Planning Board Minutes February 28, 2008

TOWN OF DRYDEN
Planning Board
February 28, 2008

 

 

Members Present: Barbara Caldwell, Chair; Tom Hatfield; David Weinstein; Joseph Laquatra, Jr.; Joseph Lalley; Martin Hatch.

 

Excused: Megan Whitman.

 

Others Present: Mary Ann Sumner, Town Supervisor; Henry Slater, Code Enforcement Officer; Patty Millard, Recording Secretary.

 

Agenda:

Proposed Official Town of Dryden Map

Update Oriole Drive Subdivision Sewer Capacity

Big Box material from Dan

Behan Associates:

Updated Draft Residential Guidelines

Phase 1 Zoning Recommendations

Discussion of Public Involvement

Phase 2 Zoning Recommendations

Next Steps

 

Meeting called to order at 7:00

 

Proposed Official Town of Dryden Map – Henry Slater

We don’t have an official, adopted, Town of Dryden map.

 

T Hatfield – I’m puzzled why we’re singling out mobile home parks.

 

Henry Slater – that’s just something we added in there. There’s no specific reason.

 

J Lalley – There’s a legend at the bottom of the page for mobile homes. I think, in general, it looks great, but I would recommend that we not identify mobile home parks because we don’t identify any other kind of housing.

 

D Weinstein – The thing is, correct me if I’m wrong, the mobile home parks have road networks that are not Town road networks.

 

J Lalley – I would go to the trouble then of displaying the road networks, perhaps in a different color, to identify the fact that they’re private roads, and you do have a color for private roads.

 

M Sumner – Do mobile home parks get some kind of special consideration in emergency planning? Would that be one reason for identifying them?

 

H Slater – Officially, no. But if you’re going to have an official map, it’s good for emergency responders to know where they are, that’s for sure.

 

J Lalley – Well, why wouldn’t they want to know where Harwood Road Subdivision is?

 

H Slater – Because Harwood Road Subdivision is a mapped road that there’s a directory that you can go to and look up and see who lives where on that road. There is no directory for the mobile home parks and I’ll point out there’s no directory for multi-family housing units either. They can be removed. That’s not a problem. That’s up to your recommendation and the Town Board. I’m just here to present what we did and ask for feedback.

 

B Caldwell – Speaking of that, we know that there are many little private roads but there are no names with them, like Snyder Heights.

 

H Slater – OK. That’s a private road, and it should be on there. That’s one I missed when I reviewed it. We’ll add that.

 

M Hatch – Do you think you want to put on Community Centers?

 

J Lalley – I’d rather have them than the mobile home parks.

 

H Slater – We’ll consider any recommendation.

 

J Laquatra – There are some that are missing, too, because there’s one on Lower Creek Road. The term mobile home park is wrong and the industry would really jump on you for that. The term is manufactured housing.

 

D Weinstein – Is there any reason to show roads that have been abandoned?

 

H Slater – If they’re a seasonal use road, they’re on there, but if they’re abandoned, they’re not. Take the map home, take a look at it, let me know if you have anything missing or wrong, etc. We don’t have an Official Town Map at this point, so there’s no hurry. If you could take them home and review them and let me know what your thoughts are.

 

B Caldwell – Would it be feasible to put in the names of the private roads?

 

D Weinstein – Looking at the Varna Park, I’m not sure where you’d fit it all.

 

H Slater – We can try. I suppose the answer to that is that if you’re going to label one, you should label them all, or if you’re not going to label them all, you should label none.

 

M Sumner – We should shoot for consistency in the orientation of the street names.

 

H Slater – It may be a function that we can’t change, but I’ll look in to that. Dan apologizes for his lack of being here. It could not be helped.

 

M Hatch – What about what you sent around to us?

 

B Caldwell – Have you heard anything further?

 

H Slater – Larry thinks he is right in regards to the Oriole Drive Subdivision boundaries. There are approximately 700 units, and maybe MaryAnn can add to this, sewer units available because of the Cayuga Heights plant bypass line that comes out of the Village of Lansing that used to formally run through the Cayuga Heights plant. It now goes directly to the Ithaca Area Waste Water Treatment Plant, of which the Town is an owner, and with the Village of Lansing not being an owner, the Town should be entitled to some of these units. And I was right, there are 7 total units available to the Town of Dryden right now off Sapsucker Woods, which is not going to address this particular project. Each single family dwelling is equal to 1 sewer unit use. Industrially it varies depending on what the use is with a car wash getting 6 or 7 units and an office building might get half a unit. We’re going to have a meeting to pump up Mary Ann to go fight for units for the Town of Dryden.

