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2006-01-11 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) JOINT PLANNING BOARD & ZONING BOARD OF APPEALS MEETING WORKSHOP MEETING JANUARY 11, 2006 INDEX DISCUSSION Planning Board & Zoning Board of Appeals Info. 1. THESE ARE NOT OFFICIALLY ADOPTED MINUTES AND ARE SUBJECT TO BOARD AND STAFF REVISIONS. REVISIONS WILL APPEAR ON THE FOLLOWING MONTHS MINUTES (IF ANY) AND WILL STATE SUCH APPROVAL OF SAID MINUTES. 0 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) QUEENSBURY JOINT ZBA/PLANNING BOARD MEETING SPECIAL MEETING JANUARY 11, 2006 7:00 P.M. ZBA MEMBERS PRESENT CHARLES ABBATE, CHAIRMAN ALLAN BRYANT JOYCE HUNT CHARLES MC NULTY LEWIS STONE LEO RIGBY, ALTERNATE ZBA MEMBERS ABSENT ROY URRICO JAMES UNDERWOOD PLANNING BOARD MEMBERS PRESENT ROBERT VOLLARO, CHAIRMAN GRETCHEN STEFFAN, SECRETARY THOMAS SEGULJIC GEORGE GOETZ THOMAS FORD ANTHONY METIVIER PLANNING BOARD MEMBERS ABSENT CHRIS HUNSINGER ZONING ADMINISTRATOR-CRAIG BROWN SENIOR PLANNER-STUART BAKER CODE ENFORCEMENT OFFICER-BRUCE FRANK LAND USE PLANNER-SUSAN BARDEN STENOGRAPHER-MARIA GAGLIARDI MR. BROWN-I guess the first thing I’d like to do is start on one end and let’s everybody introduce each other. Maybe tell how much time you’ve sat on your respective Boards. The years of experience you have. MR. SEGULJIC-My name’s Tom Seguljic with the Planning Board. It seems like an eternity, but I think it’s been two years. MR. METIVIER-I’m Tony Metivier. I’ve been with the Planning Board for this will be my sixth year, I think. MR. GOETZ-I’m George Goetz. I’ve been on the Planning Board since March. MR. FORD-Tom Ford. I used to serve on the Zoning Board of Appeals. For the last nearly a year I’ve been an alternate, just recently appointed a full time member of the Planning Board. MRS. STEFFAN-I’m Gretchen Steffan. I was a Planning Board alternate for a year, and I’ve been on the Planning Board for a year. 1 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) MR. VOLLARO-I’m Bob Vollaro. I’ve been on the Planning Board for seven years, and it does feel like an eternity, by the way. MR. ABBATE-I’m Chuck Abbate, and I’ve been on the Zoning Board of Appeals for approximately six years. MR. BRYANT-I’m Al Bryant. I’ve been on the ZBA for six years. MRS. HUNT-Joyce Hunt. I was an alternate for three years and I think nine months now as a regular member. MR. MC NULTY-Chuck McNulty. To tell you the truth, I don’t remember for sure. It must be somewhere around seven years. I filled in a partial term and then started a new one. MR. RIGBY-Leo Rigby. I’ve been an alternate on the Zoning Board for about two and a half years. MR. STONE-I’m Lew Stone, on the Zoning Board, and it’s probably double figures. What’s the term, seven? It’s nine, nine and a half, close to ten. MR. BROWN-Thank you. I’ve probably spoken with each and every one of you at some point, had a conversation about some project or some application before you. You may have not spoken to our Staff over here. We’ve got Stuart Baker. He’s a Senior Planner who you see him from time to time when you have re-zonings, PUD’s. Stuart’s our specialty guy on those things. He’s been with the Town just over a year. Susan Barden who’s new. You see at all of your Planning and Zoning Board meetings. She is the Staff person that does all the Staff review’s, prepares the notes, does all the comments for both Boards, and she’s been with the Town about eight or nine months, I think, March of last year. Bruce Frank is the Code Compliance Officer. He’s the guy you’ll probably hear from a little bit later. Any time you guys do, make a decision, make an approval, send somebody off with a set of plans to build a project, Bruce is the guy that goes to the site and cracks the skulls until it gets done. Maybe not cracks the skulls, but he’s been with the Town for about four and a half years. MR. FRANK-Five years in July. MR. BROWN-Five years in July. Maria Gagliardi. You’ll be seeing her probably more and more now that she’s getting through her extra curricular schooling. She’s back to the Zoning Board meetings doing the stenographer stuff, and Maria’s a long timer her. She’s working on 15? MS. GAGLIARDI-Sixteen, Seventeen this year. MR. BROWN-Seventeen this year. Cumulatively, through all the Planning staff, building inspectors, all the support Staff, the administrative support Staff, I counted it up the other day, and there’s 18 employees. This counts the Animal Control Officer and the two Fire Marshals, who really don’t play a lot into what we do here, usually the Building Inspectors, but we’ve got about 160 years of just time in here at Queensbury, not counting the years that people bring of experience to the Town of Queensbury. So, having said that, the goal of this meeting, maybe we’ll let the two Chairman’s interject something if they want to before we get started here, but the goal was to try and bring both Board together, maybe outline, we’re going to try and outline some of the duties and responsibilities, at least in our first presentation here, what the Planning Board does, what the Zoning Board does. I think at least for some of you this may be refresher stuff. For others this may be entirely new information. I think there are some things that either Board isn’t aware that the other Board does or is responsible to do. So hopefully this sharing will help both Boards work together and get to the best project (lost words). I don’t know, do the Chairmen have anything they want to talk about in the beginning here? MR. VOLLARO-All I can say is from the standpoint of the Planning Board, I just hope that we are able to improve the quality of the Town over the years. That’s what we do here. We make sure that, you know, development is something that I hear, I got a telephone call the other day from a former applicant, you know, talking about the amount of development in Queensbury. There’s a general concern out there, and I think that we’ve got to pay attention to that. 2 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) MR. ABBATE-I don’t think I can add anything. Thank you. MR. BROWN-Okay. If you guys want to follow along, I did some note sheets for you. It follows basically slide for slide. The first one (lost words). What we’re going to try and talk about here are these six things. First of all the composition of each Board, the number of members, the creation, how they’re created, does the Town Board do it, is it State law that you have it, State law that you don’t have it . We talked a little bit about that. Jurisdiction for each Board, two types of jurisdiction we’re going to talk about, one with the Planning Board is called provisional jurisdiction and with the Zoning Board of Appeals we’re talking about appellate jurisdiction. So we’ll talk a little bit about that. In the back of these packets, there should be the applicable sections of New York State Town law that empowers both Boards to do the things that they do and basically outlines the do’s and don’t of each Board’s responsibility. The Queensbury Town Code, we talked about the Sections of Town Code that each Board is responsible with reviewing. I don’t see administrative. I guess that’s something that I do, but reviewing or consider when they do reviews for projects, okay. Open meetings, we talked a little bit, probably the most we’ll talk about tonight in this presentation is Open meetings. In our next presentation, which is about the same size, there’s a good article with one of our Town Counsel, Mark Schachner had published in New York State Planning and Zoning. So that talks a lot about Open Meetings and as I read the article, I was encouraged by all the good things and bad things that he references in there. We were pretty much doing all the good things now, and we stay away from the bad things (lost words) caution, so I think we’re pretty close to being on the right track. A lot of that stuff may be refresher stuff for most of you, but some of the newer members, not that you wouldn’t get to these points at some point, but it’s good information to have about any decision you make it should be made at the meeting, cautious about discussion outside the meeting and conversations with the applicant. We talked about that, and the last thing, we’ll probably have Stuart give us a little bit of an update on the continuing education. I think I’ve probably mentioned to both Boards the NYmer training, the New York Municipal Insurance Reciprocal training that basically provides for a certification for any Board that wants to partake in the certification process, and we have a couple of members of the Zoning Board, Chuck and Allan have completed it already. What it does is at the end of the course, if you have a certain percentage of your Board that has completed the course successfully, your Board gains this State certification that says we know what we’re doing. If nothing else, it will be our chance to be the only Board certified between Albany and Canada, pretty much? MR. BAKER-Yes, absolutely. MR. BROWN-So we’ll talk a little bit about that at the end. So I guess if we could jump right into the first slide there, if you would, Bruce. Board composition, the Planning Board. The Planning Board I have here discretionary creation, and what that means is any time there’s a Town, and the Town has a Town Board, the Town Board could act as the Planning Board. So, typically with Towns the size of the Town of Queensbury, Town Boards create and empower a Planning Board to do plan review, long term planning, which we do way more plan review, with our Planning Board, than we do long term planning, but we’ll talk a little bit about that later. So the creation of the Planning Board is at the discretion of the Town Board, and our Town Board chooses to have a Planning Board. Alternates. We’ve adopted, three or four years ago, a policy about alternate members, to try and keep seven members at the table at all times, to give the benefit of a full review to each applicant that comes before the Board. I think it works pretty well. I know, with the Zoning Board, Leo comes hours on end and sits in the audience, even when there’s a full Board there, just to log some time. So, I don’t know if there’s Planning Board members, the alternates, well, you don’t have any now, if the practice was to come and just watch as much as possible, which is good. The Zoning Board. The Zoning Board I have mandatory creation. What the State statutes say is if you have a Zoning Ordinance, you must have a Zoning Board of Appeals and the reason for that is not everything will fit in the Zoning Code. You’re going to have something that doesn’t fit in that box, and the Zoning Board of Appeals acts, and you’ve probably read this (lost words) municipal planning, and the Zoning Board acts as a safety valve. Before something explodes and people say your zoning is out of control, it’s too rigid, we can’t do anything, the Zoning Board is there to say, 24 feet instead of 30, okay, it seems reasonable. You can place it there. So that’s what the Zoning Board does. They grant relief from the requirements of the Code, if there’s a project that doesn’t fit within the bounds. The Planning Board, on the other hand, basically reviews a project that, if you look through the use tables, is an allowable use. You look down the Highway Commercial for auto sales, auto sales is allowed. The Planning Board reviews the project and says, okay, it’s going to function on the site, if it’s not going to be 3 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) disruptive to adjoining properties, Town traffic patterns, lighting, aesthetics, all those things. So that’s what the Planning Board does. Alternates. The same thing. The Zoning Board has alternates. We’re down to one now, and the Planning Board has zero alternates. So you guys, if anybody, know what the responsibilities and burdens are on you and your time to be a member, so if you know of somebody who may be interested in being a Board member, get them in, get them on the list. The Town Board will approve the list and make the choice for alternates. So, any questions so far? I’ll just try to keep moving. There’ll be time for questions at the end, but I’ll try and stop for questions. We talked a little bit already about the original and appellate jurisdiction. Original jurisdiction. What that means is an applicant wants to have a project reviewed. They come to us. We give them the application and bring it directly to the Planning Board. They’re the first ones to look at it. The first ones to consider an approval or not an approval. So that’s the original view of that application. The Planning Board has the first whack at it. Let me follow up with what the appellate jurisdiction is. The appellate jurisdiction means every application that the Zoning Board sees, the only way it can get there is if their project is denied. They need to come to me and say, I’d like to build my house in this location. It’s going to be this tall and this many square feet, and I review that against what the requirements of the Zoning Code are, and if it doesn’t fit in that box, it’s denied unless you can get relief from the Zoning Board of Appeals. (Lost words). Now you take my decision, you go to the Zoning Board and appeal it to their judgment. I’d like to do this project. It doesn’t fit your Zoning Code. So we’d like to see if we can get some relief from you. So the Zoning Board hears those appeals from a denied, that’s how they get to the Zoning Board, and that’s what appellate jurisdiction’s all about. They’re appealing a decision that they received on the project already. They don’t get to go directly to the Zoning Board. That goes the same if it’s, for instance, if it’s not a project, it’s what we call an appeal of a decision. If I render a decision that says, your use that you want to put on your property requires a Use Variance first, you can appeal that decision and you can take that decision to the Zoning Board and say I think the Zoning Administrator was in error. I don’t think I need a Use Variance. Please review this decision and tell me if he acted correctly, and then the Zoning Board can overrule, even though they know better, they can overrule any decision that I make. Anybody who wants to appeal, they can take it to the Zoning Board. So it’s true, some people don’t believe it. I do put a lot of time into thinking about the decisions I make. I don’t want them to end up at the Zoning Board, but sometimes there’s just an issue that’s so close it’s worth it for an applicant or an appellant to take it to the Zoning Board to either get the position that I’ve rendered confirmed or returned, if the Zoning Board sees it a different way. MR. VOLLARO-What about petitions? How does the Zoning Board of Appeals handle Petitions? I notice that, in 179, it mentions it, I think 179-16-050. MR. BROWN-What do you mean petition? MR. VOLLARO-Well, if a petition is put together to do a certain thing in the Town, for example, I’ll get right to the chase, on the 174 apartments that we have, I think there’s a petition being generated on that. Is that a petition that the Zoning Board of Appeals looks at? MR. BROWN-No. Any petition like that is probably geared towards the Town Board. If there’s an application put together, well, I don’t know, it depends on what the petition is. The petition could be in the format of an appeal. MR. VOLLARO-Yes, 179 talks specifically about petitions, and I was wondering if that fell under the Zoning Board of Appeals jurisdiction. MR. BROWN-If it’s in the format of an appeal, if I were to say render a decision that a use is allowable and rather than one person appeal it, a petition is formed, that’s (lost words). (lost words) to my determination, I guess it would go to the Zoning Board as an appeal. MR. VOLLARO-Okay. MR. BRYANT-Who makes the determination whether or not an application, if an application would have to go between, you know, before both Boards, who makes that determination as to which Board and how it’s, which Board and what the sequence is? I’ll tell you specifically why I’m asking this question, and that relates to The Great Escape, where I made the statement that, in my view, the signs should have been included in the original site plan review, and somebody from Staff, and I don’t remember who it was, said 4 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) that, well, that’s not the case, you have to grant, blah, blah, blah, and so forth and so on, and I still disagree with that issue, but it’s a done deal. So, who made that determination? MR. BROWN-I’d like to blame somebody else, but that’s a decision that I made. You raise an interesting point. Does or has the Planning Board put a lot of consideration into what are the signs going to look like on this project when they do their site plan review. I think they have. I think they could probably put more time into that, hopefully this will be taken as constructive criticism and not criticism, but in defense of that, a lot of times the applicant isn’t forthcoming with, here’s what my sign package is going to be. They have a generic plan, we want to get the buildings and the parking and the site set up. We’ll worry about the signs later, some people think that. You would think they would have that, their advertising part, put together at the beginning, and I think in the future, you know, one of the things we will discover at this meeting maybe one of the hotter topics we want to have, and the Planning Board would like to consider when they do a site plan review list, especially when it comes to SEQRA and the aesthetics of the SEQRA and the visual impacts, what’s your sign package going to be? Are you going to have 25 tall illuminated freestanding signs at the entrance? Are you going to have 500 square foot wall sign? What are they going to be? Not that they’re going to be able to be granting Sign Variances for excessive signs outside the Code, but at least the Planning Board could see, what are the visual impacts, what are the potential SEQRA impacts of the sign package, to go along with the rest of the site, with the site lighting, with size of the building, with the landscaping and clearing they do, that could be considered at that time. Should they do it? I think they probably could do it more. MR. BRYANT-But aren’t they required by law though? Doesn’t the site plan review include all the signs? And in reality, a site plan review can’t even be, you know, what do they call it when SEQRA, is it segregated? MR. VOLLARO-Segmented, segmentation. MR. BRYANT-Where you’ve already approved, given site plan review approval, and then you come back to another issue and look at that issue separately, and in this case I doubt the Planning Board is even going to go back and revisit those signs. MR. BROWN-I think you’re probably right that they won’t do that, but as I said, in future meetings, it’s a bigger button that perhaps (lost words), you know, some of that it’s based on the Staff notes, sometimes, there’s so many projects that both Boards look at and so many projects that Staff looks at. It’s tough to catch everything all the time. That’s not a good excuse, but that’s the reality of it. There’s just a lot to do and some things don’t come to the forefront as much as other things. MR. ABBATE-An excellent question that Allan has raised. Over the several last few days, the Zoning Administrator and the Chairman of the Planning Board and myself have pretty much agreed that that is probably the appropriate route to take, and in the future, I think it might be in the best interest of the Town of Queensbury that when signs become a part of the request, that the request immediately go, in spite of the fact that it may require a variance, go to the Planning Board, so that the Planning Board may make recommendations to the Zoning Board of Appeals. MR. BROWN-Yes. That’s something that we’ll talk about a little bit later. Yes, we have talked about that. A couple of the things I want to talk about, I think everybody’s comfortable with the fact that neither the Planning Board or the Zoning Board has any legislative authority. The Zoning Board can’t change the Zoning Code. They can’t make a new rule that says, all houses can now be 29 feet tall instead of 28, just because you’ve granted a variance, so one house over here is 29 and one over here that’s 29. You can still tell this guy in the middle no, if he wants 29, if his project, if his project just causes other impacts with these other two on either side. So by granting variances, it’s not legislative. It doesn’t change any law. Only the Town Board can do that. Likewise with the Planning Board. If we’re going to approve every mobile home park that comes through, well, if it’s an allowed use, you can certainly do that. It doesn’t mean that all mobile home parks are allowable. So there’s no changing of any rule that can be accomplished by either one of the Boards. You may get people arguing precedents before each Board, but, you know, each application you guys know that each application is individual. They all have different aspects that apply and situations they’ve created don’t apply to the same or similar application for the same use. So, there’s just no legislative. 