Proposed Riverhead home for traumatic brain injury survivors stalled in review process

Plans to convert a vacant farmhouse on Sound Avenue into a group home where Michael Hubbard of Riverhead and other traumatic brain injury survivors would live are stalled in Riverhead Town Hall, where officials must decide if the proposal complies with current zoning.

A Riverhead Zoning Board of Appeals hearing last night on a request for an interpretation on whether the zoning code allows the proposed use was adjourned until April 25. The ZBA needs to figure out what previous use permits exist for the property. The board asked its secretary to obtain the building department file and the town assessors’ records so ZBA members could look into it.

Building permits coordinator Sharon Klos sent the applicant to the ZBA for the code interpretation because it wasn’t clear whether the proposed use is allowed under the code without some kind of variance, according to building department head clerk Frances Frisolowski.

New Beginnings Community Center of Medford, a nonprofit organization that provides rehabilitation and support for traumatic brain injury survivors and their families, first filed its building permit application with the town on Sept. 5, 2012, Frisolowski said. The applicant went back and forth with the building department, providing required information that Frisolowski said “came in piecemeal.”

The application came in as an application to alter and extend a single-family home for use as a convalescent home, she said. If no more than four people unrelated by blood or marriage live in the home, it is still technically a single-family home, not a “group home.” Klos determined she wanted the ZBA to interpret the code regarding the use, Frisolowski said.

Klos, who was injured in an accident this weekend, did not attend the hearing.

Steve Scerri, vice president of New Beginnings and the husband of founder and president Allyson Scerri, told the ZBA last night the home would house four patients who would be attended 24/7 by home health aides. They would receive rehabilitation and therapy on site, he said. One of two out-buildings on the parcel, which was converted into living quarters by the prior owner, would be used by a “house mother,” he said.

“I need more specificity of exactly what you’re proposing in the main structure,” ZBA attorney Scott DeSimone told Scerri. “It’s all very vague to me,” he said of the applicant’s paperwork. “Tell me on the record what you’re specifically proposing.”

After Scerri explained that the patients would have separate bedrooms and share a common living space and one kitchen, DeSimone said it sounded like “a familial setting.”

Scerri said the home was donated to New Beginnings by the family of the owner who had passed away. Scerri, a businessman whose endeavors include the management of Mt. Pleasant Cemetery in Center Moriches, said he knew the former owner and had handled his burial.

Scerri told the board the prior owner had most recently used the house as a home for unwed expectant mothers. The town was not aware of that use, according to ZBA members and building department records.

Sandi Aykroyd, mother of 25-year-old Brendan Aykroyd, a traumatic brain injury survivor who died in 2011, told board New Beginnings provides crucial services to TBI patients and their families at their outpatient facility in Medford.

“I cannot say enough about what New Beginnings has done for us, what it does for patients, for their families and for the community,” Aykroyd said. Her son, the victim of a violent assault in 2009, suffered a traumatic brain injury that left him hospitalized for 71 days. With therapy and assistance from New Beginnings, he was able to regain his independence, though he continued to suffer from seizures. A seizure took his life in his sleep one night in 2011. He had been a volunteer helping the organization with renovations to the Medford facility. When the Riverhead house was donated, New Beginnings decided to name it “The Brendan House,” she said.

A home will give TBI survivors “a sense of hope, independence and freedom,” Aykroyd said.

Allyson Scerri, of East Moriches, founder and president of New Beginnings, described how, after her father was injured in a motorcycle accident in 2007, she became aware of the scarcity of resources for TBI survivors and their families on Long Island. Scerri, a hairstylist, started a support group and the effort expanded. In 2011 New Beginnings opened the Medford facility, based on the concept of making the various kinds of therapies TBI survivors need available under one roof. That eliminates the stress of moving the patient from one facility to another for treatment.

“The Riverhead community has been wonderful to New Beginnings,” Scerri said. “We deeply appreciate everything that everyone has done to help make Brendan House a reality.”

Scerri said town officials have been very cooperative, but they are trying to figure out how the use fits into the town’s current zoning.