NEW YORK — Escalating its battle against the Long Island Rail Road, Southampton Village has obtained a temporary restraining order blocking the completion of a planned 150-foot tall communications tower at the village railroad station, New York’s Newsday reports.
The order issued Thursday in State Supreme Court in Riverhead is in effect until June 11, when the village is scheduled to argue the project should be permanently halted. The case has not been assigned to a judge.
The railroad, which is not normally bound by local zoning codes, is constructing the powder blue metal monopole to fill communications gaps among trains, security patrols and railroad workers on the North and South forks.
Railroad spokesman Brian Dolan said the tower was replacing a 30-year-old, 80-foot-tall lattice tower on the south side of the tracks. “This is not a commercial venture, and the tower has no commercial application. We believe, when all the facts are known, we will win the court action,” he said in a statement.
But to village officials, the proposed tower poses a major problem. “We have a large safety issue on our hands,” Mayor Joseph Romanoski Jr. said Friday at a news conference at the railroad station. “This could be a disastrous situation.”
He said that if the tower fell to the north, it could crash into a half-dozen fuel oil storage tanks. That, he said, could lead to a half-million gallons of flaming fuel oil running down from the Southampton railroad station and flooding the sewers running under the village business district.
If it fell to the south, he added, it could smash into the village railroad station, taking down some high-tension power lines as it crashed.
William Esseks, a Riverhead attorney hired by the village to try to stop the project, said the best way to stop the tower lies not in its potential danger, but in its threat to the historic heritage of the village.
The Southampton station is a turn-of-the-century Victorian-style railroad station, and a full environmental review of the visual impact of the tower and a search for alternate sites should have been done before construction started, Esseks said.
“The station is the key,” he said, adding that while the Long Island Rail Road is normally not required to follow State Environmental Quality Review Act regulations, it does fall under them if there is a substantial change in the way a property is being used.
It would be up to a court to determine if building the tower on a new site north of the tracks, and tearing down the old, smaller tower south of the tracks, would substantially change the use of the property.
The new tower’s 40-foot base was put up in April, and at the time railroad officials said they had discussed the project with the village a year before.
But village officials said they were unaware of the work, since the tower’s concrete foundation is in a freight yard not easily visible from the road.
Romanoski, on Friday, noted the freight yard and the fuel oil tanks are higher than almost anything else in the village. And, he said, if the tower crushed those tanks, it could also rupture the dikes designed to contain spilled oil.
“It would flow past a parochial school with 500 children, and get into the sewers beneath the village. I don’t know how we would deal with that,” Romanoski said.