5 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) MR. ABBATE-Yes. Since this is an informational meeting, the Zoning Board of Appeals also has jurisdictions over disputes involving boundaries as well as airport operations, in the Town of Queensbury. MR. BROWN-If you say so, but it certainly if there’s a, you are correct, if there’s a dispute over the location of a zoning district boundary, if you think the zoning boundary is here and you think it’s here, a request can be presented to the Zoning Board of Appeals to determine where is this district boundary. The Zoning Board is empowered to make that determination. I would suspect that they would seek some professional assistance, get some surveying done, some professional mapping done before that decision was made, but there is some authority to go to the Zoning Board to determine the district boundary lines, not Town boundary lines, zoning district boundary lines. Okay. Hopefully the next slide we’re going to see says New York State Town Law. MR. BRYANT-While you’re waiting for that screen, can I ask a question? MR. BROWN-Sure. MR. BRYANT-Somewhere in one of our, I think our last workshop, it was pointed out that the ZBA has subpoena authority. Does the Planning Board also have? Because I’m not really that familiar with the Planning Board at all. MR. BROWN-Yes, it’s not so much these Boards. It’s not much these Boards. The authority to compel witnesses to come and offer testimony is granted to the Chairman of the Boards, and typically that’s, maybe if you’re going to look for an expert testimony if you have an applicant that sends an agent all the time and the applicant doesn’t come to answer those hard questions about, are you willing to make these compromises for us to move forward with your project, the Chairman of either Board can compel them to come to the meeting and offer their testimony. It’s up to the Chairman how they want to proceed on that. New York State Town Law. These are the two referenced chapters, and there should be included, hopefully in the back of this package, Chapter 271, New York State Town Law, it spells out all the cans and cannots for the Planning Board, and 257 does the same for the Zoning Board of Appeals. So, that’s how the Boards are empowered to operate, by New York State Town Law, and that’s the rules that you have to follow, and it (lost words) a lot of what we’ve discussed, original jurisdiction, appellate jurisdiction. Included in the package here you’ll see I’ve included the e-mail address or actually the website address. It takes you right to New York State (lost words) Town Law (lost words) Article 16, which is Town Law. The next section, hopefully, is Queensbury Code. Planning Board. What the Planning Board is empowered to do in the sections of the Code that they’re required to consider in their review is Chapter 179. There’s a lot in 179. It’s not just in Zoning Code. 179 has all of our design guidelines, performance standards, parking requirements, landscaping, lighting, buffering, all that’s in 179. Along with the Zoning Code that the Zoning Board uses when they consider an application. So that’s one that they share, both Boards share. Section 183 is the section referencing the Subdivision Regulations, and that’s for the Planning Board, and these are the types of applications and reviews you’re going to see. Subdivision reviews, Planning Board, site plan review, petition for rezoning (lost words), pretty near down the bottom of the list, those don’t always automatically come before the Planning Board. Typically what’s happened with petitions for rezoning is, petitions for rezoning are requests to the Town Board to change the law. Please extend the zoning district boundary, please add a use to our zoning, and that can only happen by a legislative body which is the Town Board. Historically what the Town Board has done is they’ve referred that rezoning request to the Planning Board to make a recommendation, not an action by the Planning Board, it’s a recommendation to the Town Board, based on the planning views and the potential impacts of this rezoning, and that recommendation then has been presented back to the Town Board for their consideration when they make a decision on the rezoning request. Sometimes they go directly to the Planning Board from the Town Board. Sometimes the Town Board chooses not to refer it. So it depends on, a lot of times if there’s a project associated with it, if it’s a large request, a large (lost words), but large request for rezoning whether it’s acreage or a big change, so that’s usually what’s going to happen with a Petition for Rezoning. SEQRA is another thing that both Board share when you do, you know, any types of review, and (lost words). As everybody knows, that’s New York State Environmental Quality Review Act. MR. ABBATE-Just to clear something up, 179 is the Town of Queensbury law, but 179 Queensbury refers to New York State statutes 267, and so the Zoning Board of Appeals basically is guided by New York State statutes, which 179 defers to. 6 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) MR. BROWN-Okay. In 179, you’re going to find parts of 179 that affect the operations of the Zoning Board. You’re going to find the use tables. What are allowable uses? Can these uses be conducted on certain properties in certain zoning districts? Setbacks, permeability numbers, all those, the requirements and your Zoning Code, which is part of 179. The other parts are a lot of the design guidelines, performance standards, that you guys are familiar with on the Planning Board that you use to review most of the commercial projects, sometimes the residential applications, but as part of that 179, we’ll call it the dimensional and bulk requirements for sizes and setbacks. You get a variation of any of these applications, Area Variance. We’ll talk a little bit about that. I know the Zoning Board’s completely familiar, hopefully everybody’s completely familiar with what all these applications are, but for the Planning Board, Area Variance, if you have a project that doesn’t meet any one of the dimensional requirements of the Zoning Code, seek relief from the Zoning Board, using the mechanism of an Area Variance, too close to the property line, too tall, I have too much hard surface on my site, I don’t have enough parking, any of the dimensional bulk requirements, that’s an Area Variance. Use Variance, we have somebody who wants to do an auto sales facility in a Single Family Residential zone. It’s not an allowed use, so I make the determination that the use is not allowed. They apply to the Zoning Board of Appeals for relief because the actual use is not allowed by law on the property. The Zoning Board has a very strict test that’s set up by Chapter 267, a very strict test which this applicant must pass and the Zoning Board must ensure that they pass that test, before they can grant them a Use Variance. Sign Variance, very similar to an Area Variance. Again, it’s a dimensional, the Sign Variance and the Area Variance are virtually interchangeable. We just have it separate because it’s specifically for signs, but it’s a dimensional, it’s bulk, the sign’s too big, the sign’s too close to the property line, the sign’s too tall, need variance relief from the Zoning Board. Interpretations of Appeals, we talked a little bit about that before. We were talking about appellate jurisdiction, if it’s a decision rendered by myself, somebody doesn’t agree with it, and they certainly have the opportunity to take that to the Zoning Board and have that reviewed, and potentially changed or overturned by the Zoning Board of Appeals. Re-hearing, that’s kind of an odd request. I suppose we don’t get many of those, which is a good thing, I guess, and I think, I’m not sure if the Planning Board would consider re-hearings, but it’s basically, it is what it says it is. You have an applicant who is either not satisfied or looking to modify to some degree a decision that’s been made by the Zoning Board, they request that the Zoning Board re-hear that application, and it’s kind of an odd application in that it’s very onerous on the applicant to get this to happen. They have to get the Zoning Board to vote unanimously to, Number One, re-open the hearing, and then if they make any changes at all to the decision they rendered the first time, that decision has to be unanimous. So it has to be a good reason to open it up and a good reason to change it for the Zoning Board to go that way, but it is requested from time to time. SEQRA, most of the SEQRA reviews, actually the only SEQRA reviews that the Zoning Board performs are on Unlisted Actions which are basically Sign Variances. If you look through, and I think they’re listed in the SEQRA Cookbook. If not, we can get everybody copies of what are considered Type II Actions, which actually don’t require a SEQRA review by either the Planning Board or Zoning Board. The Sign Variance is not on the list. Now the Type I Action, which you guys had a workshop with, was it Mark Schachner who did the SEQRA workshop for you? Did he go through much of that or was it just the coordinated review that you guys talked about? MR. VOLLARO-Mostly the coordinated review. MR. BROWN-Coordinated review? Well, that could be a whole other workshop, SEQRA review, Type I, Type II, Unlisted, Coordinated, Neg Dec, Pos Dec, conditions. That could probably be a whole other workshop we could do, just on SEQRA, but I have it listed here as one of the reviews that the Zoning Board does. The two things at the bottom, I’ll jump back to the Planning Board for a second, and I alluded to this a little bit earlier. Plan review versus planning. Right now the majority of the work that the Planning Board does, if not the entire amount of work that the Planning Board does is planning review. The Planning Board has very little time and space on their agendas, even open meetings, to do planning or long range planning. Let’s think about, do we want to see a traffic study for the Town? Let’s review the build out analysis that was done for the Town and try and make some recommendations, maybe change some laws, maybe recommend to the Town Board we should focus on this type of development in this area or extend the infrastructure in this area to allow increased densities. The Board really doesn’t have a lot of time to do those things because we’re really bogged down with the amount of plan review that you do, Subdivision, Site Plans, all those things that you see, and you know as well as I do, in the middle of the 7 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) summer, you’ve got two full seven items agendas, and if anybody’s been downstairs in our office, you’ve seen the chalkboard that we have down there. There’s a whole queue of people over on the right side that are still waiting to get on the list in the summertime, so there’s really unfortunately not a lot of time to do some long range planning. Did you have a question, Bob? MR. VOLLARO-Yes. The Cookbook does address Unlisted Action, and the one part that jumps out at me, that I underlined some time ago is coordinated review is not required for Unlisted Actions. Sometimes we get into these coordinated reviews. MR. BROWN-It’s not required. MR. VOLLARO-We can ask for them, but it’s not a requirement. MR. BROWN-Yes. MR. VOLLARO-But it’s in there. It defines, it’s got, it’s a whole paragraph on the Unlisted. MR. BROWN-Does anybody have or not have or want a SEQRA Cookbook? We can do our best to dig some of those up. MR. VOLLARO-Pretty good document to have. MR. BRYANT-I have it on disc, if anybody wants it, I can e-mail it to them. MR. BROWN-Okay. That’s great. Policies and Procedures. I know the Planning Board has adopted officially a set of policies and procedures. Here’s how we act as a Board. I know the Zoning Board doesn’t have that. That’s why I have it listed on the Zoning Board side. It may be something you want to consider in the future is to maybe review the policies and procedures that the Planning Board has, and it basically deals with number of items you’re going to have on each agenda, the order that you hear things, alternates, who sits in the case of a vacancy, who comes back, if the regular member comes back, does the alternate stay? Policies and Procedures. It’s not Roberts Rules, but it’s a local policies and procedures for the Planning Board. We’ve had occasion to refer to it when we, the Staff has a question on how do we present something to the Planning Board (lost words). That may be something, I don’t know if anybody has a comment on that, but it sets up a format where everybody can know what to expect and know how to do something in case of an illness or somebody’s out, what do we do with this type of (lost words). I don’t want to just glaze over all this stuff and not try and answer questions. MR. ABBATE-Well, I’m sorry, before we continue, there’s one other thing I’d like, could you go back to the other slide for me, please. This is informational this evening. This is more for the Planning Board. It’s accurate, what’s listed up there, but what isn’t listed up there is the fact that we do have approval with conditions, and later on this evening we’d like to address that, particularly while I will recognize and admit, formally, that we have no enforcement authority, I would like to see, once we do have, approve something with conditions, that there is a follow-up and we are basically informed that the individual, the appellant, is complying with conditions, and if the individual is not, what’s being done about it. MR. BROWN-You must have been reading ahead here a little bit. MR. BRYANT-I’m sorry. I beg your pardon. MR. BROWN-That’s okay. The next slide, we’ll talk about that a little bit, but even more with the next presentation. Open meetings, and maybe I should have included it in this package, but in the other package that you have, there’s a, what I think is a great article that Mark Schachner authored and was published by the New York State Planning and Zoning report. It’s four, five pages long. It talks about open meetings, some good things, do’s and don’t’s. You’ve probably heard him say 10 times in those meetings, especially the Planning Board. After I read it, as I was reading it, there’s a lot of pitfalls and he says to try and avoid at a meeting, and we do a pretty good job of that. There’s a lot of positive things and correct ways to do things that we are doing. So I would encourage you to read it and think about how the Boards operate. There’s some good reminders in there. I would suggest you take the time to review it. Especially at the end he provides a quick, like one paragraph checklist of things to consider while reviewing applications. It’s tough to put it all in words here, without 8 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) reading it. Open meetings, public hearings. I think everybody knows any application that comes before the Boards is required, by our Town Code, to notice a public hearing, required that you notice everybody within 500 feet of the property, of the proposed action. They get a piece of paper in the mail, probably some of you have seen those for a project that your neighbor has had. That’s a requirement of the Town Code. MR. STONE-How do we guarantee that people get them, because the last couple of meetings, we’ve had people show up and say, I didn’t get notified. MR. BROWN-Well, I guess there’s only a few guarantees in life, but what we do is we have a pretty reliable computer software program and GIS program where we plug in the tax id of the parcel in question, and that generates, you know, we can pick any distance we want, but it generates a list of all properties that are within 500 feet of that subject property. MR. STONE-Any portion of the property? MR. BROWN-Any portion of any property, from the farthest distance of the property. They get notification. The confusion sometimes comes is those notifications go to the place, the address that we send the tax bill to. So, if you own a piece of property on Lake George and you have your tax bill sent to Florida, which is where you live the majority of the time, you come up here in the summertime, your notice is going to your Florida address. So if you don’t get it until three days after the meeting’s done, it’s unfortunate, but we’ve sent it to the address of record. They may not have the notification because it’s in their mailbox in New Mexico. MR. BRYANT-How far ahead do those notifications get sent out? MR. BROWN-They go out five days before the meeting. MR. STONE-Go out five days before the meeting. MR. BROWN-They’re supposed to be in hand five days before the meeting. We send them out approximately seven to eight days before the meeting is when we send them out so they’re in hand five days before the meeting. The public hearings are noticed in the newspapers. You’ve seen that. Those notices are 10 days before the meeting. Those notices go to the Post Star, 12, 13 days before the meeting to ensure that they’re at least there 10 days. So public hearings. Everybody knows you hold public hearings. The public hearings are to take public comment. Sometimes you get bogged down, and correct me if I’m wrong here, you get bogged down with trying to answer every single question that everybody from the public comes up and asks. You’re not encumbered to do that at a public hearing. You are required to allow time for public comment, take public comment. If you want to write them all down and sift through them and find the planning concerns in there that you think you want to have the applicant address, you can do that, but I guess hopefully you’re aware that you don’t have to answer every single question that comes up at the public hearing. If you think it’s a valid concern, pose it back to the applicant. Keep a list and read them back to the applicant and get answers. MR. VOLLARO-What about time limits on public hearings? Should we do it or shouldn’t we? MR. BROWN-That’s at the discretion of the Chairman. MR. VOLLARO-I’d sort of prefer to do that, give people at least, I guess five minutes is, if they can’t say it in five minutes. MR. BROWN-The Zoning Board gives everybody five minutes. MR. VOLLARO-Okay. MR. BROWN-They give them a chance to speak again if, again, at the discretion of the Chairman. MR. VOLLARO-Okay. 9 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) MS. GAGLIARDI-I actually have a timer that I use at the Zoning Board meetings, and I time them for five minutes and when the timer goes off. MR. ABBATE-Yes, I say, Ms. G., push the clock, and the five minutes go. Certain individuals we’ll only allow 30 seconds. We won’t use any names. MR. VOLLARO-I would just like to ask my Board how they feel about that, so I can get some feedback on some of these things real quickly. How do you feel about public comment being limited to a specific time period? MR. SEGULJIC-Four minutes. MR. MC NULTY-If you do it consistently, it causes people to be more concise. MR. VOLLARO-Yes. MR. MC NULTY-It makes them focus as long as you stick with it. MR. VOLLARO-Sure. MRS. STEFFAN-What happens when the complexity of the issue requires more than five minutes. MR. MC NULTY-Then we stretch it out, and the Chairman usually will say you can come back if you’ve got new information or other thoughts after you’ve listened to other people, but it gives you a tool to keep the long winded ones from just going off on a tangent. MR. FORD-If we’re going to do that, I’d like to have the timer. MRS. STEFFAN-Yes, I agree. MR. ABBATE-Mr. McNulty made a very important statement when he used the word, and it’s imperative for the Zoning Board of Appeals, consistency. I think that plays a very important role in controlling the hearings as well. MR. FORD-That’s what I’m getting at. It’s not an indiscriminate kind of thing if you’ve got the timer. MR. ABBATE-Well, all right. Actually I’m not being fair here. What the Zoning Board of Appeals does is this. Prior to the beginning of every hearing, the Chairman makes a statement advising the individuals in the audience what we are allowed to do by law and what we are not allowed to do by law, and then at the end of that, I make it quite clear to the public that they certainly will have an opportunity to respond to particular appeals, but they will be limited to five minutes, and then I turn to Ms. G. and I say, I’m going to give the responsibility to Ms. G. to time the five minutes. So that’s how I cover that, at the very beginning of the meeting. MR. BROWN-I’m going to take a couple of them together here, site visits and everybody’s favorite, if you read, if and when you read Mark’s article, he calls them out of school discussions. If you’re on a site visit and you happen to run into the applicant on site, and they want to talk your ear off about the project, just be comfortable knowing that you don’t have to go run in the car and plug your ears, but what you should do, and hopefully Mark has said this to you guys in the past. What you should do is when you come back from the public meeting or when you get to the open meeting and you have your public hearing, and you make any presentation to the rest of the Board or the public, put it on the record. When I was on my site visit, I saw Mr. Abbate there trying to twist my arm, (lost word) pool in his back yard, and you don’t have to go into all the details, but at least put on the record that you were there, you spoke to the person. There’s no, hey, I saw that person there, and what were they talking about. If it’s on the record, and you put it out there, there should be no problems with that. To go a little further with out of school discussions, hopefully nobody, no Planning Board or Zoning Board member ever has the urge to reach out to an applicant or an agent or an engineer or surveyor to ask questions about an application. Don’t do that. If you have a question about any aspect of any application, call Staff. We’re not involved in making the decision. You guys are involved in making the decision. Call us. We’ll get the information from them and get it to you in writing, so everybody knows what’s happened. If 10 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) there’s any time where you want to give somebody a call and just talk about the application, I’ll catch you. MR. METIVIER-Let me ask you a question. I had to find an