DAN'S PAPERS, January 11, 2008 Page 15 www.danshamptons.com
...On the Dotted Line Town to Receive $155 Million for Ski Mountain and Theme Park Property By Dan Rattiner Last week, the attorney for the new Riverhead Ski Mountain Resort, Don Secunda, came to see me at Dan’s Papers. We sat in our conference room, and he set out some papers. “Most people think this is just going to be a big ski mountain,” he said. I noted that people couldn’t be blamed for that. Nearby is Splish Splash, the big water park attraction. Further out, in downtown Riverhead, there is the new Atlantis Aquarium with its big shark tank, still another attraction. People tend to think in terms of attractions. Smith showed me a drawing of what appeared to be a lake in that rural part of Riverhead. I didn’t know there was a lake there. There isn’t. They’re going to build a one-mile long lake next to the mountain on the old Grumman site. “Here’s the mountain everybody is talking about,” he said. “And it is an attraction. But it is just one of eight different resorts, each with its own attractions, set around the lake. This is an enormous undertaking.” “It should take close to three years before a shovel can be put into the ground,” he said There are planning board permits to get, environmental impact statements to be written, building contracts to be let. And it will take two years after that to open this multi-billion dollar complex. And now the process has begun. This past
week, the Riverhead Town Board voted 3 to 2 to approve this project. It’s now in contract. At the closing, Riverhead Resorts will give the Town $155 million, the largest sum ever received by that town and triple the size of their annual budget, to buy the land, then between $1 and $3 million a year as various additional hurdles are cleared. In addition, Riverhead Resorts will pay between 6% and 9% for every dollar that comes in the door. This is an amazing amount of money for a town the size of Riverhead to
at Disneyworld or the Lake of Nations at Epcot. “We intend to build them in stages,” Smith said. The first of them, by the entrance, will be a little village with a Main Street and shops. There will be ski shops and ice- skating stores. There will also be a few condominiums. Next to it, built at just about the same time, will be the ski mountain, 350 feet high and grassed and planted with shrubs and evergreens “as a bird and animal sanctuary,” Smith said. “The skiing goes on inside the mountain,” he told me. “There will also be ice skating. And some other recreational facilities. There are many ski mountains around the world like this one,” he continued. “The one in Dubai is 800 feet high. This one is less than half that high.” After the mountain is built, a water adventure resort will go up next to it, and then beyond that an upscale condominium and hotel resort. “You have to build the attractions before you build the hotel and condominium units,” he said. “We expect people to come here from around the country and around the world, for stays of four to seven days. When they get here we have to have something for them to do. So the attractions get built first.” I asked Secunda about whether there will be day-trippers coming to the project and he said of
It appears that Riverhead Resorts will be, in size, something that rivals the great family entertainment resorts around the world. receive. Here’s what you see when looking at the plan. The lake, artificial, lined on the bottom and eight feet deep, is longer than it is wide and extends north to south. On the north side is the Long Island Expressway and Route 25a. And it is here, at the northern tip of the lake, that the entrance to the project will be built. The eight resorts will be arrayed around the lake, much in the way different resorts are arrayed around the lake at the Magic Kingdom
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