “Anything that was submitted incomplete and is missing something major, stamped plans, board of health approvals, things that are necessary for the application to proceed, are now being rejected and sent back to the applicant. They’re notified that the application is incomplete rather than just sitting in our system and backlogging us until they get that documentation uploaded. They’re also notifying the applicant now if the application is complete and accepted.”
Over the weekend, rumors swirled that Mr. Normoyle had interviewed for and accepted the senior building inspector role in Southampton Village. Those rumors were never confirmed, nor were they addressed at Tuesday’s meeting. Bill Manger, the mayor of Southampton, wouldn’t comment, nor would Mr. Normoyle, nor Patrick Derenze, the town’s public information officer.
And by the end of the day on Tuesday, a new rumor was circulating that he had told his department that he was staying in East Hampton Town.
Meanwhile, the only board member on hand Tuesday who seemed unconvinced about the proposed building permit legislation was Councilman Tom Flight (Councilman Ian Calder-Piedmonte missed the meeting due to illness).
“I still have some concerns,” he said. “I mean, look, number one, largely I have no idea because we don’t have reports as to how many applications currently in the system are outside of that 90-day window. So, supporting legislation that’s pulling us forward without those numbers is somewhat challenging for me personally.”
“Certainly, the possibility of downloading every application that’s in there and keeping an Excel file on a weekly basis that you could update for completeness doesn’t seem incredibly cumbersome to me,” he said.
“I don’t have the staff for that, Tom,” countered Mr. Normoyle, whose staff has doubled in the year he’s been in charge, from 10 to 19 employees. “That’s a lot of work for one person.”
“I’m being very blunt,” said Mr. Flight. “We’ve obviously had some real challenges in the department over the last year and a half, two years, and it’s not, I think, where any of us really want it to be. Without some kind of understanding of how we’re currently processing, it’s very hard to put this out there and deem that it’s going to be effective.”
Speaking of those challenges, Ms. Burke-Gonzalez asked Mr. Turner to clarify if the town knows the names of the contractors who offered bribes for expedited service within the department. Two former Building Department employees pleaded guilty to bribe taking early this month following a probe by the Suffolk County district attorney’s office and their arrests earlier this year.
“To be clear, I have no idea who the contractors are, or were,” he said. “Nor does the board. Only people who know that are the grand jurors and those involved in the grand jury proceeding. Under New York State Law, a grand jury proceeding is secret and those minutes are sealed. So, I know there have been people asking for that information. We don’t have it. So, we cannot provide it. We do not know it under New York State law.”
The supervisor then reiterated that the bribe takers were “responsible for the backlog that we’re seeing now.”
“Completely,” agreed Mr. Turner.
Finally, after The Star reported two weeks ago on a “shed” that was functionally a 75-foot wall, the board supported a code amendment to cap, at 3 to 1, the ratio of length to depth in an accessory building.
“Last month, we had a building permit come in that somebody built a shed that was five feet wide and 75 feet long and 15 feet high,” said Mr. Normoyle. “There was no grounds on which the Building Department could reject the application. It was a shed under our code, even though we felt the intent was something different.”
He predicted the code amendment would cover 99 percent of accessory structures. If homeowners want something different, they are free to apply for a variance.