engineer today, for a problem that I’m having, and I called Tom Jarrett. He’s in front of us all the time. I had to call an engineer for a problem with a house that I’m selling, and I couldn’t find anybody, so I looked in the yellow pages and saw Tom Jarrett’s name, and he’s in front of us all the time. It had nothing to do with an application. I’m allowed to do that, right? MR. BROWN-Sure. That’s the next thing we’ll talk about, the conflict of interest. Any time you feel that there’s any conflict with anybody that appears before you, or anybody’s going to perceive that there’s a conflict, you can certainly recuse yourself. Nobody can make you do that. Nobody can say, hey, I know you talked with Tom Jarrett about your septic system. You can’t vote on the application. Nobody can make you do that. If you’re uncomfortable and you think that somebody is going to perceive that you shop at this guy’s store all the time and you must be in with this guy, you can’t grant an approval, if you think that there’s even any perception that there’s a conflict, the safest thing to do is just say, remove yourself from the situation, and the best way to do that, and the way that you should do that is, at the meeting, when it comes time to hear the application, make a statement, I need to recuse myself. Here’s why. I have a conflict with this person. I’m in business with him. They’re my brother-in-law’s best friend, whatever the situation might be, just put it on the record so people know that you’re just not bailing out because you don’t want to act on it, and at the same time you’re not staying in when you think that there’s some conflict there. So make it clear. Put it on the table, again, I’ll refer several times tonight to that article that Mark wrote, make it clear. Make it at an open meeting directly. It’s called that for a reason. Everybody knows what’s going on when you make your decision. There’s no backdoor discussions. There’s no behind the scenes, put it on the table, all the discussions are out there, nobody has a question. MR. ABBATE-I’m pleased to say that every member of the Zoning Board of Appeals is well aware of perception of impropriety, and perception of impropriety, even though there may be no impropriety, can very well taint, if you will, the integrity of a particular Board. So all the members of our Board are very well aware of this kind of thing. MR. BROWN-And I hope that wasn’t accusatory, what I was saying. I was trying to explain. MR. STONE-Let me ask a question. We should leave the room if we recuse ourselves. We shouldn’t sit in the back, or should we? MR. ABBATE-No, you have to leave the room. MR. STONE-That’s what I think you should do. MR. ABBATE-You must leave the room. That’s statute, for the ZBA. Now I don’t know about Planning Board, but ZBA. MR. BROWN-Yes, I can check into that. Does your presence in the room represent some (lost words), I don’t know. MR. STONE-We’ve got a place to sit, we should just go out and sit. MR. BRYANT-How far do we have to go on that conflict of interest? Supposing I live in a neighborhood where there’s an application for a variance, and should I recuse myself just simply because I live in that neighborhood? MR. BROWN-Well, I can’t give you that answer. The only person that can decide whether there’s a conflict is you. MR. BRYANT-Well, I can give you a specific case where I was forced to recuse myself. MR. BROWN-Well, in that case, and we won’t talk about specifics (lost words) should do that tonight, if previously, at a meeting, or at other meetings, any statements of positioning have been made, I (lost words) do this because of this, and then an application similar to that statement comes up, you’ve kind of painted yourself in a corner by making a statement. 11 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) MR. BRYANT-I’m talking about the relationship between somebody that lives in the neighborhood and the applicant. I mean, how far do you have to go? MR. BROWN-If it were me, the safest thing would be, if I know the person, if I’ve seen them on the street and talked to them and said, you know, Happy New Year, I’m going to bail out. It’s not required. MR. STONE-Okay. So certainly, if you’re within the 500 feet, you should definitely recuse yourself. MR. BROWN-No, I didn’t say that. I mean, if it’s your neighbor, that’s an easy one. If they’re five houses away, it’s not as easy to say. You probably don’t know them. There’s no conflict. I can’t even see their property from mine, you have to gauge it yourself. MR. STONE-Okay. MR. MC NULTY-I think you’ve got to use some commonsense. State law says if there’s a financial conflict. So that’s the only definite thing. What I usually do is I think, well, am I going to feel funny if I deny this person’s application because I’ve seen them a lot or they’re a friend or whatever, and if the answer’s yes, I’m might feel funny, then I’ll pull myself out. If I can be fair, I’m inclined to stand my ground, because otherwise an applicant can shop for a right Board. I think you’ve got a conflict of interest, therefore you’ve got to recuse yourself. MR. ABBATE-You know me, I’d stop that. MR. MC NULTY-Yes, but I mean, you’ve got to, just because there’s a slight perception on the part of some person doesn’t mean you always should recuse yourself if you can defend. MR. BROWN-And usually a lot of those issues can be answered, and we haven’t talked about it yet, is voting. My suggestion on voting is, any time you’re going to take a position and make a vote, and I know that the Zoning Board does this, and I’m pretty sure the Planning Board does this, each of the Chairman’s usually say, let’s talk about this, start at one end of the Board and go around to the other end. Everybody puts their thoughts out there, not so much, well, maybe you can’t tell, it’s kind of a straw pole, where they’re going to vote on an application, but get it on the record. Get it on the record that, hey, this guy’s four doors away from me, but I wouldn’t know him if I tripped over him in the street. I know the address because it’s four house away from mine, and get it on the record that there’s no conflict, and that’s something you want to do during the voting process, and we’ll talk a little bit more about voting later, but when you’re going to vote, you always have a few choices. You can approve it. You can deny it, or you can table it, and I think, contrary to what the Planning Board’s probably heard from Town Counsel in the past, any time you do any one of those things, even tabling, you should do it by resolution, and I’ll tell you why. One of the things that probably nobody on the Board sees, maybe some people come down and see it is the file. Every application we receive, we keep a permanent file. When a member of the public comes in to review the process, the status of an application that’s been on hold for three months because they have new information to come in, it’s nice to be able to pull out a tabling resolution or a tabling motion that says, you were tabled on January 22, and you’re nd required to bring back, you know, a witch’s broomstick before you can come back, and table it to this date. Otherwise, if you move it to another date, table it to bring something, it’s difficult to do, administratively it’s a nightmare. If you’re going to make a decision, even a tabling, do it by resolution so you can track where in the process it is. MR. ABBATE-The Zoning Board has just changed our procedures recently that whenever we do table something, and there are conditions, we now list what the conditions are, so that the individual who comes before us again can’t say, well, I really didn’t know what you were talking about, and I’m going to give credit to the Zoning Administrator because he chastised me about a month ago, saying, look, when you table this stuff, you can’t do what you’re doing, because you have to include specifics. So we have been doing this now for about a month. MR. BROWN-Well, there’s fairness there to two people. There’s fairness to the Zoning Board or the Planning Board, they know what to expect. There’s fairness to Staff who knows what we’re supposed to be getting and requiring from these applicants, and it’s fair to the applicant to know what they have to do before they come back. If you table them and say we want to 12 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) see a nicer plan, what does that mean? It means something different to them than it means to you, but if you say we’re going to table because we want to see a smaller footprint, we want to see a shorter building, we want to see more landscaping in this area, give them a laundry list. They want to do the project, give them some direction. MR. FORD-It’s also informative to the general community. MR. BROWN-Exactly. MR. STONE-Absolutely. You say you’re going to talk about voting, but let me get this thought in. On every resolution there should be, we have a full Board, there should be seven votes. This is not like a Roberts Rules committee, it is everybody votes. MR. BROWN-That’s correct, everybody votes. One of the things I had written on here, I was going to talk about is abstaining. Why abstain? If you’re not comfortable acting on the application, recuse yourself. If you abstain because you don’t have enough information, and you don’t want to vote because you’re not comfortable, make the motion to table it. Maybe somebody else isn’t comfortable, either, but abstaining seems, you know, if there’s a conflict, recuse yourself. MR. STONE-Okay, but everybody should vote. MR. ABBATE-Let me re-phrase that. According to statute, Zoning Board of Appeals, every individual sitting on the Board must vote and their vote must be recorded and must indicate why they made that particular decision. So you’re right, and one step beyond right. MR. BROWN-Well, some of that comes down to the next thing we’ll talk about, decisions based on. MR. ABBATE-I’m sorry. Can I go one step further on this? MR. BROWN-Sure. MR. ABBATE-And you alluded to it earlier. The Zoning Board of Appeals, as far as I’m concerned, every member makes every effort not to pre-position themselves, and you started to allude to it, but you really didn’t explain it pre-positioning. I’m ahead of myself? I’m sorry. MR. BROWN-Decisions based on evidence of record. MR. RIGBY-Can I ask a question, too, before you get into that? MR. BROWN-Sure. MR. RIGBY-Move it back a step. There’s been a lot of discussion about what’s appropriate, as far as attendance at Zoning Board meetings and attendance at Planning Board meetings and Town Board people being at meetings and all those types of things. It’s probably more of a question for Mark Schachner than for you. I don’t know, but what is the presumption? I mean, is it okay for Zoning Board members to be at Planning Board meetings? Is it okay for Planning Board members to be at Zoning Board meetings? Is it okay for Town Board members to be at Planning Board meetings and Zoning Board meetings? MR. BROWN-Absolutely. Part of this open meetings that we haven’t talked about here is something that you have to have before you can have a meeting is a quorum. You have to have a majority of the number of members of the make up of the Board present in order to have a meeting, and in the Zoning Board and Planning Board’s case, you have to have at least four people present before you can have a meeting, before you can make any decisions. So, as long as you don’t go as four members to a Zoning Board or Planning Board meeting, I don’t see that as being a problem. This may be a question for Mark, but for instance if we had one more Town Board member here tonight, then what they would have had to do is notice it as an open meeting. We are going to go, as the Town Board, to this workshop, it would probably just be put as part of the workshop, because there is a quorum. You have enough members of a Board present to make a decision, not that there’s any decisions on the Board for either one of you to make right now, but because we had more than four Board members from each Board present at one time, we had to notice this as an open meeting. 13 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) MR. RIGBY-So once it’s noticed as an open meeting, it means it’s open in general, Town Board members, Planning Board members, it doesn’t have to be specific, or does it? MR. BROWN-Well, what you want to do at an open meeting is notice what the meeting’s for. Everybody saw the advertisement for this. It was for a joint workshop between Planning Board and Zoning Board. We may have talked a little bit about some of the things that are on the agenda, but it is a notice that Board members are going to get together to talk. Not a public hearing. You’re not encumbered to take public comment tonight. No public hearing’s been noticed, but I know what the meeting says, we’re going to get together to talk about stuff. So everybody knows that we’re not here trying to be secret, trying to make these decisions without having the door open for them to come and listen if they want. MR. STONE-Yes, but as Mark has said to us on many occasions, don’t talk about current actions. If you want to use examples, go with something that’s been decided. MR. BROWN-Correct, and like I said, there’s no applications in front of us on tonight. You guys have nothing to decide on tonight, and we’re here to do our best to keep you from talking about any specifics of anything that’s current. Just to avoid that. MR. METIVIER-So, let me ask you a question. We were, as a Planning Board, reprimanded at one point from our Supervisor for going out for a drink after a meeting? We really can’t do that, can we? We, as a Planning Board, one night the meeting got out early, and we decided to go out for a drink after the Planning Board meeting, and we were reprimanded for it later on, and according to what was just said, we actually can’t do that. MR. BROWN-Yes. I don’t know the answer to that. MR. BRYANT-I think it depends on what you drink. MR. MC NULTY-It depends, more importantly, on what you discuss. MR. METIVIER-Well, who cares what we discussed? If it wasn’t anything to do with the Planning Board, it’s nobody’s business. We’re five guys that went out for a drink, and we get reprimanded for it. MR. BROWN-I think, you know, if everybody gets invited to a Christmas party and everybody comes to Chuck’s house because he’s going to be generous, but if everybody goes to Chuck’s house for a Christmas party, do we have to note that as an open meeting? No, I mean, there’s no. MR. ABBATE-Let me ask this question. Is there any impropriety when the Chairman of the Zoning Board of Appeals has to pay for the lunch of the Zoning Administrator and the Chairman of the Planning Board? Is that impropriety? Is there any reimbursement? (LOST WORDS) MRS. STEFFAN-I find it interesting because we’re all interested in our community, and I know there’s been several discussions over the last year or so about these issues, and, you know, there are Planning Board issues that come up that are very controversial in the Town, and I don’t have any problem with seeing all the Town Board members in the room or any Zoning Board members. I mean, it’s just we’re all concerned about community. That’s one of the reasons why we sit on this Board. So I think it’s silly, in some respects, for us not to be able to be in the same place at the same time, and obviously I think it’s reasonable for us not to discuss open cases. I don’t think we need to be scared. MR. GOETZ-Doesn’t this go down to commonsense? MR. BROWN-A lot of it. MR. VOLLARO-Sure. MR. STONE-Yes. Well, I always say to people, as a member of a Board, we don’t give up any of our rights as citizens, and that certainly would be going out to have a drink with a 14 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) couple of friends, but it’s, again, perception. We talk about it all the time. What does somebody else think that you’re doing there. MR. ABBATE-This is the basic rule. If I have to make a decision, it will be like this. What’s in the best interests of the Zoning Board of Appeals, and then I will make that decision accordingly. If I have to recuse myself from something, even though I may not have to, if it’s in the best interest of the ZBA and its members, I’ll do it. MR. BROWN-Okay. I mean, you obviously have to keep in mind the best interest of the applicant that’s before you. That’s why you’re there, to discuss their case. MR. ABBATE-Sure. MR. BROWN-So if it’s in their best interest, too. Decisions based on evidence of record. We’re all unfortunately familiar with the legal process that they call an Article 78, but for those of you who aren’t, what an Article 78 is, is if an applicant appears before either Board and they’re dissatisfied with the outcome of that decision, and it doesn’t have to be the applicant, it can be any aggrieved party, if you approve my project, and my neighbor doesn’t like it, he can file what’s called an Article 78, and what that is, that’s a lawsuit which is filed with the Warren County Supreme Court that says I don’t agree with what the Planning Board or Zoning Board says, so please re-hear their decision. See if they acted according to the statutes set forth not to displace your judgment, but to make sure that you acted accordingly and your decision was based on evidence of record. So why is this a big thing? The first thing that any Article 78 judge is going to do, look over the minutes of the meeting and read what everybody said and what the information in the record shows as to how they based their decision, what they based their decision on. If there’s somebody that says, I’m going to (lost words), that’s not good. That’s not good. So you want to make sure that the decision making process that you use is obviously based on that criteria that you’re bound by, but get all that stuff on the record. The last thing that, if your Counsel was here, he would tell you, the last thing that Counsel wants to have in their pocket when they go to defend an Article 78 is a one page of minutes that says, motion to approve, yes, yes, yes, with no discussion, no basis for the decision, no discussion of the approval, no, here’s why we approved it. Even though there was a lot of public comment against it, we still found it met the criteria, it fit the Ordinance, it’s an allowable use. Here’s why we still voted yes. You just have to make sure that that’s based on the record. It shouldn’t be based on personal preferences, personal observations. Is that going to be part of your decision making process, hopefully it is. Hopefully you can draw on, you know what, I’ve been to Joe Schmoe’s restaurant in Kentucky, they do a nice project, quality restaurant, I’m familiar with it, I know what that’s about, that’s not why you’re going to vote for it, but in your decision making, you’re going to remember that the site was nice. This is a franchise, it’s going to hopefully be similar to that. We can draw on the information you have. (Lost words) some of that’s going to come into your decision making process, but you don’t want to base your decisions on that entirely. It’s got to be, you know, the Zoning Board has five criteria for an Area Variance, four for a Use Variance. That’s what you based your decision on. Planning Board, there’s three pages of criteria that you’re supposed to review, and you do, with each application, here’s why we’re going to make this decision to either approve or deny the project, it meets SEQRA. You’ve got all your landscaping and your stormwater. You’ve got all these things, and you want to make sure that’s in the record. MR. ABBATE-Yes. I want to clear that up a little bit, if I may. Well, the Zoning Board of Appeals is much different than the Planning Board. The Zoning Board of Appeals is a quasi- judicial Board, and New York State law mandates that the only decision we can base a decision on is the evidence that is contained in the record. If it’s not contained in the record, we cannot take that into consideration, and the reason I’m emphasizing that, as a quasi- judicial Board, we are subject to judicial subject to judicial review. So consequently, we don’t have any wiggle room with 276. We have to comply with the law, and our Board members base their decisions on the evidence contained in the record. Now that includes, of course, testimony as well, but outside of that. MR. STONE-Yes, but it includes our testimony, too. MR. ABBATE-Of course. MR. STONE-That’s what I’m saying. 