 

D Weinstein – You said a household is 1 sewer unit. A lot of those houses on Cardinal Drive are 2 family.

 

H Slater – Right. So they take 2 units. It’s one per family. I believe Mary Ann is meeting with Larry next week. He has some ideas about how to go about this because Larry was a City of Ithaca engineer for a long time. He actually was involved in the building of the sewer plant and of course it’s in his best interest to help the town because his client wants some units.

 

M Sumner – He’s also a Town of Dryden resident.

 

T Hatfield – It seems like a pretty compatible concept and it wouldn’t hurt the Town of Dryden taxpayers either.

 

H Slater – The Town owns 2% of the sewer plant. Cayuga Heights doesn’t own any, the Village of Lansing doesn’t own any, and the two majority owners are the Town of Ithaca and the City of Ithaca, and we’re this little minority owner. But nevertheless, we’re an owner, and we should have some rights since we help to pay the bills, to some of that usage.

 

M Sumner – If nothing else, we have a vote and they don’t.

 

H Slater – That’s right. They don’t have a vote and we do. They have some big project coming up that’s kind of quiet and they want all of them because they paid for the bypass. That’s the Village of Lansing’s thinking. They paid $125,000 to put that bypass in. My guess is they put it in because Cayuga Heights said, no, you can’t ship anymore wastewater so they bypassed it.

 

D Weinstein – So, those 7 units, that’s just for the sewer line that goes through Cayuga Heights. It’s not for all of Dryden.

 

H Slater – Right. That’s just for the waste that goes through the Cayuga Heights plant. If we were going to be developing in downtown Varna, no big deal. All the capacity we want.

 

T Hatfield – And it would go to the IAWWT plant?

 

H Slater – Yes.

 

T Hatfield – Do we have any capacity issues there at all?

 

H Slater – None that I’m aware of. I think it was built with the future in mind.

 

T Hatfield – In a decade or so, is there an issue that needs to be in long-term planning? Current growth, concentration and densities needs to deal with that issue.

 

H Slater – I’m not aware of any, but I’ll be sure to ask that question.

 

D Weinstein – Every time I’ve asked about that, the answer has always been that there’s more than enough capacity for future expansion. When they put in the new pressure pump station, they upped the capacity.

 

T Hatfield – This particular one is going to Cayuga Heights because it’s convenient, right?

 

D Weinstein – There is no connection elsewhere.

 

H Slater – You would have to form a new district if you wanted to link up with Varna.

 

T Hatfield – That’s what I was wondering. How far away are we and is that a possibility if we can’t link in to Cayuga Heights?

 

H Slater – Well, Larry said he wanted to develop an industrial area. Through working with Millers, they’ve already said if that happened, it would make more sense to run the flow back to Monkey Run, because you have to have a pump station. Gravity flow won’t work in that area. I can see, however, for 16 units, the man wouldn’t want to spend the money for the infrastructure way over here. Maybe for 100, it would be a different story. And besides that, Oriole Drive would have to be pump stationed up and over and be pump stationed as opposed to gravity feed going this way (to Cayuga Heights).

 

T Hatfield – So if there are 7 available and he needs 16, he’s not that far away. If you take 2% of 700, isn’t that 14?

 

Cross talk

 

H Slater – There wouldn’t be enough for Phase 1 of the Oriole Drive Subdivision, let alone Phase 1 and 2, if they were to do two-family homes. If they did just single family, there might be enough. I don’t believe Larry intends to come back until he knows that he can get rid of the wastewater from that area. I’ll keep you posted.

 

Big Box handout

M Hatch – At a meeting, Dan had said there were some inquiries to the Town Board regarding Big Box for Route 13. He said that we might be talking about it here. So I brought it up to Barbara as a possible thing to talk about, and then Dan wrote a letter saying that there’s no rush, but he’s putting together some information for us and for the Town Board. His point to me was that the Planning Board should have this information in our master plan. If our current zoning code is wholly insufficient (in this area) and we need to think about how to make it sufficient.

