Planning lessons for the Village are all around us

Local planning boards are living in interesting times, it seems.  The town's planning board lost its chairman and deputy recently (albeit in a much more sedate way than Lloyd's chairman, who was forcibly removed), and joins the village's planning board in being short members.

Chairman Paul Brown was given praise by those he worked with, and I agree with that assessment.  Paul tried hard to find agreements among differing parties, and did his best to separate his role of facilitating the meeting from his vote as a member.  He implemented a series of checks, balances, and systems which have long prevented the town's planning board of being the victim of the administrative errors and uninformed votes which have plagued the village's planning board.  He was also careful to recuse himself from discussions of the so-called Pyramind-Benanti project, a development which proposed a new connector road off Eugene L. Brown drive on land his family once owned.

Pity the chairman of Lloyd's planning board didn't understand conflict of interest rules as well; he was removed from his position because he crossed the line between his municipal volunteer actions and his role as a real estate agent looking to make a living.  It's going to be a little bit harder for real estate agents to be appointed to planning-related positions until memory of this incident fades.  I wish they had actually removed him entirely from the planning board, but it seems local governments are extremely fearful of preventing the "people's business" from being done if they lack a quorum on that board.

I doubt the village would have taken such a strong stance if it had discovered ethical violations in its own planning board - they've been struggling to maintain a quorum on it for years, and that fear is much stronger than anything but the loudest of public outcries.  Instead, the planning board administration seems hellbent on getting projects approved regardless of the rule of law, and there's no attempt to stop it.  Take the hookah bar application, for example.  I voted for it when I was a member, but at the time I didn't know that mayor Terry Dungan considered "four and three-quarters days" to be close enough to the legally-required five days' notice to be sufficient, nor did I know that even now chairman Ray Curran has not produced any proof that the notices were even mailed out for that public hearing.

I was personally stonewalled to the point of throwing in the towel and resigning from the planning board because I couldn't find out what I needed to know to make informed votes, and I was tired of fighting for the right to make my several hours a month of volunteer time remotely productive.  I know that for every case which is public shown to be deficient, there are probably many more which nobody has noticed yet.  For fear of losing its quorum, the village board is allowing its planning board to be run in such a cloak-and-dagger manner that its remaining members are not even aware of how much they do not know.  Chairman Ray Curran has repeatedly thwarted any attempts to shed more light on the proceedings, threatening to resign if the meetings are televised and denying without good cause my repeated requests for a public comment period at planning board meetings - something which Paul Brown had on the agenda for his entire tenure, and something  I hope his successor continues.

I don't believe the village is going to find and retain qualified planning board members as long as the board itself is run in secrecy.  The mayor tells me that there is very little that the village board can do; it cannot force a public comment period or demand that planning board members have the right to participate in off-line discussions, for example, because the planning board's independence is protected by law.  He has yet to explain why the village board took the weasel-like non-action of simply not bothering to renew the chair's term of office last June.  They could have either reappointed Mr. Curran (if they support his methods) or removed him (if they did not), but instead they chose to simply abdicate their responsibility.

Until the village learns some lessons from nearby towns, planning is going to continue down a dark, mysterious road that is fraught with bungled projects and uninformed votes.  How much longer will the village board permit this miscarriage of planning to continue?

Clearing sidewalks is snow joke

We get more snow in the Hudson Valley than I experienced growing up to the south of here, and far less than the many feet I saw when I was a college student to the north. Snow removal, particularly from sidewalks, was a topic of concern at this week's Town Planning Board meeting, held jointly with the Town Council. It's also the topic of a letter that Bill Weinstein wrote to the New Paltz Times. The picture at left, taken this morning, is of my own buried sidewalk, and reminds me that some shoveling is definitely in order out there.

Paul Brown, chair of the Planning Board, seems to feel that we're better off minimizing how many sidewalks we require be built because those sidewalks need to be maintained and cleared. Better to make people walk in the streets, which are plowed, than force homeowners to shovel would could amount to hundreds of feet of sidewalk in some areas of the Town.

Bill Weinstein recently took over the chair of the Bicycle-Pedestrian Committee, and he's not impressed by how poorly the sidewalks in the Village proper are cleared. This is what he has to say:

To the Editor:

The heavily used crosswalk across Main Street from the Chase Bank to Elting Library was blocked by snow on the bank side for at least six days from Thursday, January 15th. The shoulder of snow that straddled the street and sidewalk by the bank was thrown up by a snowplow doing its job clearing the street. Nevertheless, no one took the time to cut through this snow and make it possible for pedestrians, particularly people in wheelchairs or children in strollers, to use this wheelchair-accessible curbcut.