15 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) MR. ABBATE-When I say the record, I mean, the entire proceedings, that kind of thing. Sure. MR. BRYANT-I want to extrapolate a little bit on what Chuck just said, or Mr. Abbate. There have been instances, in the last couple of months, and even prior to that, that I can recall, where an applicant has been before the Planning Board or has been before the Zoning Ordinance in another hearing that wasn’t necessarily relative to their current application, and we don’t get the minutes for those meetings, the Planning Board and so forth and so on, and some of them are not on the website. So my question is, with that little line in mind, that our decision is based strictly on the evidence, shouldn’t that information from the Planning Board and from a subsequent hearing, shouldn’t that all be included in our package, so it’s part of the record? I’d like to know what the Planning Board said about an application before they came to us, so I know what their attitude is, what they’re looking for. MR. BROWN-Well, that’s hopefully something that we’ll talk about later, but the answer to your question, logistically, sometimes that’s just not possible. If you have an applicant that’s before the Planning Board, and right now they go before the Zoning Board before they go to the Planning Board, but the time it takes to get the minutes transcribed from the tape depends on the length of the meeting, the number of applications, Maria’s existing other workload. So to turn a set of minutes around from a meeting from seven o’clock to one o’clock in the morning in a week, that’s just not possible, and you have one Planning Board meeting and a Town Board meeting to do that to, I’m sorry, a Planning Board and Zoning Board meeting, you do that twice in two weeks, that’s just a lot to do, so to get it turned around, should you have one, ideally, sure, you want to have as much information as possible to make your decision. The fact that they’re not there, is that going to alter your decision making process if it comes to a lawsuit. If it’s not in the record and you didn’t consider it, then it doesn’t have any effect on your decision. Should you have it? If it’s possible, yes. We’ll try and get it to you, but sometimes it’s just not possible to turn around. If you really want to know, go to the Planning Board meeting. MR. BRYANT-Well, that’s ridiculous because there are other ways. I mean, if you had a, and I’ve discussed this with Susan a couple of times, if you had a search engine on your website for the minutes that are on the website, there’s no way to search them. You have to open up every single set of minutes for a year for both Boards. It’s ridiculous, okay, if there was a search engine. You’ve got a Y FI situation here. I know McNulty brings his laptop. I refuse to bring my laptop because I’d like to be able to search these files, and maybe Maria can’t type the minutes and turn them around in a week, but if we had the ability to access certain areas in the Town server, we might be able to search those ourselves. MR. BROWN-Okay. MR. BRYANT-So those are just recommendations. MR. BROWN-Okay. We’ll just try and keep moving here so we can get on to the next one. Decisions based on the evidence of record. (Lost words) pre-disposition. Pre-disposition, what’s that mean. That means giving the perception to the applicant or anybody in the room that you’ve made up your mind before you’ve heard the evidence. I’m not saying anybody does that, but ideally what you want to do is, after the applicant’s made a presentation and you’ve opened the public hearing, you’ve taken public comment, now’s the time for the Board members to release, ask their questions, discuss it amongst themselves. A big no no is to have a Planning Board member, before the public comments opened, before the applicant has time to make a presentation, come out with a statement that I don’t think there’s enough information in your application here. I don’t like your drawing on Page Four. So we’re going to go ahead and table this, okay. That doesn’t happen, but that’s certainly an extreme that you don’t want to do. You want to get the information, and then assert your position. You don’t want to say, or give the impression, you don’t like a project, or do like a project before the public hearing is open and the Board’s had the chance to get as much information, or at least appear to have gotten all the information they need to make a decision. That’s just a cautionary thing. You don’t want to give that perception that you’re, again, this is another open meetings thing, you don’t want to give that perception that you’ve met at Cool Beans and you guys have talked about this and everybody’s already decided before you open up the meeting. You don’t want to give that perception. So that’s why I just wanted to talk about (lost words). Workshops, that’s what we’re doing right now obviously. Another form of open meeting. You notice it. Everybody knows what you’re there for. You publish an agenda, at least a general agenda to talk about what you want to do, and hopefully by the end of the 16 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) night, maybe somebody’s keeping some notes over there, I’m trying to jot down some notes, too, here. If anybody has a topic they want to talk about. If they want to talk about conflict of interest. If they want to have the attorney here to talk about SEQRA, do a workshop, maybe by the end of the night we can generate a list of future workshops that maybe it’s another joint workshop, maybe it’s just a SEQRA one for the Planning Board or Zoning Board, because you guys have a SEQRA. We’ll see how it goes, but ideally we’ll come up with a list of workshops that we can do throughout the year, if there’s slow times. Executive session. A lot times when you have the dreaded Article 78, there’s going to be a time when Town Counsel may want to come and either update you on the status, if you have questions for the Counsel on pending litigation. That’s one of the times the Board can go into Executive session. I have it under open meetings because you certainly don’t want to hold an Executive session, and there’s a process to do that, if either Board’s done it before, a motion to go to Executive session, you vote on it, just like any other motion, you go into Executive session, you’re done, you vote to come back out to the regular meeting. There’s only certain times you can do that. You can’t, obviously, go to Executive session to talk about an application. I have a list of eight or nine things here that do allow you to go to Executive session, and the big ones are, pending litigation. It doesn’t really apply to these Boards, but, you know, employment history, financial decisions that say a Town Board would make, purchase of property, criminal investigation, those types of things where if you talked about it in an open forum, it might compromise the outcome of the decision. So those you’re entitled to take into Executive session to hear those. Again, I’ve got it under open meetings because you don’t want to be talking about applications that are pending at an Executive session. MR. ABBATE-Yes. As a matter of procedure, again, I don’t know about the Planning Board, but when the Zoning Board of Appeals goes into Executive Session, it must make a public announcement to the public there, the purpose of the Executive Session. That’s a prerequisite. MR. BROWN-Yes. As I said, make a motion, vote on going into the Executive Session, and vote on coming out of the Executive Session. Typically, it’s not going to be in the same room. You’re going to adjourn to a private or secure location, but it comes up so rarely we don’t need to dwell on it too much, but I know that it’s a buzz word that flies around sometimes, maybe we should talk about this in Executive Session. Certainly both Boards have the authority and the availability to do that, but you’re limited by New York State statutes, on what things you can talk about in those Executive Sessions. MR. RIGBY-The procedure to go into Executive Session is for someone to make a motion and that gets seconded and then it gets voted on? MR. ABBATE-Yes, I would have to make a motion to go into Executive Session and that has to be seconded, and then we’d have to vote on it, but prior to leaving, I’d have to make a public announcement to the folks why we’re going into Executive Session. I don’t have to have to give them details. I could say it might be attorney client privilege. MR. RIGBY-So you would typically make the motion, the Chairman would make the motion? MR. ABBATE-I have to, yes. MR. BROWN-Well, you don’t want to give them specifics about it. You don’t want to just say, I’m going into Executive Session to talk about litigation. You really want to say it’s about, I’m going to talk about Joe Smith’s lawsuit, but I think you need to. MR. ABBATE-I didn’t say litigation. I said attorney client privilege. There’s a difference. MR. BROWN-What’s the difference? MR. ABBATE-Well, the difference basically is the attorney has told us something that’s made it clear that we can’t discuss it in public. MR. BROWN-I don’t know if that’s an acceptable method to go to Executive Session. MR. ABBATE-Yes, we can. As a matter of fact, it almost came up at our last meeting. 17 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) MR. BROWN-What are you going to talk about in the attorney client privilege? Is it one of the items that? MR. ABBATE-A question came up, one of the Board members had a question, wanting to know whether we could discuss a certain portion, and I basically said, without going into Executive Session, whispered, we can’t discuss that because that’s attorney client privilege, and it was actual fact that we received a letter, some of you may recall at our last meeting. MR. BROWN-Did you want to add something, Roger? You guys do this a lot more. ROGER BOOR MR. BOOR-Well, typically it would be another category. You have Executive Session material and then you have Attorney Client privilege. At the Town Board level, Attorney Client privilege is not something that’s really extended into Executive Session. MR. BROWN-Okay. Well, that’s what we have on this slide. The next thing hopefully we’ll come to is the Continuing Education. MR. SEGULJIC-Excuse me, can I ask a quick question? MR. BROWN-Sure. MR. SEGULJIC-I hope it’s a quick question. Discussions with the general public. I assume as long as we’re just discussing the facts of the application it’s okay. MR. BROWN-At the meeting? MR. SEGULJIC-In the general public. You’re outside the meeting, someone says I understand such and such application is coming up. You say, yes, it includes, they’re going to put a building there, this and that. Nothing at all? MR. BROWN-Nothing about it at all. Just say, I’m sorry, I can’t talk to you about it. MR. SEGULJIC-Okay. MR. BROWN-That’s an out of school discussion. MR. METIVIER-That’s public record, though. It’s on the meeting next week. MR. BROWN-Yes, but you guys, everybody sitting at these tables, are the people that are empowered to make a decision on that application. You don’t want to talk about it with anybody. Commonsense, again, you may be having the most innocent conversation that says, here’s the bare facts of the application, to answer your question, they just want to put a house there, yes, but Chuck can’t here what we’re saying over there, and he sees me talking to you, he knows that you’re a Planning Board member and you’re talking about my projects with me, or my neighbor of the project. He doesn’t know what we’re talking about. The perception that you’re getting some insider information on this project is such that you just want to avoid that. If you do, if you talk to somebody and you have discussions, you come to the meeting and say, hey, I saw Roger at the store the other day, yes, I talked to him about this project, and here’s what we talked about generally. You don’t have to do a verbatim discussion of what you did, but now everybody knows that you talked about it. MR. SEGULJIC-So really I should just say call the Planning Department for details. MR. RIGBY-When somebody outside of the Zoning Board asks me a question about an application, I say, yes, there’s an application on the table. If you want to know about it, call Craig Brown. MR. STONE-Yes. I mean, we can acknowledge that it’s on for Wednesday night, period. MR. BROWN-Sure, but giving the details of it, you want to avoid that as much as possible. They’ve got you in a corner and you want to give them a response, limit it, and if you talk any specifics, just bring it up at the meeting. 18 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) MR. ABBATE-Yes. Leo made a good point, or, Lew, I’m not sure. It’s advertised. The public knows before we have a hearing the name of the individual, if there’s going to be an attorney there, the number of the variance, the kind of variance it’s going to be, and what the applicant is looking for. So that’s no big secret. So, you know, you guys are right. MR. STONE-Yes, it’s on the agenda. MR. BROWN-Last slide in this presentation, Continuing Education. I’ll have Stuart give you a presentation. MR. BAKER-Good evening. You may all recall, in fact, about a year ago, I first spoke to both Boards about the NYMIR Pace University training program, and at that point we put it all out there. We wanted to get both Boards, the majority of the members of both Boards certified in 2005. It didn’t happen. To date we’ve had participation in this training from only five individuals and they’re all on the Zoning Board. Of those five, two are certified and that’s Chuck Abbate and Al Bryant. Actually Chuck was the first certified in June of this past year. Al was shortly behind him in August. The third to be certified is going to be Joyce Hunt. Who’s now completed five of the nine sessions. Jim Underwood and Roy Urrico are also working on it. Why do I point this out? As Craig mentioned early on in the meeting, very few communities in the northern part of the State are working on this. Why? Well, primarily because Pace University is the primary sponsor, is down in the Lower Hudson Valley and surprise, surprise, all the communities that are currently certified Boards, Planning Boards and Zoning Boards, are in the Lower Hudson Valley. We’d like to be the first community with certified Boards up in the northern part of the State. In fact, I’m certain we would be the first anywhere north of the Thruway. So with that, I would ask all of you to please take advantage of this opportunity. We need Board members to do five of nine of these sessions. They aren’t, as a whole, they aren’t designed to be that time-consuming. They’re designed for volunteers, and they’re designed to provide useful information. I think you’ll find, as you go through this, that there’s some good stuff in here, and it’s stuff you can hang on to and use as future reference. You’ve all received the materials. Please do continue working on them. If you haven’t started, please do so, because we would, again, like to get both Boards certified, and to certify both Boards, what do we need? We need a majority of each, of the members of each Board, that’s four of the seven regular members on each Board. MR. STONE-So we’re almost there. MR. BAKER-The Zoning Board is almost there. I suspect the Zoning Board will be there within three months. We need at least four of the seven regular members of each Board to complete at least five of the nine training modules. So I’m here to encourage and to, I guess to some extent to (lost word). This is a great opportunity for both Boards to get a lot of public recognition for your efforts. Certainly you do get a lot of recognition from Staff and from the Town Board especially for the hours upon hours that you put in as volunteers to this community, and we can’t tell you enough how important your service to the Town is. By getting certified, it’ll give us an opportunity to (lost word) the community, not only are they putting in hours upon hours at these Board meetings, but they’ve taken the time and they’ve taken the effort to become the first community north of Albany to become certified in the NYMIR and Pace University program. So please let’s do continue with this. I’d love to see both Boards certified by the end of 2006. As you finish sections, get them to me, turn them into Staff at meetings. They will get them to me. I will grade them. I will give you the next section, and again, individual members only need to complete five of the nine sections, although I should point out that both Chuck and Al, in getting their certification, completed all nine modules. So that ends my pitch, and I hope I’ll see more of the completed sections coming my way before long. Thank you. MR. BRYANT-Stu, you know, I just want to comment on the course. The course was fabulous. It really opened my eyes. Prior to even taking the course, I really had no clue, okay, but I still have relatively little clue, but one of the ways that you could have done this, when we have these workshops, why not do some Power Point on the course, let them take their test and turn in their test, and that’s how you certify these Boards. MR. BAKER-That is a way we could approach it, and if folks would prefer to do it that way, we certainly can. We’ve been, we being Staff, have intentionally been pushing this doing it on your own, at home approach because frankly we thought it would be more convenient. 19 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) MR. BRYANT-Well, I made the comment at our last workshop, which was actually the first workshop that I ever attended in the almost six years that I’ve been on the Board, that we don’t have enough education to sit on these Boards. A lot of the new members, I had no experience with Codes. I have plenty of experience with construction, but no real experience with zoning or any of that. So it would behoove the Town to put in place some kind of training for the two Boards, so that they can learn what their duties. These workshops are great. MR. BROWN-Yes. I don’t know if Stuart mentioned before, but any of the New York State Planning Federation conferences, and I know some of you Board members have been to them, all of them are open to any Board member that wants to go. We try to get those notices out to everybody. Typically, there’s a yearly convention in Saratoga (lost words) the last three or four years. They offer all kinds of Department of State classes that talk about areas, case law, (lost words). MR. BAKER-Sustainable development, the newer. MR. BROWN-They offer all kinds of classes on these things, and if there’s times that you can make those, the Town pays you to go to those, they’re all open. MR. BAKER-As we see opportunities (lost words) we make a point of forwarding them to your attention so please take advantage of those. MR. BROWN-And maybe to the extent, the Town Board certainly could mandate training. I mean, that’s an option that possibly they could. They could say, Zoning Board, Planning Board, you must take this training and you must have at least six hours of refresher courses of reading. They could. I don’t know if it’s been demonstrated that there’s a big void where you’d have to have some training, but it’s a possibility. MR. BRYANT-I think somebody should do a study on the cost of defending these Article 78 situations. MR. BAKER-Well, that’s a very interesting point. One of the sponsors of this program is the New York Inter-municipal Insurance Reciprocal, which is an municipality owned insurer. Why did they join with Pace University on this? To reduce liability and reduce lawsuits. MR. BRYANT-So it might behoove the Town to say, okay, the Boards, instead of meeting two weeks a month, every other month they meet a third week and they do training, and in order to offset the costs of these Article 78’s and other issues, liability issues, it might behoove them to do something like that. MR. BAKER-And that’s certainly, again, something the Town Board could consider. Again, we proposed this approach as a voluntary approach, and we strongly encourage you to take advantage of this. I should also point out that within the last couple of legislative sessions Albany there have been bills floating in and out of committee that would, indeed, require mandatory training for Zoning Boards and Planning Boards across the State. To date those haven’t gotten out of committee, but they keep coming back. So in terms of State law we may be headed in the direction of mandatory training, but if more communities took advantage of voluntary opportunities for training we wouldn’t need such standards. MR. ABBATE-Stu, let me make a statement here. It doesn’t really matter how much training or education an individual has on the Zoning Board of Appeals. The decision to go to a 78 is generally based upon an attorney who has been hired to go to 78, and the 78 is merely an attempt to have the Supreme Court take a look at our proceedings in a judicial review. So, we have to be careful that, all the training in the world that we have doesn’t guarantee there will be no 78’s. That’s a decision solely made by the appellant and his attorney. MR. BAKER-Absolutely true. MR. BROWN-Again, it’s just another tool out there available to the Boards to make a decision. It’s best to have much information as possible. MR. ABBATE-Absolutely, and I’d like to give some publicity to the ZBA. We have been 100% successful in appealing Supreme Court decision, which the Appellate Division voted in our favor, and overturned the Supreme Court decision, I’m proud to say. 20 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) MR. BAKER-Thank you. MR. BROWN-Thanks, Stuart. The second presentation I put together for you guys is approval process. What this is is kind of an overview of every application that comes before both Boards goes through a process in our office downstairs, right from the telephone call that says, hey, what do I need to do if I want to put a K-Mart in Town, right through to the end when it’s done and we give them their CO and we follow up next year and the year after to make sure that (lost words). We’ll go through that now. I kind of broke it down into approximately nine different sections, the project review. Concept (lost words) that’s the telephone call. That’s the, hey, would you come over to my site and look at this with me. That’s the stop in the office, what do I need to do if I want to do this on my property. Based on that information, we issue a determination. You need A, B, C. Pre-submission conference, we know what those are. Deadline date, we’ll talk about that. We’ll talk about how we go through and process the agendas, descriptions, public hearing notices, all those things that we touched on a little bit already. Staff review, Staff notes. Talk a little bit about Board review and decision making processes, there, again, we talked about that already, but we can talk some more on that, it’s worth talking about. Applicant follow-up, what responsibilities the applicant has after they leave this room, and then Staff