 

M Sumner – Dan did mention it in passing during the Town Baord meeting and people were eager to get it to the Planning Board. I was going to wait until next month so that I had something more concrete to say about it. A realtor came to talk to us about the possibility of a Big Box store at the former of Lower Creek Road and Route 13. A type of big box store that we might not wholly mind. I’m not nuts about big box stores, but I’m supposed to keep an open mind about this. They were feeling us out about it. Seeing if we were going to merely throw road blocks up, in which case they weren’t even going to try it. If we had a set of regulations in place in advance that they knew whether or not they could work with, we’d have a better way to negotiate. I was a the Association of Towns meeting last week and talk to somebody about regulating franchise architecture, which I thought was an interesting concept too. Dan’s absolutely right. We should get on top of this before it’s too late.

 

B Caldwell – We might want to look at the proposed Commercial Guidelines with this in mind.

 

M Sumner – Dan had a link to a fascinating website called Big Box Evaluator and we tried tinkering with all the variables and tried making it look like it would pay off for us, and he couldn’t make it look like it paid. That would be one approach to making regulations.

 

J Laquatra – One of the larger issues is that the corner of Lower Creek Road and Route 13 is not a retail commercial area in the master plan.

 

H Slater – Neither is the Lucente property. There were things about that map I think a lot of people weren’t particularly thrilled about, but in the interest of moving forward and the fact that it’s a living document and could be adjusted later on, we accepted certain things. I did win this battle. (The protection of the agricultural farmland just outside the Village.)

 

M Hatch – This doesn’t involve that typical scenario where tax credits are given in order to come in.

 

M Sumner – We’re not going after them. They’re coming here and hoping we won’t make it too difficult for them. They’re not expecting any breaks.

 

D Weinstein – What we should do is express to them that we have a plan that calls for that area to not be a commercial area, to actually be a conservation area because we felt it was important to have a break between the development further East on Route 13 and the development that would happen at NYSEG.

 

J Laquatra – And then not have that area turn in to strip malls.

 

M Sumner – That’s a separate discussion, but about this particular project, absolutely. The larger issue is that if we had big box regulations in place – other people are going to be close behind this guy. Apparently Southwest development in the Ithaca area is getting too expensive and they are looking for other locations.

H Slater – I think what Dan intends to do is give you some models to look at.

 

M Hatch – And it’ll be in the context of commercial guidelines that we’re working on already.

 

M Sumner – So it should be high on our minds for next month, but we don’t need to do anything tonight.

 

B Caldwell – You’ll keep us posted.

 

M Sumner – Yes. There was a third thing that came up, I think it was Marty, and you said you were interested in having the Town look at prime locations for communication towers or wood towers?

 

M Hatch – Two things. Planning decisions that would help make broadband town wide, and second was to identify areas where energy production fuels for agriculture would be most propitious. I think we talked a little about not just going the next step which is not only identifying good agricultural type (unintelligible) but also including some kind of promoting of alternative energy fuels and things of that nature. That’s a little bit farther along than the broadband.

 

J Laquatra – That’s why you have the packet Patty just handed around.

 

M Sumner – We’ve applied for a grant – we’ve partnered with a local ISP provider to target one of these universal broadband grants that Spitzer’s touting. We should find out by the end of the month.

 

M Hatch – The last thing was municipal power. Identifying sites where alternative energy municipal power sites could help provide town wide power. It’s been successful elsewhere in the County and we could get a little more proactive about that.

 

M Sumner – I’m working on something for the Town Board to consider to charge the Planning Board with.

 

J Behan -There is a lot of material. If you wouldn’t mind holding questions until the end, I think we can get to the end more quickly and then have time for discussion. (John handed out an updated copy of the Draft Residential Guidelines.) We took your feedback and edited the guidelines. We also made the format similar to the Commercial Guidelines so that they would match. We made them a little more consistent, took out a little redundancy that we found when going over them again.

 

See Presentation for details.

 

We’re recommending the town encourage private roads by having the legal mechanisms in place to accommodate them. It’s very common throughout the state. We’ve had a lot of experience with them.

 

M Sumner – Actually, we just updated the Highway Specifications to make it easier for developers to build a road and turn it over to the town.

 

H Slater – I’ll get you a copy of them.

 

Under Phase 2 Recommendations:

Change Affordable Housing to Workforce Housing.

 

J Behan – The State of Vermont passed a law that does not allow any municipality to prohibit conversion into incessant in-law apartments.

 

QUESTION, ANSWER & DISCUSSION

J Laquatra – NEHB has green building guidelines. Participants – do you have Tompkins / Cortland Builders and Remodelers involved? (Yes.) OK. So you have LEAD specified, but they consider that to be high end. Which it is. It’s not really for mainstream buildings. So there’s the NEHB green building guidelines. If you could mention that as well.

