Rye’s City Council is holding firm on the terms of the six-month moratorium it passed in June.
On Wednesday, the council denied a waiver request for the owners of 43 Locust Ave. to move forward with a mixed-use construction project, refusing to provide an exemption two months into a pause on developments in certain areas of the city.
Property owners Kenneth Haas and Ursula Serluca submitted a petition to Rye’s City Council on June 25, about two weeks after the moratorium took effect. In a public hearing Wednesday, they requested to proceed with plans to demolish an existing building and construct a new three-story structure, with law and accounting offices on the second floor and a residential apartment on the third floor.
The local law, which passed June 8, temporarily halted new construction in Rye’s central business district and neighboring B-1 and B-2 districts. The property in question is the former home of Judith’s Skin Care, located one block from Purchase Street in the B-1 neighborhood business district zone.
“There are two components to my concerns with this project,” Mayor Josh Nathan said Wednesday. “One is flooding, the other is the central business district design standards. We have not developed new flood standards. We don’t know what future legislation is going to be. What’s before us may or may not comply with that. The reason for the moratorium is to pause while the municipality takes a look at rules and regulations and identifies any appropriate changes.”
Haas and Serluca purchased the property for $1.3 million on April 29, 2025, then sold their primary residence in Rye in June 2025, with the intention of building their new home on Locust Avenue.
Brian Sinsabaugh, an attorney from the Zarin & Steinmetz law firm, and Rex Gedney, of Crozier Gedney Architects, spoke on behalf of the property owners Wednesday, emphasizing the inconvenience to their clients, who went through many of the city’s required steps for approval before the moratorium took effect.
“This process we’d been going through has gone on for a while. Are you all familiar with how the building process moves and runs?” Gedney asked the council. “For us, the applicant, the boards review our plans, and we go back and forth. That can go on a long time. The project, we thought, was moving along, and has now been stalled again. We can’t go before the BAR (Board of Architectural Review) or have LaBella (the city’s engineering and planning consulting firm) review it because of the moratorium. It’s really quite a burden.”
A site plan application was submitted to the Planning Commission on Aug. 25, 2025, with two follow-up submissions and presentations in 2025, then two more in March 2026. A variance application was submitted to the zoning board authority on Sept. 22, 2025, with five follow-up submissions and appearances, the latest coming on April 16, 2026. Most recently, a submission was made to the BAR on June 5, 2026, three days before the six-month moratorium passed.
“This moratorium includes B-1,” Gedney said. “Are there any other projects in B-1 affected by this moratorium?”
“I don’t think that’s relevant,” Nathan responded. “As we sit here today, we can’t say whether this project will comply with something that hasn’t been drafted.”
The purpose of the six-month moratorium was to slow the rapid pace of development in Rye as the city works to update its comprehensive plan for the first time in 40-plus years. Two major topics of discussion in the early stages of the comprehensive planning process include preserving the character of the city’s neighborhoods and minimizing future flood damage.
Sinsabaugh and Gedney both spoke about how the new design would be a significant aesthetic improvement to the neighborhood, and how the plans far exceed current FEMA flood regulations.
“No neighboring buildings have been transformed to be FEMA compliant,” Gedney said. “I can’t imagine, and I’ve been doing this a long time, that FEMA regulations will change to make this noncompliant. If that’s the case, all surrounding buildings will also be FEMA noncompliant.”
Nathan and the council didn’t dispute the construction would conform with current regulations, but ultimately said it was best to wait until the end of the moratorium rather than predict what the future may hold.
“Maybe this would comply with the new requirements, maybe it wouldn’t,” Nathan said. “I simply don’t know. This street is part of the scope of the analysis we have consultants working on, and we’ll have committees looking at it as soon as possible. We just passed the moratorium, and it’s unfortunate the project is on the other side of it from the applicants’ standpoint, but public policy is what solves these issues.”
See the full letter and supporting materials Zarin & Steinmetz submitted to Rye’s City Council below:
