Longtime Riverhead planning director Rick Hanley has put in his retirement papers, according to Supervisor Sean Walter.
Hanley will retire effective Jan. 3, the supervisor said.
Hanley is not retiring from the planning director position, however. That position, which carried a salary of $118,843, was eliminated in the town’s 2015 budget.
Under civil service rules, Hanley is entitled to “bump” a less senior planner — and the only remaining planner in the planning department — Karen Gluth from her $86,000 position.
Hanley has elected to do that for three days in 2015 in order to “earn his accruals” for 2015, Walter said, referring to accrued retirement, vacation and sick leave benefits. Hanley will be paid at the lesser salary for those three days, according to the supervisor, who said the town board will set his salary as planner at tomorrow’s regular meeting.
Gluth will be reappointed to her job, the supervisor said.
Hanley was first hired more than 35 years ago as an aide in the Riverhead Community Development Agency, where he worked under the CDA’s first director Robert Scheiner, a licensed architect and planner who became his mentor. He was appointed “planner trainee” in 1981 and went on to become a planner working for the planning board and ultimately was named planning director when the town board formally created the planning department in the late 1980s.
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