Pedestrians eventually made their own passageway through the snow, a mini-Khyber Pass of about a footprint's width. (Please see the attached photo.) This was what I had to help my three-year-old navigate twoThursdays ago, with only one eye out for the traffic – a dangerous situation with a high risk of slipping or tripping into the traffic lane.

By Friday, the passage was no clearer, and colder weather and more snow was setting in. By the end of the Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend, the now greater accumulation of snow and ice still had not been cleared, as was the case on Monday and Tuesday.

On Wednesday afternoon volunteers from the New Paltz Bicycle-Pedestrian Committee cut a clean, wide path through the snow and ice. Pedestrians could now cross Main Street from the bank to the library without fear of slipping.

But whose responsibility is it to make sure that New Paltz crosswalks are kept clear for walking? Village Code §175-11.E requires that the owner of property at an intersection must clear a path 30" wide to enable pedestrian access from the sidewalk to the street. Safe pedestrian access to our crosswalks and sidewalks is an important part of making New Paltz the vibrant, liveable community we love. Let's make sure we all hold up our end of the shovel when the snowflakes fly.

Yours sincerely,

William Weinstein
For the New Paltz Bicycle-Pedestrian Committee

I find that New Paltz is really the worst of all worlds when it comes to removing snow. As a homeowner, I do not have the village clearing the sidewalks as happened in Potsdam, where I went to college. I also do not have a parkway strip, as my parents did on Long Island. That two feet of grass between road and sidewalk is very useful right now, because with my sidewalk adjacent to the street, it becomes the depository of the plowed snow.

I like to think of myself as a young man, and I have no problem either shoveling a couple feet of fluffy snow from my walk, or hiring some local kids to do it. But moving the plow's share is a lot tougher. Last time we had snow, we got it shoveled only to have it buried again, and then it froze solid. I've been trying to get rid of it ever since. It can take more than good intentions to shovel even a short walk, and I can't imagine how people older than I do it.

In the village, at least, I am thinking it may be time to consider having the DPW clear the sidewalks, like the college does. Either I'm paying someone to do it or I'm losing money (and possibly my health) by doing it myself, so I don't think it would actually cost more. It would also ensure that pedestrians get safe passage, whether or not Chase Bank gets the walk shoveled or my snow freezes under the plow's blade. Some people can't be bothered to clear the snow, and others try and fail. If the goal is snow removal, we should seriously consider why we don't consider sidewalks to be as important as roads.

Comments and contradictions welcome. Libertarian comments about the dangers of expanding government are particularly invited, but I invite one and all to poke holes in this idea.

Good isn't always good enough

Last night I found myself in the uncomfortable position of voting "no" on a good project. The Jewett Family Farm was seeking to get a lot line revision approved by both Town and Village planning boards (something that, as I remarked at an earlier meeting, is one of the best arguments for unification that I've heard all year). They will be giving some land to the Historical Huguenot Society and taking some back in return, more or less formalizing how the land has been used for some time anyway.

Most of the land involved is encumbered by a conservation easement which was created as part of the well-publicized Two Farms Campaign back in 2007. That easement permitted two home sites, and this modification would be transferring one of those between landowners. The easement isn't ready for review yet, and I didn't think it was particularly good planning to approve an application without knowing all the details. I was cast the only "no" vote.

Not the only lone "no" in November
My former colleagues at the Town Planning Board were asked to recommend a variance to the Zoning Board of Appeals with virtually no information. This is again a case where the application could very well prove to be a good idea; Hampton Inn wants to build a hotel at the old Frito-Lay site, and is looking to go one story taller than code allows. They provided a few pictures, but no formally prepared drawings or analysis. Jonathan Wright was the dissenter in that case, feeling that it's madness (my word, not his) to recommend a variance from our laws if we don't know whether or not they could make a go of it under existing zoning, especially when we're talking about the gateway to New Paltz.

The New Paltz Times also provided sketchy details about chairman Paul Brown's lone dissenting vote in the case of Dawn Brown's application to turn one lot into three on Springtown Road. Neighbors have been mighty concerned about the increased flood potential that new buildings would represent in this area, which probably should never have been developed in the first place for that reason alone - building on a flood plain is a common form of human stupidity, though, so we can't fault our forebears for not having foresight. My prior conversations with Paul Brown don't shed much light on his reasoning - he is generally in support of development, but has expressed an interest in finding ways to keep more development out of this sensitive area through a "transfer of development rights." If I had to guess, I would think that he justified being the only member voting to approve the site plan because he feels that an individual's right to choose the destiny of one's own land should not be influenced by, well, anything at all.