Before this thread gets too far from away from the facts
I would like to offer the following points of clarification.
A request for relief, which included a request to force the town to restore the property to its pre-developed state, was in fact made by the complaining parties to the same Appellate Division panel of judges that originally overturned our zoning action. That request for relief was denied. As such, I am highly confident that Friar’s Head is not going to be dug up anytime soon!
In the meantime, we are not able to “open” until we resolve our zoning issue through a supplemental administrative proceeding in the town. People have, however, played the golf course (which is not yet fully grown-in) as our private guests and that is now a fairly well known fact. A number of them have commented in the past, so I’m not sure why people believe that there is some kind of “code of silence” in effect at this time, other than perhaps out of respect for our circumstances. So those of you that have played or seen the golf course should feel free to comment, or not comment, about Friar’s Head as you please.
With respect to the original permitting, Tom Paul is both right and wrong. Our original focus was to build a great golf course and housing wasn’t even on our radar screen. So left on my own, I would have studied the impacts from only the golf course. But counsel properly advised us that the DEC, which administers the NYS Environmental Quality Review Act, requires that you study the maximum impacts of a phase of a project which is uncertain with respect to either its design and/or timing, so that’s exactly what we did with respect to the “potential” housing. Unfortunately, the appellate division court said that the town didn’t study the environmental impacts of any housing, so all of the maximum impact studies that were included in our environmental impact statement with respect to “potential” housing (i.e., traffic, school impacts, woodland/farmland impacts, etc.), and which were relied upon by the lower court in affirming our permits, don’t exist at all? You can say they aren’t there, but that doesn’t make it so!
Now if Guest believes that I made serious mistakes in the permitting process, he/she is certainly entitled to that opinion. And who am I, under the circumstances, to say he/she is wrong.
But at this point, it doesn’t really matter whether I made mistakes or not because my belief that we did a proper environmental review is not going to fix the problem! Sometimes life just isn’t fair, just as golf shouldn’t always be fair, so you have to just get on with it. And that’s exactly what I am doing!
Have fun!