 

M Hatch – Could you give an example of what’s diluted in the LEAD?

 

J Laquatra – I wouldn’t say it’s diluted. The process is more streamlined. The fees are lower. I haven’t gone through the process. They have more options than LEAD.

 

J Lalley – On your cash flow analysis, one thing you may wish to explore, particularly when you get to the farm type thing, by opening up more land, there’s the notion of a conservation easement. This is a tax flow that can flow to the seller. It can actually be split between the seller and the buyer. If you sell off the development rights to something like the Fingerlakes Land Trust, if the seller does that at the time of transition, one of the things that can happen is it ends up being a lower sale price, but the net to the seller is actually greater by doing it that way. So it’s an incentive to get the land into a conservation easement. It might not change the cash value, but it preserves that as open space.

 

J Laquatra – That happens at the time of sale?

 

J Lalley – Yes. You have to work with your tax consultant to do that, but it’s something worth mentioning in terms of structuring the deal. It makes it more affordable for the buyer, the seller is just as happy.

 

M Sumner – Can we do something like that with transfer of development rights?

 

J Lalley – The way this happens, though, it doesn’t cost the town anything. Discussion of an example of a donation of property which was a tax deductible donation that didn’t cost local tax payers that allowed as high of a net for the seller, a lower purchase price for the buyer, and no cost to the local municipality. Essentially the IRS purchased the development rights by way of a tax deduction that was allowed.

 

T Hatfield – On the pro forma, it would interesting to see how your net present values work out if you use a common time frame instead of a different span of years for each. That’s what you’re going to get in terms of public feedback. They’re not going to want to tie in to the assumptions laid out here.

 

B Caldwell – You made a statement to the effect there without documentation or referral about the desirability on the part of the buyer to buy in to these more dense situations. It may be true, but it may not be the mind set of the people who are marketing. I think it would be helpful to have something to back that up.

 

J Laquatra – There are some case studies. There’s a developer in the Midwest who puts together conservation subdivisions and other forms of cluster development and markets it as, “You’re buying a quarter or a half of an acre, but you have access to 30 (or whatever’s in there).” He’s finding that those houses sell at a 13% premium.
C Whittaker – I think I mentioned that in the information I sent to you. There was a reference to that article.

 

J Behan – I think you’re right. Your immediate perception is, I’ve got my section and that’s it. But in essence, it’s tied to the value of the neighborhood and the town, etc.

 

D Weinstein – You’re talking about actually incorporating in to the guidelines this scenario calculation.

 

J Behan – No, we just use that as part of the environmental review, the analysis that we’ve done. We wouldn’t put that in the guidelines, I wouldn’t think.

 

D Weinstein – You made a statement to people. You’re trying to say to people, look, they’re equal values for these other options. Why wouldn’t you want to communicate that?

 

T Hatfield – I don’t know that we’d want them in the guidelines, but it wouldn’t hurt to have an appendix with it in there. I think it’s especially pertinent if we’re using these as guidelines for developers who come in. If we want to start looking at the world a little differently, we have to start giving them some impetus as to how and why to look at things a little differently. By taking the calculations and use the same time span so that it’s a little more uniform, it gives a good example for the developer to look at and he can see where he’d be adding value and not losing anything.

 

B Caldwell – Presumably, you have figured these scenarios on the basis of a private road. The guidelines for private roads or any driveway even over a certain length require certain standards.  Right, Henry?

 

H Slater – If you are located more than 200 feet off a public highway, for emergency response purposes, you have to be able to handle an emergency vehicle. It has to be able to handle a 10-wheel truck. There has to be an area at the end of the driveway or private road for an emergency vehicle to be able to turn around. The first department replaces more mirrors and windows from backing out of places that they had to drive in to that were too narrow to get out of. If you’re within the 200 feet, we don’t care what you do because they’re going to respond from the road. 200 feet is an easily covered distance with a hose or a stretcher. If it’s a private road or long driveway, it could be expensive to construct.

 

B Caldwell – This is what I wondered in terms of the numbers being put in for calculations. Whether the quality of the road that you require for a private road, the costs are figured in there.

 

J Behan – We have some generalized costs that affect reduce standards for private vs. public road.

 

H Slater – There’s no requirement to pave or surface it. It just has to stand up to the weight of a vehicle mentioned and be able to turn around.
J Behan – I think we have two different numbers we use – one for private driveways and we assume a certain amount is free. The longer driveways, we added that in.

