Riverhead reconsiders Scott’s Pointe expansion, new land-use fight heats up

Riverhead Town is back in the middle of the Scott’s Pointe fight, this time over whether Island Water Park Corp. can push past the go-kart-only limits that helped win approval for the Calverton amusement site last year.

The company has asked to amend its site plan so Scott’s Pointe could host drifting events, add battery-powered bumper boats on its man-made lake, build a floating dock, install a fire-suppression well that would draw water from the lake and add a zip line over part of the water. The request would require the Town Board to reopen a covenant that was written into the project’s June 17, 2025 final approval.

That covenant was not a minor detail. Riverhead tied the park’s approval to a strict promise that no vehicles other than go-karts would use the track and that the lake would be limited to nonmotorized watercraft. Town planners said that restriction was directly connected to the board’s earlier environmental finding under the State Environmental Quality Review Act, which let the project move forward without a full environmental impact statement.

Senior Planner Greg Bergman warned the board that changing those conditions now could reopen questions about runoff, emergency response and the chance that contaminants could reach the water. The board had already imposed six conditions in March 2025, including a topographic survey of the as-built go-kart track and pickleball courts, an amended grading and drainage plan, continued groundwater monitoring, fuel-storage safeguards, spill protection, an on-site spill response kit and a spill response plan.

The stakes are broader than one amusement park. Scott’s Pointe opened in November 2023 as a 75,000-square-foot year-round attraction after the owners bought 43 acres for $714,000 in 2002, and supporters have long argued that it brings family activity and local spending to Calverton. Opponents have focused on unauthorized construction, code violations and environmental risk, especially after the site became a flashpoint in 2024.

That year, the state Department of Environmental Conservation ordered Scott’s Pointe to stop using the aquapark and other public recreation in its groundwater-fed man-made lake and said the go-kart track had been built without approvals and was at least partly in an area authorized for mining. Riverhead Town also sued in July 2024, seeking to shut down the illegal work, dismantle it and impose at least $100,000 in fines.

The lake itself remains a point of concern. It is a 19-acre man-made body of water created under a DEC mine reclamation permit, and the mine on the property had not been fully reclaimed as of June 2025. Groundwater tests in 2024 found low levels of PFOS and PFOA but no other harmful contaminants, and the pond sits in the short-term capture zone of a public water well.

Town officials now face the question that has shadowed the project from the start: whether Scott’s Pointe is simply adjusting operations or trying to turn a tightly limited approval into something much larger for Calverton.