follow-up and Staff signoff, what responsibilities Staff has after you guys make your decision, approval or denial. So concept discussion (lost words). It comes in a variety of things. We’ll get telephone calls, office visits, site visits. We’ll get people with specific requests. We’ll get generic, we’ll get e-mails, we get all kinds continuously every day. Everybody over there at that Staff table receives a half a dozen phone calls every day about, here’s my tax map number, what’s my zoning, what can I do. So that’s a continuous thing we get all the time. Sometimes they turn into building permits. Sometimes they turn into site plan review applications. Sometimes they turn into variances. So, it always starts with that first, what do we need to do? So that’s, and I want to go through each one of these steps to kind of show the amount of time that goes on with an application behind the scenes, other than the 20 minutes an applicant may spend before the Board or the two hours they may spend before your Board talking about their application. Likely there’s been four or five hours that they’ve spent either with Staff or in your preparation of the application because of the process, before they even come to the Board. So the next thing we’ve got to talk about is determination. Chuck talked a little bit about any review or any application which appears before the Zoning Board has to be based on a decision that I make. The way we do it now is relatively informal, and that has caused some difficulties. We’re moving towards a more formal decision. What the State law and probably case law is going to tell you that every decision, every application, has to have that. If an applicant appears before the Zoning Board of Appeals and they don’t have in their possession a letter from me that says no, you can’t do this, you need a variance, it’s probably going to get kicked out at the Appeals level if somebody doesn’t like the decision the Zoning Board made. They’re going to go back to the applicant and say, okay, where’s your original denial that put you on the docket to get before the Zoning Board of Appeals? We don’t always do that in a formal method, now. We, a lot of times we have some regular players, and you guys know who the regular players are. They know the Code almost as well as I do, that they come to the meeting and say, I need a variance because I don’t meet the setbacks, and they have a project in mind. They know that they’re not within the 50 foot shoreline setback. They come with a variance application. They’re willing to just skip that first step of having a decision rendered and basically what that means to them is they’ve saved the cost of hiring an architect, preparing a building permit application, submitting the building permit application, having the building permit application denied, now they can go for a variance. They’ve just skipped those four steps, and it’s evolved into this, and it’s the way it’s been done since I’ve been here. I’ve been with the Town for almost eight years. I think it’s evolved that way to be more user friendly to the public. Could it get us into trouble? It could. A lot of times we keep track and we write down things on pre-submission meetings and some documentation on why there’s a need for a variance, but ideally that decision is made in writing, directly to the applicant, based on the information they’ve presented in a building permit. (Lost words) Is it the same with a Planning Board application? No. The Planning Board has original jurisdiction. Somebody could come with an application that says, the use table says my use is allowed, here’s my site plan review application, I want to go to the Planning Board. That’s acceptable, but when it comes to the formal decision making process, we’re working towards being more formal with that, trying to make it a more bullet proof process for them and for us. MR. ABBATE-Instead of bullet proof, let’s say compliance with the law. At the present time, the Town of Queensbury really isn’t following statutes. In order for the Zoning Board 21 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) of Appeals to determine standing, only the Zoning Administrator, and not second or third parties, may deny a permit. At the present time, the Zoning Board of Appeals does not receive a formal declaration that the individual has been denied a permit, and that’s required by statute. We require, from the Zoning Administrator, documentation, stamped and dated, determining whether or not it has been granted or denied. Based upon that, then the Zoning Board of Appeals can determine standing. MR. BROWN-Yes, that doesn’t happen all the time. MR. ABBATE-But it does happen. MR. BROWN-Occasionally you’re going to get an attorney who’s real sharp, who wants to make sure that when he goes through his project review, his client’s not going to get turned over in the end. So they’ll say, I want to do this project, please provide me with a written determination. Do those every day. (Lost words) it’s going to cause some frictions. It’s going to cause the applicants to come to our building permit counter and you guys would be interested to hear this. They’re going to come to our building permit counter, and say, I need a variance. MR. ABBATE-Yes, but it’s going to. MR. BROWN-We’re going to say, has your project been denied yet. MR. ABBATE-That’s right. MR. BROWN-And we’re going to require them to submit enough information, whether it’s a set of drawings, a thumbnail sketch of something for us to make a determination on, and a denial that they need a variance and need to go to the Zoning Board before they can do that, would cause a delay in there, but I think it’s the right way to do it, and we’re slowly working towards getting things done. MR. ABBATE-Right. It doesn’t happen all the time, but again, I want to emphasize this fact. We have been hearing cases we have no authority to hear. It’s not often, but we do receive those cases, and it’s based upon the fact we do not have written determination from the Zoning Administrator that there’s been a denial, and based upon a judicial review, we’d be in a lot of trouble. MR. BROWN-Well, luckily for the Zoning Board and the Planning Board, anybody who doesn’t like what you’ve said, within 30 days, they have 30 days to appeal that decision. Any decision that I make, they have 60 days. MR. ABBATE-No. You’re missing the point. MR. BROWN-No, no. I realize what the point is. MR. ABBATE-The point is procedure and consistency. MR. BROWN-I understand. MR. ABBATE-We don’t have it at the present time, and this is the first time I’ve ever raised the issue to the Zoning Board, but we have been hearing cases we should not be hearing. MR. BROWN-Like I said, we do a lot of them informal now, and again we’re working towards making it more formal. We’ve probably moved away from that because of trying to be more flexible when people come in, and a lot of times it’s good to be flexible, but you can’t be (lost words) with somebody. This next thing, after we’ve made a determination, we go to a pre-submission conference, and what that is is it’s a requirement right now in our Zoning Code, the only requirement is, if you have a site plan review application, you have to have a pre-submission conference. It’s not required for subdivision. It’s not required for area variances. We do some arm twisting, and nobody’s balked at us yet, but we require people to come for a pre-submission conference for a variance and for subdivision. The only codification of that, it says site plan. So whether we want to think about the Boards maybe making a resolution or a motion to the Town Board or to the PORC Committee that just says, when you’re doing these changes, let’s add in the Code area variances and subdivisions have to have a pre-submission conference. The Chairman of the Planning Board, Mr. 22 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) Vollaro’s going to talk about this a little bit later, I suspect, the fourth item is completeness. When we have, the whole goal of these pre-submission meetings is to have Staff review the information that an applicant wants to submit to at least try and get an assurance there’s that minimum level of information necessary for the Board to make a decision. Prior to that, an application would come in with a sketch on a cocktail napkin, with an application cover letter on the back of a utility bill and our application is submitted. Well, that’s not something that is really going to get them far with the Planning Board. So we, at our pre- submission meetings, are a little more strict about what we want to take in. Will we satisfy both Boards with the information we the information we let through, no, you guys could come up with other information that you’re going to want me to make a decision, but for the most part applications that you guys see have gone through our pre-submission conferences. It’s mostly Susan and I that sit down, sometimes Stuart will be in there, sometimes Bruce will be in there. We all kind of cross cover that part of the review process (lost words). So what I was going to say is (lost words), at least with the Planning Board applications, will re- institute something you guys seen before, the completeness review committee, establish a committee of Planning Board members to come to our Planning Office, and if anybody’s ever been downstairs to the Conference Room, actually we have our agenda meetings and we talk about the applications before you guys see them. The goal is to have this completeness review committee do a cursory review of the completeness of the application, not to review the application and talk about, this driveway’s too close to that one. It’s just a completeness. Is the stormwater management plan here, is the lighting plan here, are all these things here? Okay, it’s complete. We’ll put it out. That’s at your discretion. Ideally, that’s what both of the Boards have empowered Staff to do. If you read the description of one of the portions of my job description is to review all applications and make determinations of completeness. We can certainly do that. If you think that, obviously you want to do that, you want to go to another level and do your own review so you have a certain comfort level that, before you get it, you’re happy with the information, the amount of information that’s in there, maybe not the quality of it, but the quantity of it, and you’re going to put it on your agenda. MR. VOLLARO-All I’m saying is what I’d be looking for is not only the completeness, but the accuracy of the submission, things like the Floor Area Ratio be done correctly, that they use 30% rather than 22% when they need to. Otherwise, when you’re home, or when I’m home, I’ve got to re-do that, so I expect that that application comes to us complete and accurate, both. MR. BROWN-We can do that. We can talk about that when we get into that, but it’s just going to make that meeting longer. The more things we review for completeness, it’s going to be a longer completeness review meeting. Do they have the correct permeability calculation, did they do the math right? I don’t think we want to get into that level of review at the completeness review meeting, but I don’t want to get bogged down in that here, but. MR. VOLLARO-But when we review it, I’m going to want them to have that done correctly. When it gets back to you, it ought to look right. MR. BROWN-That’s correct. MR. VOLLARO-As far as the record is concerned. MR. BROWN-That’s why we have Susan. Susan is our project review, we’ll call her a specialist tonight. What she does is she’s going to look at the application. She looks at the application and checks, did they do the permeability calculation correctly, did they, is it 30% in the zoning district, do they meet the 30%, you know, they do the number crunching, and it’s impossible to do up front. If we were to sit down and do that hour long review of an application with an applicant before they submit it to us, before we take it in, you would hear a lot more kicking and screaming than you hear right now. We have a certain level of confidence in the applicant that they want their project approved. Everybody wants their project approved, but they’ve provided us with accurate information so their project’s not going to get delayed. Hopefully the majority of them aren’t going to knowingly give us something that’s not right. So we have to assume that what we take in is correct. We’re going to check it, but we’re not going to say, before we check this, we’re going to check every single thing you’ve written down. We can’t do that. MR. VOLLARO-No, no. When we go to the completeness review conference, though, when I come to your completeness review with another member of the Planning Board, you’ve 23 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) already looked at some of this stuff, or are you doing the initial completeness review with us, or have you already screened some of these applications? MR. BROWN-Well, we’re going to talk about that in a couple of more slides, but we do a very cursory review of, here’s what we have. When they come in on deadline day, if anybody’s been down there on deadline day, sometimes at 4:30 we’ve got three people lined up at the counter with their arms full of maps that say, okay, here, I’m going to submit. So the next morning, what Susan gets plopped on her desk is, here’s a pile of Zoning Board applications, here’s a pile of the Planning Board applications. So before we have our pre completeness review, and try and sit down and look and say, okay, we’ve got 14 of these and 15 of these, plus we have 12 old business tabled and we try and get our mind wrapped around the quantity. Will we look through them quickly and say, you know what, this one doesn’t even have a map, put that on the bump list? We try and do those things, and what the completeness review committee have all been through last time it was instituted was we would do that pre-screening and pull out all the ones that had obvious flaws. We’d bring it to the attention of the completeness review committee, this one doesn’t have this, but they’ve asked for this waiver. Do you think we should give them a nudge and say, the Planning Board’s probably not going to give you this waiver, you want to put a landscaping plan in here and don’t ask for the waiver. That’s what evolves into, and if that’s what it would be, I think that’s okay. I just don’t want to get bogged way down in the review of the application that early on. MR. VOLLARO-Well, is the completion review, then, maybe too early? Should we be doing it later? Normally what happens, you get something on the 17, and we’re in on the 18. So thth you haven’t had much time to look at it, really, other than to sort them out and look at the obvious, this doesn’t have something, throw it out. Maybe we ought to take a look at completeness review just a little bit later. I don’t know. MR. BROWN-I think the last thing we want to do is do work on an application, review it, come up with a description. We do work on an application, it’s going to get bumped. So we want to make that first cut. MR. VOLLARO-Fine. MR. BROWN-(Lost words) doing it early is okay. We can talk about it more. MR. VOLLARO-Because I don’t know if you’ve got time. Let’s take a look at, it’s the 15 th and it’s 4:30, and you’ve got three people at the desk with applications. The morning that we come in on the next day, which would be the 18, you haven’t really had a chance to do much th with that package yet, hardly at all. You may have done, this is Planning Board and this is Zoning Board, and that’s about it. So what we get to see in completion review is almost what you get to see on the very front edge. MR. BROWN-Right. MR. VOLLARO-So maybe you’ve got to have a chance to go through those a little bit further before we get into completion review. The idea of completion review is, in my mind, that we don’t get bogged down, during the meeting, with incidentals that could have been caught earlier. That spreads a meeting out, you know, and one of the things I’m going to attempt to do is to move these meetings along. That’s why I asked you about when people come up five minutes. MR. BROWN-We can talk about that in a moment when we start that process again. To close out submissions, pre-submission conferences, sometimes we have multiple meetings, before they get it right. We always tell someone, we’ve concluded your pre-submission. Go do the things we’ve told you that are missing, put together your application, bring us one copy, let us look at it one more time, before you make a big stack of prints that you’re going to have to change, let us look at it one more time and make sure you’ve included the things that we’ve identified as missing, and see how many of (lost words) we’re pretty sure the Board’s going to ask you for, you’ve chosen to include (lost words) they’re not required, but we have a pretty good flavor for what the Board is going to ask you for in certain applications. Once you have that, and sometimes it’s Friday night before Monday deadline, they go away, they make those revisions, and they come back with their stack of copies, and we do that extra meeting so that they don’t come in with a ton of paper that they’ve got to throw away now because they didn’t bring in everything. 24 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) MR. VOLLARO-Yes. I find the pre-application conference paper that comes with our packets to be very valuable, providing I can read them. I notice that a lot of them are written very quickly, and probably because you’re a little bit rushed when the applicant’s there, but I consider that very important, because it says to me, what have you told the applicant before he’s, and then I get to look and see, has he got this or not here, because I’ve got to do almost the same kind of review you do in my little knot hole, or on Sunday or on Saturday, and you folks aren’t available. There’s no telephone. You’ve got to work with what you’ve got. MR. BROWN-Sometimes we get behind. MR. VOLLARO-Yes. Otherwise, don’t even put them in, because it doesn’t help me any, to try to spend a half hour deciphering the thing. MR. BROWN-Yes, we can certainly do that. Deadlines for meetings, I don’t know (lost word) so we’re going to skip that. Go right to deadline day. What we try to do with deadline day is when somebody comes in with their stack of papers, we try and confirm that they’ve had a pre-submission. Now, are you going to get, either Board, going to get somebody who hasn’t had a pre-submission meeting, hopefully less than you have in the past. We have had occasions where an applicant comes in with the nicest, most complete application that you could ever ask for, but they haven’t had a pre-submission. Is that a reason to bump them off the agenda, no. We’ve been flexible with our rule that says you have to have it, but it’s a commonsense thing. A lot of what we all do is commonsense. A lot of it is guided by the requirements that they have to follow, so we try and make sure they’ve had a pre-submission meeting. We try and squeeze in these last minute follow-up meetings. Noon, deadline day, go away and make copies and come back at 4:30. I can’t tell you how many of those we do. You get the submissions by the end of the day, 4:30. That’s when we sometimes have a line of people at the counter, at the last minute. Or calling at four o’clock, I’ve got 40 sheets to make copies of, can I bring it in an eight o’clock tomorrow morning on the 16. We allow that, just th because we, but we give them a disclaimer. The Board has a limit of 14 items. If you choose to not make it by 4:30 on the 15, and you’re number 15, by the time you bring it in th tomorrow, you might be on the bump list, and that’s the only fair way to do it. We time stamp and date every application that’s submitted, and if the ones that are complete, come up with a list of 14 items that are complete and submitted by deadline day, that guy may have the nicest application, he didn’t get the copies in until the 16, he gets bumped off. So th that’s how we have to manage those things, otherwise, you have to take them in time order. What happens on deadline day is there’s an overlap with us doing pre-application meetings, I say us, it’s mostly Susan, us doing pre-application meetings, reviewing applications for, right now we’re reviewing applications for our January meeting, but next week we’re going to be doing more pre-application meetings, writing January Staff notes, and talking with applicants about applications for Planning Board. So we’ve got some overlap with taking in applications for this month, and that’s not a complaint. I just want you to know that, let you know that we’re doing February stuff right now while we’re preparing notes for both Boards for January. So hopefully you don’t ever get notes on a Friday that you haven’t seen yet, and we’ll try not to do that, but there is an overlap of pre-submission meetings and Staff notes, we do those notes at the same time, just because of where the 15 is and where the th meetings are on the third and fourth weeks. So that’s just how that falls. Agenda process. You asked about what do we do with applications (lost words). We do an initial agenda review. Typically it’s Susan, Stuart sometimes will sit in, sometimes Bruce will sit in to keep up to speed. Oftentimes we’ll have Marilyn in there. Once in a while we’ll have Maria or Sue or Pam, if you guys have been downstairs, you know what I’m talking about. We just try and get a handle on the quantity. How many applications do we have? Should we be thinking about maybe sending a note off to the Planning Board Chairman, you might want to consider a special meeting this month (lost words) we’ve already gotten 47 cases on backlog, we’ve