 

C Whittaker – It’s a square footage – an amount per linear foot in all 3 scenarios.

 

M Hatch – Question about the retained equity on these three scenarios. You have the land owner retaining 17 acres in the agricultural scenario with the homestead. I’m just curious, do developers think of themselves as having homesteads? And how would one handle retained equity once all the housing lots are sold off? I’m very much in favor of that idea, it’s just curious to me. That’s not common land you’re talking about, it’s retained equity.

 

J Behan – It’s written from the owner’s perspective. They’ve retained that. They can also sell it.

 

M Hatch – And if they sold it, that would also be developable?

 

J Behan – No. It would be that lot. They would keep it or they would sell it.

 

M Hatch – What would it be for?

 

J Behan – In this case, that’s where they live now. They can continue to live there or not.

 

M Hatch – So the $875,000 includes $426,000 of retained equity.

 

C Whittaker – Yes. You have the 17 acres, plus the buildings that are on that property, and the 1/7 share of the other 108 acres.

 

D Weinstein – I’d like to hear more about this incentive zoning. I don’t know if it means you have some very restrictive, a set of firm zones, and the guidelines associated with those, but that somehow the Planning Board would have leeway to change the rules?

 

J Behan – No. The Town Board. Let me give you an example. Jefferson Road in Pittsford, when you drove down that road, and there’s a beautiful old storage barn with this for sale sign on it and behind it is 40 acres of field. Attached to that is another little 10 acres parcel across the road. And when you drive by it, somebody spray painted on the For Sale sign, “Leave it alone.” It was zoned for, it had water and sewer available, suburban, residential development. I think you could put 50 or 60 houses on it. As a gateway parcel to the town’s place, because there’s an open space element, and they weren’t really excited about developing it, so a developer came by who wanted to put a senior housing / extended care project somewhere in the neighborhood. They found that property. Essentially we had said in zoning that the developer agreed to leave that parcel alone, just like someone had spray painted, and kept it open – that 40 acres – and kept leasing it to the farmer who had been leasing it to grow corn. And he put his 150 unit extended care facility worth like $10 million, all on the 10 acres with a little pond around it and everything, which you couldn’t do. It was multi-family, attached housing, really intensive use with employees coming and going, etc. So essentially the Town Board rezoned that property to allow that use. They got that 40 acres of open land, which is probably worth, just as it is without any thing, around $1 million for nothing without paying for it by being willing to consider this alternate plan as an incentive. We called it open space zoning when we wrote it. That was the deal. The amenity was that was left alone, that big 40 acre property. They were allowed to build this much more intensive use on the 10 acres. If they had just gone by what the town zoning laws allowed, they would have put up 50 houses. That’s amenity incentive. You essentially write it for what you want to achieve in the town. It’s typically set up as a review process. Ideally, you have some places you can identify where you want certain things to happen. Like if the town knew it wanted certain things on certain sites or in certain areas, or ideas that you want to guide people towards, or amenities that you want to see happen, then you can be responsive. It’s a little open-ended and you might limit it.

 

T Hatfield – Has this been tested? It sounds an awful lot like a legal way to do spot zoning. Every once in a while, that issue of spot zoning rears its head around here. Yet incentive zoning seems like a great tool to have in the portfolio since it allows you to modify what otherwise would not be doable using that particular set of tools.

 

J Behan – It’s not always an easy tool to apply because of all this use associated rezoning and the feelings of “not in my backyard.”

 

H Slater – The other problem is that the Town doesn’t have any control over assessed value of properties. This County sets assessment at best use.

 

J Behan – TC Assessment can set land at whatever Ag & Markets said the land could produce for crop value.

 

T Hatfield – Is that because Monroe County has different assessment policies?

 

H Slater – It’s because the county has control and their practice is to use best use.

 

Audience – Who controls that policy? The County Board?

 

H Slater – I would assume so. It would be much easier if you controlled your own assessing, because then you could offer some incentives with some assurance that you’re not selling somebody a brown paper bag with a hole in the bottom.

 

T Hatfield – When was the last time this was discussed? In all honesty, I’ve either forgotten or didn’t know.

 

M Sumner – Countywide assessment? It was quite a while ago.

 

T Hatfield – Yes. On grievance day, they come before a board that’s town resident based.

 

H Slater – And they don’t have to follow the recommendation of that board either.

