The Appellate Division, Second Department, recently rendered two interesting decisions involving claims of “segmentation” under the State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA or SEQR)[1]� – one arising from a proposed development in Eastern Suffolk County and the other from a proposed development in Western Nassau. Under SEQRA and its implementing regulations,[2]� segmentation occurs when a governmental agency’s environmental review of a single action is broken down into smaller stages or activities, addressed as though they are independent and unrelated, requiring individual determinations of significance.[3]�
As the Second Department’s decisions make clear, developers may not seek to distort or evade the SEQRA review process by presenting their projects piecemeal in an effort to minimize the adverse environmental impacts. However, the fact that a developer presents a project in stages does not necessarily require a finding of improper segmentation, so long as the individual elements of a project, and the project as a whole, are the subject of a full SEQRA review.
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