got 24 more. Do you want to look for a third meeting? We try and get that handle on it. That’s what the initial agenda review is. We try and pull out those easily identifiable, insufficient applications. There’s no plat, there’s no signature, there’s no Long Form SEQRA. These are big chunks that are missing, put them towards the bottom of the list. Sometimes we give them, you know what, you don’t have your Long Form SEQRA, and we have an idea that they probably completed it. They just didn’t copy it and put it in their application. If we’ve got 13 items, we’re going to tell them, you don’t have your Long Form. Once you get it in, even though it’s after the deadline, if you get it in, we’ll call your application complete and get you in there. The last thing you need is a backlog of applications that you’ve bumped off because they don’t have a signature. Even after the 25 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) deadline date, we’re constantly working with the applicants to say, get those little things buttoned up and get them through the process, not that they’ll get an approval, but to get them in this process to have their project reviewed, get an outcome one way or another, get them through the process. Completeness review. We talked about that. That’s what happens next. At least with the Planning Board, we do a completeness review with a formal committee. On the zoning applications, we do our own completeness review, and sometimes (lost words) we call in Dave Hatin, he’s the Director of Building and Codes Department, sit down with the applications. Sometimes Mike Palmer, who’s the Fire Marshal, or Gary Stillman, who’s the Deputy Fire Marshal, they’ll come in and review the applications and try and identify any fire prevention building code issues that might come up. Mostly on the site plan applications, not so much on the variance applications, but, hey, there should be a fire (lost words), we need a ring road to make sure there’s a separation between the buildings and the propane tanks. They try and identify all those fire code issues. So, Number One, we can get that information off to the applicant and give them a chance to add that information to their application, avoid a delay when they come to the Planning Board, and get that information in our minds where we want to put it in Staff notes, we know that the Fire Marshal thinks we need to do something here, and we will likely ask for a letter from him or suggest that this applicant contact the fire chief in the district to give them an opinion on the accessibility of their driveway. So that’s what we try and do at the Staff our Staff meeting. We get everybody involved that may have input on the application. Dave, sometimes will notice, this is a three frame wood story building. You can’t do this. Is it an issue that they’re going to iron out when they come to the building permit phase? Yes, but we don’t know the building codes as well as Dave does, and he identifies a building code issue. A lot of times, we’ll, all of us will notice the applicant and say, here’s an issue with this. If it’s going to cause you to change your project, now it goes on hold, when you change your project to a two story bigger building, it changes the whole site plan. So that’s what we find out at the Staff plan review meetings. Development and descriptions. After we get all through completeness review, Staff plan review, identified all the issues, part of developing an agenda is come up with an accurate description of what the project is, and we always strive to get as much detail as possible (lost words) variance applications, we (lost words) they need 6.7 feet of relief in the description. If we advertise 6.7 feet of relief, and they need 6.8 feet of relief, do we need to re-advertise the thing because we advertised it incorrectly. So we’re pretty generic about they need shoreline setback relief, side setback relief, height relief. The details of it, if you want to know, come look at the file. (lost words), specific numbers are purposely not included. Revisions. There’s constantly revisions that applications go through. The more we go through the review process and Susan looks at an application or depending on what the application is, split up between two other members of Staff, , the revisions of the descriptions, ordering of the agenda, placement on the agenda, all those things are constantly changing, until we get to our final agenda, which is, you know, we have to come up with a certain time of the month, usually it’s always the last Thursday of the month, and the reason we put that deadline on ourselves is we’re required, by General Municipal Law, to refer every application that meets our agreement with Warren County, we have to refer that to them by the last Friday of every month. So we want to get our agenda in place, so we’ve identified all those referrals that have to go to the County, they have to be done by a certain time. So, sometimes like February, and probably March, they’re going to be real short months where we’ve got a lot of things to turn over in a real short time, and that’s not a complaint. It’s just there’s a lot of behind the scenes stuff to do to get these things put together, and if you ever have any questions about why things are on the agendas, why descriptions are written in a certain way, certainly, yes, you know, we’re trying to put them out to make it clear to the Board and to the public what this project is and what type of review is going to be associated with this project. So if there’s ever a question about a description you’ve seen on an agenda, call us up. We’ll try and explain it or (lost words) you’ve seen something that could be misinterpreted, but try to get as close as possible without getting too, too specific. MR. VOLLARO-Just real quick. It kind of sounds to me like you folks are really doing 100 miles an hour in a five mile zone down there. You’ve got to move pretty fast doing what you’re doing. My question is simple. Would reducing the number of applications per month to, let’s say, 12 as opposed to 14, would it help the process down at Staff at all? MR. BROWN-No, and hopefully that didn’t come out as a complaint. MR. VOLLARO-No. MR. BROWN-Would less applications help? Probably not. You still have some overlap. You still have the amount of applications to do. There’s certainly enough time to do that. If 26 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) you figure that each Board has 10 applications in a month, we’ve got like 20 or 22 working days between each set of meetings, if you designate a day for each application, that’s a lot of time. I think there’s plenty of time to do it. Again, this is not a complaint. It’s just, here’s what we do with each one of these applications and how we package up the agendas, and we’ll talk a little bit more later about the Staff notes and the Board reviews, but here’s some of the behind the scenes stuff. MR. ABBATE-Why are we limited to two meetings a month? If this is the case. Based upon what you’ve said this evening, you folks are understaffed, and if the backlog is that great, why restrict us to two meetings a month? Why not have three? That way we can address these various. MR. BROWN-Chuck, I mentioned that a little bit earlier, that the Planning Board has a set of policies and procedures that says, we’re going to hold two meetings every month. We’re going to have no more than seven items per meeting, and on that agenda we’re going to have Old Business first, then Expedited Business, then the Subdivisions, there’s a criteria of how those things are set up. If the Zoning Board wants to adopt a policy that says, you can have as many items as, as many agenda meetings as it takes. MR. ABBATE-We have no such restrictions. MR. BROWN-That’s correct. MR. ABBATE-So what’s the problem of the Zoning, why can’t, if, in fact, and I believe what you’re saying, that you do have a tremendous case load, why not diminish that caseload by having, in certain months, perhaps three hearings rather than two? MR. BROWN-Well, I have a whole philosophy on that, but the reason that you only have two meetings a month is because that’s what the Zoning Board decided. That’s a decision the Zoning Board made. At some point in time, there was a decision made by the Zoning Board way before your time. MR. ABBATE-Then we can change that. MR. BROWN-You can change that. MR. ABBATE-I’ll ask the Board members their opinion. MR. BROWN-If you remember, it’s within the last year, the Zoning Board adopted a resolution that says in effect the same thing that the Planning Board resolution said. We will hear no more than seven items per meeting. You’ve made that resolution. You can say we’re going to have 12 meetings a month if you want to. MR. ABBATE-Okay. MR. BROWN-What are we trying to do? You look at the big picture, planning and zoning, are we trying to funnel every single thing that comes in through our process and get it approved, which is the majority of the outcome of all applications, or do we want to have a process that allows for quality of review that gives an outcome and allows a project to be performed in the way that we want it done, the way the Town Code wants it done. If you have more meetings and you funnel more stuff through, is that what you want, or do you want it, and I’m not saying that we should be pro-development or against development, but if you’re going to funnel more stuff through, I don’t think that’s the way to get the Town developed the way you want the Town developed. MR. ABBATE-No. That’s not what I’m suggesting. I was trying to be discreet. You’re understaffed. Perhaps what you need is more Staff and this wouldn’t occur. MR. BROWN-There’s not a backlog of Zoning Board applications. Right now there’s not a backlog of Planning Board applications. In the summertime, you know, June, July, August, probably, maybe there’s a lot for the last couple of years. There a backlog developed, when you get 14 items per meeting and we’ll talk a little bit later about tabling. If you’ve got an application that’s tabled, tabled, tabled, that takes up a slot on an agenda. When mom and pop come in and they want to do their project and they need a slot on the agenda, if you’re Number Fifteen, and that tabled item is already taking your slot, now you’re waiting a 27 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) month until there’s an available New Business slot for you. So, you know, some of this may come to, do you want to look at conditional approvals? Do you want to look at Preliminary subdivision review, fix all your problems, fix all your issues, and come back for a signoff, rather than tabling it. That’s something we’ll come to later. MR. ABBATE-I can really argue that point. Because tabling basically is a result of something along the process that was lacking. MR. VOLLARO-And to fill that in, I think one of the things I’ve got to check with my Board on, and I will, is the fact that I’d like to institute the Sketch Plan review. When a Board is under Sketch Plan, they don’t have to make a decision up or down. That’s one. Two, they don’t have to deal with SEQRA. Three, they don’t have a public hearing. We can look at the plan rather objectively and then tell the applicant the things that we think, in the Sketch Plan, that he ought to be coming into with his Preliminary, and then if he comes in with Preliminary and he’s got everything organized, come in with the Final. We did it last month with one of our applications. The applicant came in and it was like, I looked at my watch, it was ten minutes to approve the Final. MR. BROWN-Well, that’s one of the things we can talk about a little bit later on here is, Board review and decision making. We’ll talk a little bit about that. The final thing for agenda process, and I just have a short list here. Publication. When we publish our agendas, they don’t just go to the Planning Board and Zoning Board and Post Star. Everybody you can think of, we send them to all the schools, NiMo, Adelphia, Time Warner, everybody who potentially could have any interest in any project, Warren County Economic Development Corp., A/GFTC. Everybody gets a copy of it. So, at the publication date, once we finalize the agenda, we spread it out there to as many people as we possibly can think of. So hopefully they’re getting them, and (lost words) three months later a comment letter from NiMo that says well why did you let them cut the trees down at The Great Escape, we’re trying to circumvent that, but you give them the agendas. If they choose not to come in and look at the application materials until they actually meet in the field with their project engineer and say, what, you’re not taking down these trees next to the power line, that’s something else. We can try, we send all this stuff out, but sometimes we don’t hear from them. Staff review and Staff notes. These are developed (lost words) review of the application, a review of the project, a history of what else has happened on the property. We keep detailed records of building permits, sign permits, previous site plans, Use Variances, Area Variances. They’re all (lost words) and we’ll review what’s been done on the property before. It’s difficult, as you can imagine, to try and figure out what’s happened similar to this on adjoining properties, how far do we go to come up with a history. We review the Town Code. How does this project comply or not comply with the Town Code. Trying to identify as much outside agency approval in the Staff notes as possible without getting to the position where we’re going to identify the outside agencies, and if we miss one we’re going to be in trouble. We’re not going to be exhaustive, but if we, based on the information of record we have, see that there’s some DEC wetlands in there area or it’s in the Queensbury sand plains area where the Karner blue is an issue, we’re going to try and identify that in our Staff notes that you need to contact the DEC with wetlands or the butterfly or you’re in the Park, there appears to be some wetlands. You need to make sure that there’s a Park jurisdictional determination or (lost words). That’s what happens. Staff notes go out to Board members. We try to get them out the Friday before the meeting. So, for next Tuesday, Wednesday meetings, the notes are generally published and either mailed or delivered. Sometimes it means you have them delivered so you have them prior to the meeting. Sometimes it doesn’t always work. With the Planning Board, part of the Staff notes and Staff review is we prepare draft resolutions, and we try and make those draft resolutions as neutral as possible. We try not to make them sound like there’s an approval or denial. We leave in approved/denied, some of the positive negative kind of choices in there, just so it can go either way. I know sometimes, especially with a denial, it takes some more time. You need to say, timeout. You want to do a resolution that is going to be enforceable, but the reason we do draft resolutions is to hopefully expedite some process and (lost words) some questions about some of the information in the draft resolutions right now, and we’ll talk about that, but as far as Staff notes go, as we prepare those, we kind of did a straw pole of the Zoning Board at one time about draft resolutions, and it didn’t fly very high. Mostly because the Zoning Board resolutions, I don’t know if any of you have ever seen them, they pretty much go through a description, which they have historically gone through, a description of the project, a description of the relief, and the rationale based on the statutory criteria of why the decision is being made either for or against, and it’s tough to write that in draft format, because different factors (lost words). We don’t do draft resolutions for the Zoning Board. Photos. 28 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) You guys have seen on a somewhat regular basis photos of the site. At one time, and Bruce is much better at it than I was, you can see the GIS map (lost words), the GIS application that shows, here’s the project, here’s the surrounding area in the Zoning, to give you a feel for what’s there, and you see project photos from as many reasonable angles as we could on the site, to keep it fresh, and I guess I have it up there as a question for me. Is that something that’s useful? Do you think it takes away from the meeting, it adds to the meeting? Does it help you remember, yes, I remember that tree, you cut that one down. MR. RIGBY-I think it’s useful for the Zoning Board members, but I also think it’s useful for the public. MR. METIVIER-It’s more useful for the public, but I think it’s not, I mean, every case is different, but it’s good. MR. SEGULJIC-Yes, it’s not going to hurt. MR. STONE-Well, I know every once in a while you get an applicant, we had one on 9L, who came in with virtual views of the house from the lake, very helpful, because particularly in certain times of the year it’s hard to get out and take a look from that side, and that’s one of the things that we’re concerned about. MR. BROWN-And so you know, obviously, we have the capability to put pretty much anything we want to on that screen. We do as much as possible. Make that known to the applicant to say, if you want to give us an Auto Cad drawing of your floor plan or you want to give us some elevation drawings or some of your own photo representations of your sign for your Sign Variance, we can put them up there in a neutral way, where we’re not going to say, here’s the sign that we like. We’d just let them use them in the presentation, and we’ll throw them on the laptop, and if they ask us to throw them up at a certain time in their presentation, we can do that for them. So, likewise, if there’s anything that either one of the Boards thinks, you know what, before we grant this, we’d like to see something, whatever it might be, we can certainly get that from them and you may want to request that from them at a certain point (lost words). Sometimes the easel isn’t visible. You’re really looking at colors, you can’t read it. This is helpful. Are we going to get everybody to use this? No. MR. VOLLARO-Just one comment. The photos are good. I think the Board agrees with that. I like the photos. They’re helpful. They’re helpful to me on a Friday night, on a Saturday and on a Sunday. At the day of the meeting, all this stuff is caged in my head already. I’ve already looked at all of this stuff and I’ve written my own notes and I’m ready to go in, without seeing anything else, because I’ve been studying for maybe two days on these applications. So I know them. They’re in my head. MR. BROWN-Yes. MR. VOLLARO-I’m not going to be doing that, by the way, now. I’m going to be depending on my Board to do that. I’m going to be paying more attention to getting these applications through in a reasonable period of time. MR. BROWN-Okay. We talked about Staff review. Now we’re up to Board meetings. Maybe I can get through everything here and hopefully we can answer some questions before they come up. Presentation. Obviously you’re going to have an applicant come to you at the meeting. Whether you want to allow them to make a presentation, we talked about pre- positioning before. There’s a presentation. A public hearing is held, and we talked about, do you have to be responsible for answering all the questions at the public hearings. You can sort through, (lost words) good at sorting through neighborhood disputes. Gee, he’s got four dogs and they’re barking every night, and now he’s going to have this pool over there, and that’s going to look like crap, and you can see through that stuff and you realize you don’t have to answer all that stuff, but the public hearing, you have to take the comment. You have a public hearing. You want to get all that stuff out in the open and on the record before the Board really jumps into any in-depth discussion about the project. You want to get that before. Board discussion. A lot of times, and this has come up in the past, this is not a suggestion, but what can we do to shorten the meetings. It’s a balance between getting everything on the record and being clear, making a clear record about how you make your decision and saying the same thing the guy next to you just said. If you need to say, I like it for the same reasons that they said, that’s fine. That’s on the record. It’s clear. Does everybody need to go through and say the same thing in other words. It’s not required. You 29 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) can certainly ask them any questions. I’m a big proponent of asking the most obvious question there could be, but once you do it’s on the record now. You’ve got the answer from the applicant. They’ve said, yes, I will take down that shed. It’s on the record. You may want to ask them as many questions as possible. On the back of this I’ve put together a site plan review, actually I think this came from George Hilton (lost words). It’s a good checklist of things you might want to think about when you’re reviewing the application. Again, they’re all outlined in the Town Code, but this is a useful tool, and everything on one page. (Lost words). MR. VOLLARO-I’m looking at something different here, from George, Zoning Ordinance, Site Plan Review criteria, is that the same? MRS. STEFFAN-This is usually the list our Chairman goes down. MR. BROWN-Some of the things don’t apply, but if you get a variance request from say (lost words) permeability requirements, some of these things may come into play, well, what’s your stormwater package look like? Why do you need so much impermeable surface? And maybe the last thing we’ll talk about tonight is decision making, approve with or without conditions, (lost words) reasonable and enforceable conditions. I’m certainly a proponent of, if you have an application before you and you want to see two more trees over there next to the swimming pool in order to approve this application, I would go ahead and approve that application, with a condition. Rather than table it and say, bring back drawings with these two trees on it, then we’ll give you an approval with no conditions. Sometimes it doesn’t work. If you’ve got ten conditions (lost words) it’s more difficult for us to enforce, track those conditions, but if you can get them to put them on the plan, and approve that plan, that works. It’s a case by case basis. MR. VOLLARO-I would just say one word about that. If we go through a plan first, a Sketch, do that first and do it seriously. I can say this. Sketch Plans, for our Board, in the past, have been kind of a free pass for the Board to relax a little bit, and, you know, at least I get that impression. I really want to drill on Sketch Plan to make sure the applicant knows what we want, so when he comes in with Preliminary, the objective is to get to Final, so there is minimal amount of conditions on the Final application, minimal. The drawing should speak the whole story. MR. ABBATE-Craig, I want to clarify that, please, conditions. Again, I don’t know about the Planning Board, but the Zoning Board can only grant conditions based upon the land, and nothing else. I’ll give you an example. We had a case recently rendered in 1984, in which the Zoning Board of Appeals of the Town of Queensbury granted conditional based upon. MR. BRYANT-A Use Variance with conditions. MR. ABBATE-Yes, a Use Variance with conditions, based upon, not on the land, but something else, which one cannot do. MR. BROWN-That’s what I’m trying to explain by reasonable and enforceable, and let me give you an example of poor condition. We’re going to grant you this shoreline setback for your retaining wall, with the condition that the grass between the retaining wall and the lake, don’t ever fertilize that. We’re going to have Bruce out there every Fourth of July weekend making sure they don’t have their spreader going? That’s not enforceable, and I wouldn’t even think it’s reasonable. MR. STONE-But you could say no grass. You could say do plantings and have a mulched area. MR. BROWN-Well, you could suggest that. I don’t know if you really want to get into designing this and reconfiguring the property. MR. STONE-But that’s good lake management practice. MR. BROWN-It may be, but it may not fit their particular use. MR. STONE-Okay. MR. BROWN-You want to make sure you’re not steering them in (lost words). 