 

J Behan – Some other possible concepts to tie in to some of the bigger zoning projects. In another town we worked with, we set it up so a standard lot was x acres, let’s say 5 acres. That’s what their lot size is in rural areas. If you want to do a standard size. If you want to do a Conservation Subdivision, and set aside some land for open space, we made the incentive to allow an average density of 33 homes on 100 acres as long as you put in half the land for conservation, a lot can be as small as (as long as well and septic and everything works) I think we mad the minimum lot size 1 acre. We set up the whole Conservation Subdivision like that.

 

D Weinstein – In that circumstance, you made what the clear trade off is in the code versus having a free for all where it seems like, we’ll entertain any deal you come to the table with. You tell us what you want and what you’re willing to give up. That seems too open-ended. It’s great to set up an incentive system, but you want the trade-offs in the incentive system to be very clear.

 

M Hatch – What Henry’s saying about the paper bag with a hole in the bottom really sort of puzzled me. If the county is assessing land values based on optimal use, I suppose with zoning – no this is an agricultural zone – that would then not allow the county to say this is developable land for 50 houses on this 100 acre site, because with agriculture, you can’t do that.

 

H Slater – Is it being farmed? That’s the question. If it’s not being farmed, it gets assessed as industrial development land either way, but if it’s being used for agriculture, they get an exemption of 50% off if they file.

 

D Weinstein – Is that true if the zoning says the only thing you can do on this land is farm? Could they still say this is an industrial development possibility?

 

H Slater – Zoning has no bearing on best land use strategies.

 

M Hatch – What if it’s a residential area and we’ve zoned it so it can only be five acre lots?

 

J Behan – I think there’s a short list of important conversations to have with the town. That’s one. The other is water / sewer and septic requirements. Once we know, meaning the town, once we know what exactly we want to discuss with them in terms of specific outcomes, you can talk to the county about specific scenarios and ask them to make accommodations. And I don’t think any of these are show stoppers. I think we need to lay out the groundwork. Otherwise we need something clear to present them. It may be an education process for the assessor in terms of how to assess open land. We’ve done workshops on that for that.

 

M Hatch – We talked about his scenario with 17 acres of land left. If that 17 acres is assessed as developable in 1 or 2 acre lots, the taxes on that property are going to be huge. So there is going to be no incentive for this person to keep their 17 acres.

 

J Behan – If your code says you require no further subdivision, then the value would be less.

 

M Sumner – If we say it can’t be subdivided, but the County’s doing the assessment based on best use.

 

J Behan – They have to consider that.

 

J Lalley – I suggest when the time comes to have the conversations with the County, we may want to consider going to committee rather than to staff. The County does its work by committee.

 

D Weinstein – Were you  making a firm proposal here that we consider 250 feet for frontage?

 

J Behan – Yes.

 

D Weinstein – And are you introducing that as part of this or something we need to think about?

 

J Behan – That’s our question to you. My sense is that the dimensional changes – right now, the way your subdivisions are set up and the code is set up, you’re going to continue to get these convoluted subdivisions coming in to the Board. My question to you is, is that ok while you’re trying to fix the whole zoning. We want to get these guidelines in place, but there are also discussions we have to have about lots and development. That number is a great tool for the Planning Board to use with direction as a starting point to implement these guidelines.
J Lalley – I’m in the camp of rolling out the guidelines, because it starts the discussions and lays the groundwork for ultimately the laws that might support that, rather than – it’s a question of swallowing the elephant in a series of bites rather than trying to swallow the whole elephant, for the public in particular. For that matter, the various committees for the Town. Sooner rather than later is where I would lean.

 

J LaQuatra – Yes, sooner rather than later.

 

B Caldwell – But no moratorium in the meantime, because that gets people’s backs up.

 

M Sumner – So I came back from conference with this legal framework for a Conservation Subdivision Design which suggests, “A Town Board may, by local law or ordinance, authorize the Planning Board to approve Cluster Development simultaneously with the approval of a plat, subject to certain conditions.” Or “The Town Board may allow the Planning Board to invoke requirements provided there is no increase in density overall in the subdivision.” That sounds simple. Why don’t we just do that?

 

J Behan – Who wrote that?

 

M Sumner – I was trying to figure that out. This was presented by BME Associates, Penfield.

 

B Caldwell – We had that wording before and Mahlon (Perkins) said it had to go back to the Town Board because they had to do it.

 

Right. They have to pass the law and give us that authority.

 

M Hatch – Can rural residential permit agriculture?

