Thompson wants ban on summer bungalows

Thompson - Bungalows may soon go the way of the dodo bird in the Town of Thompson.

Later this month, the town is expected to pass a six-month ban on construction of these one-story, summer cottages built on piers, as much of link to Sullivan's vacation glory days as the hotels that once dotted the landscape.

According to Thompson officials, many of the town's 150 bungalow colonies are well on the way to extinction, with peeling paint, makeshift wiring, sagging roofs and littered with trash.

A decades-long running question about what to do about bungalows boiled to the surface in July when the Kaufman Bungalow Colony on Benmosche Road constructed a sewer line near the Monticello Raceway that was 8 feet in the air in places. The town forced the colony to tear it down days after it appeared.

And this year, the town has had a spurt of requests to add on and build new bungalows.

"A lot of these places, they would be better off to just bulldoze them," Thompson Planning Commissioner Jim Lyttle said.

Over the next six months, the town will hammer out new zoning regulations that would ban new bungalow colonies. All new-home construction within existing bungalow colonies would have to be built for year-round use.

"It is going to be a house, or it ain't going to be built," Thompson Councilman Bill Rieber said.

On March 21, the board will likely pass a six-month ban on new bungalow colonies and place several restrictions on new construction.

• You can't build on piers, all new bungalow construction must be on a slab and designed for year-round occupancy.

• If you expand an existing bungalow, you must put the entire bungalow on a slab and the addition must be covered with an "architecturally compatible enclosure."

• You can build a home according to the current building standards within an existing bungalow colony, but you can not build on newly-acquired property in a bid to expand the colony.After six months, the town may write these changes permanently into the zoning code.