30 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) MR. BRYANT-I have a question, relative to conditions and enforcement. MR. BROWN-Yes. Let me get to the end here, when we get to the end of this, just this slide. Denial. Obviously you want to make sure the decision is as clear as possible. If you’re going to make any motion, whether it’s an approval or a denial, tabling, if there’s been a lot of public comment, (lost words) Board members about condition this, condition that, I’d like it if they take that out. Take five minutes. Take a recess. Take a couple of people on the Board to develop a resolution. I know the Planning Board does this, and the Zoning Board does occasionally, but come up with a resolution that has everything in it. You’re still going to have to second it and vote on. So you still have the chance to modify it, but if Bob’s making a resolution, and Maria can attest to this if she’d like to, Bob makes the resolution, before it gets seconded, somebody says, well, I thought you were going to put this condition in or that condition in, and we’re trying to type these resolutions and it’s an administrative nightmare when you try and make sure we get in all the conditions that we want in, because we want to keep it as clear as possible, but when you’re making the motion and you want to add this in, you’re talking over him at the same time, you can’t transcribe the minutes, much less get all the conditions in there that you want. So it’s a request from the Planning Department that any resolution you do, just make sure that it’s clear. Ninety-nine percent of them are, but if you need to take that five minutes to get all your conditions in there, if it’s going to be a conditional approval, or try and write it so it’s a denial and you want to make sure that it’s bulletproof, take some time. The Code’s basically going to tell you you’ve got 60 days. MR. VOLLARO-Exactly right. Particularly when you’re making a denial on a tough application, to try and do it in five minutes is very difficult. MR. BROWN-Sure. MR. VOLLARO-On one application not too long ago we took the 62 days. MR. BROWN-If you need to, it’s certainly possible. Tablings. We talked about this a little before. I had a little bit to add to it. What we talked about before, if you want to table and have them come back, be concise. Do them a favor, do us a favor, do yourselves a favor, give them a list of things that you want to see. Be as clear and accurate as you can, and the other part I want to talk about is pick a date. (lost words). You’ve probably heard the comment from Town Counsel that says you don’t have to do a resolution for tabling. It’s always easier for us to track it and know what the status of the application is if a resolution’s been made and if there’s a document in the file. Tabling an application, and we’ll use this month, next Tuesday, the 17, the Planning Board has an application (lost words). The Planning Board th tables an application that’s on the 17 for some reason, they table that to the first meeting in th February. What you’ve effectively done there is now you’ve taken a slot on a Planning Board agenda from all those people that made it in by the 15, and you’re going to throw this th Old Business item on there. Is that okay to do? Sometimes. If the tabling motion, however, says, we’re going to table you because we want a revised stormwater management plan, new landscaping, lighting plan, all this new information. What are we going to do with that? We’re going to send that to C.T. Male. They’re going to have to review it. We’re going to have to review that, I say “we”, but I mean Susan, we’re going to have to review that and we’re going to have to turn around Staff notes in a shorter period of time. Granted we’ve looked at it already. Pick the last meeting of the month. You table something to the first meeting of the next month, there’s a shorter turnaround time to get that information and adequately review it and provide Staff notes to you, rush it down to C.T. Male and get it back. It’s probably the second iteration that they’re going to see because they reviewed the first one, now they’re back with more stuff. It’s just better if you can pick that January 24 th meeting, and you table it until March. Are they going to like that? Probably not, but bring us this new information by February 15, meet the submittal deadline just like everybody th else, and we’ll get you back in the agenda cycle. You can give them preference, put it at the top of the agenda because it’s Old Business, but now we’ve got the application materials in time. We have enough time to review them and provide comments to both them and the Board and get comments from C.T. Male. (lost words). The classic example is, (lost words) application. We’re going to table it to next week because we need something from (lost words). Well, Tuesday is today. Tomorrow’s Wednesday, submit it Thursday or Friday, and be back on Tuesday for the Planning Board. Well, Staff doesn’t have time to review it and any revised comments in that short period of time. Is it always necessary? Sometimes, but if we get in the practice of, if you’re tabled, submit it by the next 15 deadline, to get on the th following month’s meeting, hopefully that’ll (lost words) we’re certainly not looking to send 31 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) any message, but (lost words) if I don’t get it all together and complete the first time, add two months to my review process. I’m not trying to slow things down. I’m just trying to make sure we have time to review it and get you information. MR. VOLLARO-Utilization of the Sketch Plan would go a long way to resolving a lot of those problems. We’ll have maybe very, very few reasons for tabling, if we do a good job at Sketch. MR. ABBATE-You said you were going to address the ZBA next, but before you do that, let me tell you what our procedure is. If we have hearings in January, and we have to table an application, we make it quite clear to the individual that they must submit all the revisions to Staff no later than the 15 of February, and then we will schedule that re-hearing for the th month of April. Does that meet your requirements? MR. BROWN-March. MR. ABBATE-I’m sorry, March. MR. BROWN-Well, yes, it’s not a requirement. MR. ABBATE-I’m just asking, does that make you happy? MR. BROWN-Yes, and having said that’s a good way to do it, I’ll also tell you in the same breath, it’s okay if you don’t do that. If you’ve got something that’s really minor, if you really don’t feel comfortable in granting that conditional approval without adding those two trees, and you want to see that map with the two trees on it before you give an approval, that’s an easy thing that, you know, you’re going to have to use your own judgment, do we table this until next month, or do we, because (lost words) substantial amount of information we want, make them go to the 15? I just want to let you know that when you table it to the th next month, that application automatically goes in front of that list of people who are new, met the 15 deadline, and any grumbling that you’ve heard or haven’t heard in the past, we th hear it, (lost words) bumped, these applications have been tabled 14 times and the same set of things are on every month. That’s what it does. It creates that bump list. We either get them out, get them back in when they’ve met the proper submission deadline or, I don’t know. MR. METIVIER-Can I ask a question? If we, as a Board, feel that, you know, we’re missing some information, we can’t table it for next week so we want to go next month, but at our discretion. What’s to say you don’t still have the seven items and we, as a Board, vote on adding that as an eighth item? MR. BROWN-Well, you know, logistically, when do you do that? Do you do that the night of the meeting? MR. METIVIER-Yes, that’s what I’m saying. MR. BROWN-I suppose you could do that. (lost words) done that in the past (lost words). MR. METIVIER-Right, but I’m saying, if we know that it’s just a few trees we’re looking for, or, you know, C.T. Male signoff, we’re not comfortable with what we have to make a motion to approve, but we think that we can get, because it’s Old Business, get it through in five minutes, as to not waste that seventh agenda item. If we, as a Board, decide that we would accept it as an eighth item. MR. BROWN-Yes. MRS. STEFFAN-Didn’t we do that in December with the Schermerhorn? MR. METIVIER-Yes, the Schermerhorn, and it was a five minute thing at the most. MRS. STEFFAN-And two other things dropped off the agenda anyway. MR. METIVIER-Yes, well, that’s just luck of the draw. 32 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) MR. BROWN-You certainly can do that. Be flexible. A lot of the process you do now (lost words) be flexible and help the people with projects. That’s what we try and do downstairs. We try and help people through the process. We don’t help them get an approval or steer them towards a denial. We just help them get into the process. Where it falls when it gets here, that’s dependent upon the presentation, and issues that come up. MR. FORD-It seems to me that if we’re going to table with a laundry list, that we do exactly that, and it would be the rare exception that we would date the next meeting. It puts the onus right where it belongs. If there’s a laundry list, the onus is on the applicant. Let them worry about the deadlines. We’ll accept it when it comes up, and it would be the rare exception when we didn’t do it that way. MR. BROWN-The reason that I suggest you should date it. I think everybody, at least on the Planning Board, (lost words) an opinion that came from Town Counsel that said, if you have tabled an application, and you don’t pick a date, now you have to re-notice the public hearing, because nobody knows when it’s coming back, and how does that affect us, it affects the Town in that who pays for this re-notification? (Lost words) a million dollars now, but when you table five things every month to an unspecific date, we have to do these re- notifications, re-notify everybody within 500 feet of the property, (lost words) a parcel on say the States avenues in West Glens Falls, it could be 300 properties, that’s public notification in the newspaper. If you don’t pick a date and say, at this public hearing, we’re going to continue it at this date. If you do that, you don’t have to notice the public hearing again. That’s why I suggested that. MR. FORD-Thank you. MR. BROWN-Conditions and approvals. I know you want to talk a little bit about that. Bruce, if you want to come up. What Bruce does, any time you guys do an approval, we’ll talk about this, any time you guys issue an approval or denial, what Bruce’s job is, Bruce goes to the site, various stages of the construction, right from before they break ground (lost words) right through the day they get their CO and then continuing on through next year, we drive through Wal-Mart and make sure all their trees are still alive. If not, we put them on notice, hey, your two trees have died, change them out. So Bruce just has a quick comment on what would be helpful for conditions. MR. FRANK-What I really have is a request or a suggestion. You can do what you want with it. You know who the regular players are, and you have other developers come in who may not be familiar with our Town and our standards and what not, and unfortunately you’re going to find (lost words) this is really for the Planning Board on site plans. You’ll find a lot of fine site plans that are put before you and they look fine, and certain details are left out. You fill in the gaps and you’ve got a fine plan that meets all the standards of the Town, and then it comes time to develop the project, and I can’t tell you how many times I get out there and the project is not developed the way that it was approved. (Lost words) Hess, experiences they had with the Town years ago, (lost words) and then we’ll save some money and time, and I’m not saying it happens all the time, but it does happen from time to time. The only little suggestion I would hope that the Chairman or whoever, to the agent, to let them know, hey, we like your plan. We’re approving this plan, but before we do, we want to let you know that the Town Official, somebody is going to be out there and he is going to scrutinize your plan. Your project has to be developed per these plans. That’s what he’s going to let him inspect only those plans, nothing else. By the way, conditions, you mentioned that. Conditions always go on the plans. I get the resolution with conditions. The first thing I do when I get that set of plans is I look at those conditions. Are they on the plans? Is it worded correctly? If not, I make sure that it’s according to what was really approved. So there’s key things, obviously, that you would make a special note of, a condition. Again, the most important thing is be upfront with the individual. Let that individual know that, hey, your project better be developed the way we’re approving it. If not, it will result in a deficiency, which won’t go away. It’s going to cost you time and money to correct it, or, if you can’t for some unforeseen reason, you’re going to have to go back before the Board. You no longer have a modification. You’re going to have to have a new project before the Board, and the Board’s not going to be real happy if you want to have something approved that is different than what they approved before, unless you have a real good reason. Of course things come up from time to time. (lost words) and the Board is reasonable at times. Nobody saw this. We understand now we will approve it as is, but I think it’s unfortunate, because it takes up more of the agenda space, takes up more of the Board member’s time. When certain agents should be put on notice right now to make sure 33 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) that what they’re proposing they’re really prepared to do with this project, because it will be inspected thoroughly. I don’t like to toot my own horn, but I am a very, very big on attention to detail, and (lost words) part of the job. It’s fun because you’re seeing this concept and then to watch it evolve in the field, it’s enjoyable to me. There’s other parts of this job that are not enjoyable. MRS. STEFFAN-We appreciate what you do. MR. FRANK-Well, somebody has to do it, and that’s what they need to know that somebody is doing it. So make sure that you do what you have to do, and I’m going to address the Zoning Board, too, because it’s a little different. MR. ABBATE-Okay, because I have about 12 questions. MR. FRANK-It’s a little different than going out to check on compliance of relief that’s been approved of the Zoning Board. Sometimes they’re hand in hand. If you’ve approved some relief that also requires the project to go before the Planning Board for site plan, of course that’s part of that plan anyway, and with our new Staff member, and again, we’re still getting up to speed, because this is not simple Code we have, for starters. We have a very complex Code, but I know we are getting there, and Susan’s always asking questions of Craig and I and everybody else, and we encourage her to do so. She’s looking at these plans and she’s handling both sets of plans. So she knows when something’s come before the Zoning Board and they’ve granted the relief necessary to go to the next stage to be reviewed by the Planning Board, she’s going to see that plan again, and if something looks a little different, she’s going to go, wait a minute, (lost words) this plan, before the Zoning Board it was a little bit different. So they also know that. The agent knows that at the pre-application meeting I’m handling both these applications. Make sure they’re reflective of what you’re going to set before both Boards. MRS. STEFFAN-I don’t want you to mention any names, Bruce, but are there agents who regularly engage in this kind of activity? MR. FRANK-There were some that did, but knowing that I’ve forced them to develop sites the way they’re supposed to, now I’ve got certain individuals calling me up, Bruce, we’ve got a site constraint. We never saw this. It’s minor. We don’t think it really needs to go back before the Board. Well, I’ll take a look at it and discuss it with Craig, and we’ll decide, this is real minor. We want to shift the dumpster enclosure 15 feet. The landscaping that was going to be over there near the dumpster enclosure is minor, if there’s no line of sight issue, because we hate to put something back before the Planning Board and have the Board say, what the hell are we looking at this application for? This is a no-brainer. Why are we even doing this again. So we don’t want to take up the Board’s time, too. We use a lot of logic and commonsense and we have a lot of discussion with all our Staff when certain things come up. So we try to help out everybody, the applicant, the owner. This leads me to my next point. It’s bothersome that a lot of times you have those regular players are the applicant’s agent before you. If you’re going to tell them what I’m asking you to, to be on notice that this is what’s going to happen after you get this approval, make sure they let the owner know this. Make sure they know that that word’s going to get down to the project manager. I can’t tell you how many times I get out there and the project manager says, who the hell are you. What are you doing here. They have no clue, and I say, how can you not know. By the way, where’s your plans, where’s your site plans? I’ll get to a project and they don’t have their site plan on the site. How can you develop that project per those plans when they’re not even on the site. MR. BROWN-The one thing we talked about, just today, as a matter of fact, making both Boards, any resolution you make, you must have the project plans on site at all times during construction. What we do as a follow up, and we’ll get to this a little later, but every site plan and every Zoning Board application and every Planning Board application, when they’re done with the project, you require them to bring us three copies of the final plan, all the conditions of approval on the plan, and put one of those as the final set of drawings in the file. One goes to Bruce to inspect the site and one goes to the building permit file, so there’s no question of what the project should be when you file for the building permit. They don’t have an approval for a 2,000 square foot house and file a building permit for a 3,000 square foot house. Compare those. An option we talked about today is, maybe four or five sets, and one of those sets be the project plan. If you don’t have the stamped set of plans from the Town of Queensbury on your project site, you shouldn’t be working. The Building Department does 34 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) that now. The Building Department, they collect two sets of drawings for every building permit application. Keep one, and stamp the other and give it back to you. You have to have this on the project site, every day you’re working and the building inspectors come to do inspections, they need to look at those plans to