 

H Slater – You can do agricultural anywhere in the Town of Dryden currently.

 

Discussion.

 

H Slater – You might want to take a look at the definition of agricultural, because the definition written in 1968 is a lot different today.

 

N Munkenbeck – And you might actually want to consider whether you want it blanket agricultural or if you want to be able to, say, restrict confinement hog operation or something of that nature. Putting a CSA in the middle of a subdivision is very different than putting a confinement hog operation on the edge. I can’t imagine anyone putting one in the middle.

 

H Slater – I can see someone saying the same thing about sheep.

 

M Hatch – I just want to make sure we discuss it at some point and that it doesn’t get lost in the zoning regulations.

 

H Slater – Those are things that should be on the punch list so we make sure to take a look at them.

 

J Behan – One of the main things I want to get a decision on from the Board is – it seems like it makes sense to move forward with the Design Guidelines now. The bigger zoning questions that we’re talking about now are there. Get the guidelines out there as a bite size piece to see. Then moving on those, either together or independently, get those adopted. My sense is, the frontage issue, you may not want to deal with now. We may want to leave that alone.

 

M Sumner – I don’t have a good sense of it yet. I can’t even talk about it yet.

 

H Slater – My sense of it is that frontage right now is critical. Frontage, other than with access, many times means nothing because you’ve got small access to 17 acres. I think frontage should be always subjective to the lot size.

 

M Sumner – But you’re suggesting using it as a crippler by increasing frontage, which would inhibit development, until we were ready…
H Slater – Not always. Along the Route 13 corridor, it’s a great idea. But on Card Road, it might not be.

 

J Behan – It’s a tool though. It’s probably more important than acres. It’s the commodity that’s in place now. 15 acres with small frontage, what you can do is use the guidelines

 

D Weinstein – If we go to 250, it needs to be spelled out – here are the options that we’re throwing in to the mix – so it’s clear that we’re not just taking something away – we’re giving a trade off of new options accompanying this bigger, required road frontage. And I don’t have a good feeling for what those other new options are.

 

J Behan – If you look at the guidelines as they’re written right now, essentially the difference between the scenarios – if you adopted the guidelines and that property came in, the Irish Settlement road property, one could development that in a much worse way right now in the town, given your current law. The only thing you would need to change right now would be the frontage. That would empower, give you the capability. In other words, if you adopt the guidelines softly, it would be discussion you could have with applicants showing them what you want to have happen.

 

H Slater – Can we use density as a guideline? If you maintain this density ratio for this 40 acres, let’s say, we don’t care how much road frontage you have.

 

D Weinstein – But we do care. We care that it gets created in such a way that it maximizes open space. We don’t want them to go and just divide evenly

 

H Slater – I just picked density because that’s one I know would work. You don’t have to pick density. There is any number of tools to pick to regulate what you want the outcome to be.

 

M Hatch – For me, the problem comes when we’re talking about where this 250 foot or this density model is going to be applied in this map. And I look at the headings – Residential, Agricultural, Conservation Open Space, all laid out in this patchwork way, and I’m trying to picture (the point Henry’s making) in relation to that where some places, having a very narrow band going up and then creating a very narrow cluster development off that narrow band, makes a lot of sense. A 250 foot space on a town road doesn’t always make sense. These Zones, once the guidelines are out, it would seem to me, all that’s going to have to be reconfigured in some significant way, because you’re going to want to preserve open space in some places, and you’re going to want to have density in other places, and it’s going to have to do, not with how these grids are laid out, and you’re going to want to have Agricultural Permits of a certain sort in some spaces, and in other spaces Agricultural freedom to do more than perhaps not concentrated feed lots, but something that would be less accessible in more residential region. I think guidelines are really important to get out, because I think it’s really important to encourage people to think about commercially developing this way, and residentially in more open spaces this way or in clustered spaces like you were saying instead of those leafy patterns going out from the village / hamlet. The next step to zoning would be to reconfigure these categories: Conservation, Agriculture, Rural Residential, Suburban, so that the topography fits more with the ?? dicons?

 

J Behan – Right. For this district, there would be special provisions on how it is developed and for these situations, these provisions. For situations where there is little frontage for a property, you would enable them to do a good project.

 

B Caldwell – You’re going to be meeting with the developers and builders tomorrow, right?
J Behan – Yes.

