Riverhead hopes winery will quiet the noise
After losing a court battle this month to force a Baiting Hollow winery to quiet the noise from weddings, concerts and other events it hosts each summer, the town of Riverhead has given up on any idea of further lawsuits.
Instead, town officials hope to woo the winery operators into voluntarily doing what a State Supreme Court justice ruled earlier this month the town could not force them to do - turn down the volume.
Riverhead Supervisor Sean Walter said the town would be setting up a committee to discuss joint problems and possible solutions. The Long Island Wine Council, the Long Island Farm Bureau and Southold town - which has similar problems - will be on the panel.
"We want them to be successful. But some of them are not willing to respect their neighbors. It's a tough balancing act," he said.
It's the latest wrinkle in a decades-old battle between East End farmers and the neighbors who built homes next to the picturesque, green rolling farm fields - only to have their sleep disturbed by irrigation pumps and their clothes lines darkened by tractor dust.
In every one of those challenges to farming operations, the judge ruled that the state's Agriculture and Markets Law allows farmers to do whatever they need to do to keep their farm going, from running trucks for hours at a time to constructing acres of greenhouses.
"In the old days, it was irrigation motors and air cannons [to frighten birds]," said Joseph Gergela, executive director of the Long Island Farm Bureau. "Now music plays at wineries ... they have the right to do it under state law. It's how they market their wine. If they had to depend on just selling bottles of wine, the wineries wouldn't make it."
Linda Margolin, attorney for the Baiting Hollow Farm Vineyard, said that the court has ruled the wineries have the absolute right to play music as part of their marketing. She said that music for summer events usually lasts only three to four hours, and is mostly in the afternoon.
Both sides agree there are additional problems with traffic and parking at the vineyard, one of the westernmost of the dozens that cover the north and south forks. Margolin said there had been delays she blamed on the town but additional parking should be ready by summer.
In Southold, Supervisor Scott Russell already has a committee of vineyard owners and local residents starting to discuss similar noise and traffic problems.
The Supervisor said if those problems get out of hand, the town could simply decide not to renew its agricultural districts, but quickly added "That would never happen." Agriculture and the tourism that vineyards bring are one of the major industries in the town.
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