 

B Caldwell – If anything significant comes out of there that you feel we should hear, presumably that would come back to us. If nothing significant comes out of that, would it be helpful, MaryAnn, for us to have a motion to recommend to the Town Board that they adopt these two sets of guidelines? Are we on the right timeframe there?

 

M Sumner – I think it is time to start introducing this to the Town Board, so that they have time to review it and digest it. I don’t know that we’re ready for a motion yet.
D Weinstein – It wouldn’t be a bad idea that, next month, this Board was going to consider and vote for a recommendation for these guidelines or not.

 

J Laquatra – I think that’s a real good idea.

 

M Sumner – Is this meeting with the construction people, are we planning another kind of public meeting between now and the next Planning Board Meeting? We need to have a public information meeting before we have a public hearing.

 

Discussion.

 

J Behan – I see nothing really damaging, overly controlling.  In the residential, you’re just saying, we’re going to be considerate.

 

J Lalley – You’ve just cut in half the number of lots I can develop on my frontage lot. I know that’s not what you’re saying. I’m being irrational and coming up with things people will say.

 

J Behan – We discussed not implementing the frontage development right now. I’m very comfortable putting the guidelines out just as they are, realizing the Planning Board is going to be a little bit in a in between phase until they have the rest of the dimensional parts laid out.

 

M Sumner – It sounds to me like the guidelines are like the new version of the Comprehensive Plan. We told everybody, don’t worry about the Comprehensive Plan, it’s just an idea, just a suggestion.

 

J Behan – These will be adopted. These will be your code.

 

M Sumner – I know, but the Comprehensive Plan was adopted too, but it’s not a law. They’re guidelines. They’re not regulations. That’s what people are going to say. They called it the closest thing you can get to new zoning without adopting new zoning.

 

Discussion.

 

J Behan – These have to be administered by the Planning Board, so when the convenience grocery store comes in to town, you’re gonna say, hey, welcome. Here’s this little booklet. Let’s talk about it. These are the kinds of things we’re looking for. The Planning Board, instead of negotiating after the fact, they’ll probably have engineers and other kinds of folks.

 

D Weinstein – So if they come before the board and they say, these guidelines are very nice, but it’s not really the way we want to do it. We don’t have any power …

 

J Behan – I would say you do. Here’s the thing. The Planning Board has guidelines on how you have to be fair and reasonable, not arbitrary. Just like on the SEQR, is this impact acceptable? At the end of the day, it’s human judgment. That’s why you’re given the big bucks. The Board has to use these. And it’s up to you to have that conversation with the applicant and because it’s not simple, there are tradeoffs.

 

N Munkenbeck – Where do you determine the Board has to use them?

 

J Behan – When you get the amended town zoning, it’s going to say that. You have the authority now to ask for all of these things in the guidelines, but it’s not really clear how you go about that process right now, so you’re really just saying, have them go through this book and if they make a good effort at dealing with Access Management and Circulation, do you really need four curb cuts, have they dealt with screening, building materials, signs, lighting, landscaping, site layout, being responsive to village character, parking and site layout, and you go through that with the applicants, and by the time you’re finished, you should have a project that fits this. And this is really for the applicants. If you’re a commercial developer, it’s much less guess estimating what you want as a Town. There will be questions and back and forth, they (the guidelines) are really just interpreting what you have power already to do in your Site Plan Review. That’s what this does.

 

B Caldwell – Is it an appropriate time to ask the Town Board to give us this special flexibility on subdivisions?

 

M Sumner – That was the first priority after the Comprehensive Plan was accepted that what we really need to do is enable the Planning board to allow these. A couple of developments have started that could have been a lot better. I’d be all for it.

 

J Behan – Again, we’ve already made some of those changes before we put them in front of you. We redefined what a subdivision is. We’ve crossed out some stuff to allow you to do that. If you wanted, we could develop that as well.

 

What are our next steps?

 

J Behan – We’re going to have that meeting tomorrow (with developers and contractors). Then we’ll schedule a public meeting with this board. We can present to the Town Board. I would like that conversation to be a public event so people can come and get the whole story.

 

M Sumner – The March Town Board meeting. Are you talking about doing something that soon?

 

J Lalley – I think our March meeting should become the public meeting and from that there could come a motion to present the guidelines to the Town Board.

 

One meeting or two? Discussion. Two meetings in March.

 

Public Workshop scheduled for March 13^th.

Regular Planning Board meeting scheduled for March 20^th.

 

Meeting was adjourned at 9:15 pm.

 

Respectfully Submitted,

 

 

 

Patty Millard