make sure your building is according to your plans. If the plans aren’t there, you don’t get your inspection. MRS. STEFFAN-Yes. We built a house a couple of years ago, and we had to have plans on the site for when the building inspector came. MR. BRYANT-That’s an OSHA regulation anyway. You’ve got to have plans on site. MR. ABBATE-Let me make sure that I’m hearing this right. Well, let me make a statement, and if the statement is wrong, then I heard it right. The Zoning Board of Appeals does not, is not in a position to advise the appellant what he should do or should not do. The Zoning Board of Appeals has only one objective, and that is to listen to the appeal, and only to the appeal, not to advise the individual, you have to have a site plan and so on. That is not our function. MR. BROWN-Okay. Then don’t do that. MR. ABBATE-Well, I’m letting you know. MR. BRYANT-I want to ask a question about conditions and enforcement. We had a case, and I don’t remember the name of the case, and they had gotten, five years ago or whatever, had gotten a variance, okay, with conditions, and during this period of time now, they did something above and beyond, or they didn’t comply with the conditions. They came back to the Zoning Board for a new application, so that their conditions or whatever could be, you know, part of the new appeal, you know, application, so that they wouldn’t have these conditions. Whatever the situation was. I don’t really. In any event, they were in violation all this period, and the thing was never enforced, and then they came back to us with this application so that their violations could be wiped away, and I don’t understand, I know Mr. Abbate disagrees with me, but I don’t understand where the enforcement issue lies and who’s responsibility it is. MR. FRANK-Was that five years or more ago that you’re talking about? MR. BROWN-Before you started. MR. BRYANT-It happened recently. I don’t remember. MR. ABBATE-Let me make it clear that I don’t disagree with you, and I say this publicly. The Zoning Board of Appeals does not have enforcement authority. MR. BRYANT-No, but we should not have a case come before us that is in violation, in my view. Now he disagrees with me. We’ve got to hear everybody, and I understand that philosophy, but I don’t remember the name of the case. You probably remember. MR. BROWN-I don’t, but if it’s in that timeframe, a lot of things (lost words) why wasn’t this project (lost words) according to (lost words). If it was five years ago, I was probably doing Planning Board and Zoning Board notes and projects, and the field enforcement afterwards, along with a lot of the Zoning Administrative stuff, and Chris was (lost words) because he was the Executive Director. Part of it was a manpower thing. There’s no question about that. That’s not the case now. Another part about that is why does an applicant appear before us with violations that he wants us to fix. Is that your question? MR. BRYANT-That’s exactly the question. MR. BROWN-Here’s the answer. We can take this applicant to Queensbury Town Court and say, you’re in violation of your site plan. Here’s your plan. You didn’t do it according to your plan, we’ll go to court. You don’t want to do what we’ve told you have to do, we’ll give you a warrant and take you to court. You don’t want to do that. You want to keep it as is. Well, if you take them to court, the judge is going to say, tell me if I’m right or wrong here, the judge is going to say, have you exhausted all of your administrative remedies? MR. ABBATE-You’re absolutely correct. 35 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) MR. BROWN-To get this approved by the Town, and what we do is we let them come to the Zoning Board and see if the Zoning Board agrees with what they’ve done and want to include it in their new package and say, we’ll give you the relief for that, too, or agree that you don’t have to do that condition, because taking them to court to have them do it, even if the judge says, you know what, we’re going to find against you, now who’s (lost words). We could have a whole other workshop on enforcement. MR. BRYANT-Okay. Maybe we ought to, because that issue, in my mind, still, I think a sane judge would say, these were conditions that were imposed in the original variance. Why, now, we do have to listen to something that has already been decided on? It’s a condition. We’ve granted you approval, this is the condition, and you’re in violation, and now you want. MR. STONE-Right, but, Al, we can say, we said at the time before, we’re going to say it again, so now you’re doubly in violation. MR. ABBATE-Yes, but there’s something else. When the judge says you have to exhaust all of your opportunities for resolution, what he basically means is this, and the individual who may come before us with a violation based upon the scenario set forth by Allan, has the opportunity to come back to us, perhaps, and ask for a re-hearing. That’s part of exhausting his opportunities to resolve the case. So it’s complex. It’s not as simple, Allan, as it sounds. To take the people to a court, it’s not that simple. MR. BROWN-Enforcement is, I find it extremely frustrating. MR. ABBATE-Right. MR. STONE-Well, don’t we all. We all do, but that brings us, you were going to tell us what is enforceable, please, that’s what I would like to hear you talk about. MR. FRANK-I want to make one more comment to Al, as far as an Area Variance approval. They go for the life of the project. You won’t believe how many times somebody complains. Before I go out to investigate a complaint on something, I review the history of the property. They got an Area Variance back in 1985. I pull the file. I go to the site, and if I find something that’s not in compliance, look, I’ve been directed to come here, I mean, and if it’s directly related to the complaint, you’re in violation. I’ve got your approval right here. MR. BRYANT-That whole concept of conditions is an administrative nightmare, because you tell an applicant, we grant your application, but plant a tree here, okay. Well, you know, 10 years pass, and that tree dies, for whatever reason, and how do you know about it or the next Bruce know about it? They don’t. MR. FRANK-Some of these things do come back around, if you review the history of the property, if you keep good records, so that’s the great importance of keeping good records, and again, we could probably go on and on about it. MR. BRYANT-But if you don’t have an application, there’s no reason to look at the property records. MR. FRANK-That’s not correct. If I get a complaint on the property, I want to know what could possibly be enforceable on the property. Especially when they know, you won’t believe how many times a complainant says, I know that 10 years ago they got a variance, next door neighbor’s have good memories of their neighbors approvals, and I know that they’re not going to be in compliance, and if it’s something that really affects your quality of life, that’s what zoning’s all about. You’ve got this relief granted to you. You’re in violation. You’ve got to come back into compliance. Because that’s good for the life of this project. MR. ABBATE-One other thing, too. The Zoning Board of Appeals has to ensure that we have a fair and unbiased hearing. We cannot cloud our judgment when granting conditions on what if and who is going to enforce these conditions. That’s not our function. We make the decision based upon conditions on good judgment, and once we make a decision, we have to, like it or not, we have to take the position that case is over with, and after that it’s none of our business. 36 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) MR. FRANK-It would depend our us to do our job because, you know, if we’re not doing our job, these guys are going to make sure that we are, because we’re not (lost words). MR. STONE-See, I would argue with that a little, Chuck. As citizens of the Town of Queensbury, it is our responsibility to report on things that we see that are in violation, either before the fact or after the fact. If we remember, if we can, I mean, we are watchdogs for the Town of Queensbury. MR. ABBATE-Well, and I would counter that by saying that when you volunteer for a position on the Planning Board or Zoning Board of Appeals, like it or not, you give up part of your rights, or you should. MR. FRANK-By the way, if your neighbor is doing something that’s in violation of the Zoning Code, and it’s affecting your quality of life, of course you’ve got the right to complain. Why would you not have the right to complain? You’re a citizen of the community, too, but you have to use some discretion here. If it’s some place on the other side of Town, you know he’s in violation of something or you think he’s in violation of something, but it’s really not affecting anybody’s quality of life, especially the people right next door, does anybody really care? Depending on what that violation is, but it might not even be a violation, because our Code is so complex, a lot of it also is dependent on subdivisions may have a different rule. Certain rules may not apply for a certain time period prior. Our Code is much more complex than you think. It’s not a simple Code. One other thing I want to touch base on, how do we track this stuff? Besides what our computer software initiates that, hey, a flag came up. You’re supposed to do an inspection on this property, and of course I pull the file and I look at the resolution, and I look at the conditions. So I do all my homework before I go over to the site. I know what I’m going to find when I get to the site, if they’re in compliance. As soon as I get there, it doesn’t take me more than a couple of minutes to realize the site’s not in compliance. It’s that easy. What do I do, personally, to track it? This is just from this year, I’m sorry, 2005, this is my own spreadsheet, and I track every site visit I do, whether it be an inspection for an approved site plan, whether it be an Area Variance compliance inspection, whether it be a complaint, or whether it be a violation that I found on my own, everything is tracked, going all the way back to 2001 when I started. This is just 2005. All the open items, they go to a separate spreadsheet. These are all the open items that aren’t even closed out because it’s real easy to track how much do I have open and what’s going on with these projects, and they’re all still in the hopper. Nothing’s going away. So, it takes a while to get certain sites to come into compliance. Others it’s a quick fix. It depends on the complexity of the project, the problem, and, by the way, 300 and some items last year. That’s just for the project or the site. Numerous ones, I was sent back to the site for a return visit, a return inspection, follow-up, dozens of times, dozens of times, and I track everything and I keep it in my day planner. So, if you said to me, you know what, Bruce, I don’t think you’ve been to that site even once, well, let me show you what I did. I’ve tracked everything thoroughly so nobody’s going to ever say to me, I don’t think you’re even doing your job. I mean, Town Board members have come to me, what are you doing at this site? Have you ever been there? Let me show you what I’ve done. So I don’t leave anything open. I’m not going to set myself up for a knock down, but because this is what my job is supposed to be. This is what I’m supposed to be doing. The next guy should be doing this, if he’s doing the job correctly. By the way, I’m human, I’m going to miss something. I’m going to make a mistake. I don’t mind if anybody calls and says, Bruce, would you check into this. Gretchen called me this past summer, Great Escape. Big project. She sees a problem with one of the detention basins. Well, there she’s correct. There was a problem there. It happened a few times until they finally, I kept going after and after them, and they finally got it right. The problem was corrected. So I don’t mind if somebody, certain Board members may want to ask their Chairman, hey, can I give him a call or should I bring the problem to you and I’ll call him, or call Craig. Craig’s my boss. You really should probably bring it to the attention of Craig. If he’s not around, let me know, because it may be something he knows about already. Let him know about it, or e-mail us, and let us both know, however you want to do it, as long as Craig doesn’t have any problem with it, but again, I’m not perfect. I’m going to miss something from time to time, but going to employ every tool possible to minimize mistakes or oversights. That I can promise you. MRS. STEFFAN-One of the things that we’ve done on the Planning Board recently is we’ve, obviously, clearing limits are a big issue. So in years prior, what they used to do is ask for deed restrictions, and we realized that that was not enforceable, and what we’re doing now is we’re asking for deed restrictions. We’re also asking for plat notations that say that, you 37 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) know, you only are allowed to clear certain areas, and that’s an example of what we’ve done to make sure that what conditions we’re putting on applications are enforceable by you. MR. FRANK-By the way, I’ve suggested numerous times, I hope it was part of my suggestion, I don’t know how it got to you guys, but that was one of my biggest complaints, that projects began because they didn’t let anybody know, and then they exceeded their clearing limits and this and that, and (lost words) to apply for a building permit. So nobody knew about this project starting so we’re instituting new procedures that are going to make sure that, it happened yesterday. The self-storage on Sherman Ave., the project was actually sold to somebody else. The guy comes to the counter, I need to meet with you. Here’s a letter saying I have to meet with you. I want to start my project. What do you require of me? I had to go, first thing, pull the plans out, we looked at them together. Clearing limits, I want them delineated, by a professional surveyor. I want to be able to go out there and say, they’re correct, start clearing. So, the project should be tracked by the time and day. We’ve had other problems. Our Code is a little outdated, and fortunately we have this PORC Committee to address a lot of these things. Someone had a subdivision, they exceeded the clearing limits, well after the houses were built. A watchful eye could pick up on it. You know about it because it was before you. So it’s helpful to have others and John is in the audience. There’s a project that he was very, very concerned about, a certain aspect of it, something with the environmental issue, something I hold very dear to my heart, because I’m an environmentalist. I’ve worked as a professional Biologist in the past, and John will tell you, we were on top of that project until the point where they had to get, provide the infrastructure to come in to meet with the plaza manager and his contractor, this is what we are going to require of you. So this could get very, very detailed at times, and it’s fortunate that we have some good people that are watching out for this stuff, and by the way, it may take something very important, and a lot of times it’s (lost words). There may be other times when it’s maybe a lot priority for us. We still, there’s seven plus square miles of Town to take care of here. There’s going to be times when something is going to be put on the back burner because this is minor, and it may well be a violation and we may well get to it in good time, but I don’t want you to think that you’re not being heard. In other words, I don’t want you to come to me or Craig with every thing that you think is a violation, because it may not be a violation. The most important thing is that, think about how much work we’ve got to do, and make sure that the important stuff is what gets enforced. That’s what we need to know about. We may well say to you we know about it. We’re on top of it, and thank you for bringing it to our attention. So it’s a team effort all the way around. Any way you look at it. MR. VOLLARO-Bruce, I’d just like to ask you one very simple question. Would you rather see a site plan that’s almost devoid of conditions but reflects all of what the Planning Board like to see? In other words, to me, the drawing speaks volumes as opposed to the words. Would you rather see a drawing that has everything on it with minimal amount of conditions, maybe one or two, as opposed to, I just signed a couple tonight that have a whole list of conditions on the plat. MR. FRANK-I don’t mind the conditions. It makes it easier for me to do my inspection because those are the (lost word) I look at. Obviously if it was so important that you made it a condition, it’s very important for the development of that project. MR. VOLLARO-Well, if we bring the project into compliance, drawing wise, is that something you can handle. In other words, the drawing, now, doesn’t have to be conditioned. Build it like the print, you’ve got it. Just build it like the print. Build it like the picture. MR. BROWN-Conditions or no, if somebody’s going to ask to do something, not going to want to do something (lost words). If they think the landscaping is too much, they’re going to say, gee, I didn’t realize it was going to cost me this much to landscape. MR. VOLLARO-Yes, but Bruce can take a look at the landscaping on the plan and say you’re not up to speed on this. MR. BROWN-Well, I guess if it’s listed as a condition or as part of their, matter of fact, here’s my base plan, if they’re not going to do it, they’re not going to do it. MR. VOLLARO-See, very often conditions, when they go in the motion, we may miss a couple. It’s not easy to get all those conditions lined up and get them right and get them into the motion and all of that. I’d much rather see the drawing be the reflective document, as opposed to a whole bunch of conditions. That’s all I’m saying. 38 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) MR. FRANK-One other quick thing. One other thing the Board can do, and I know you guys ask a lot of questions, but I want to bring certain things to your attention from time to time. I hear the same complaints over and over again, and one of them is snow removal. I’ll get to the site, and there’s a row of arborvitae on the property line, and the owner says to me, that’s where I want to plow my snow. I can’t put that landscaping in. Why was that not discussed at the Planning Board level? Then they’ll say to me, well, my landscape architect threw that in. I didn’t know he was going to do that. Craig and I will tell him, that’s your plan. You hired competent professionals to represent you. You should have a good handle on what they’re proposing. That’s why I want you to say to them, look, you’ve got a nice plan here, we’re going to approve it. Make sure you develop this way, and do you have any concerns right now? Is there anything on here that you’re having second thoughts about? Are there any issues that may come up, snow plowing issues? I know you guys do mention snow plowing on certain sites. I’ve seen it in conditions before, but it’s some of the smaller projects you guys say, I don’t even want to put the curbing in now because the snow plow’s going to keep hitting it. Make sure you develop the site the way you had it proposed and approved by the Planning Board. MR. VOLLARO-Make it like the picture. MR. FRANK-That’s all I have to guide me. It’s an easy thing for me to do. So that’s why they should have fair warning that, this guy’s going to be out there inspecting it. Make sure it’s developed this way, or else it’ll end up being back before us again. MR. STONE-Thank you, Bruce. MR. BROWN-I think maybe if we can move to the next couple of slides. It probably will cover a lot of ground, this discussion we’re going to talk about here. Aside from the Board, (lost words) now it’s up to the applicant. They have a certain responsibility, too, and that’s basically, in a nutshell, what we require from them, we send them a letter, after the approval, that says, you had this meeting. Here’s the outcome of the project (lost words) approval. You’re required to submit us the final drawings (lost words) things we talked about earlier, along with whatever else (lost words). If there’s engineering that had to be done, they have to pay their engineering fees before they get to the building permit. So we identify those things right up front. We require those final plans to be submitted for all these types of applications, and we need to get those in hand before we issue a building permit. If the project is for something that’s going to require a building permit, they don’t get it until they’ve drawn us those final set of plans, and if there were conditions, those conditions have to be listed right on the plan. On this final set of plans, it’s one of the hardest thing to get from them, because they think once they leave here, they’re done. I’ve got my Planning Board approval. Now all I have to do is get my building permit. So it’s, you know, communication to make sure they have that information. That’s why we send it out to them right away. Some people are in a hurry where they’ve got their building permit ready to go. Once they get through the Planning Board process, they’re in the next day for a building permit. I want to start digging tomorrow. So we need to make sure they get that information to us. Part of this letter says contact Bruce. Right at the bottom it says, before you do any work, contact Bruce. Here’s his number. Here’s his name. Here’s the location. His e-mail address may even be on there. Contact him. Have him come out to the site and identify what you need to do first. A lot of times it’s, make sure you have your silt fence up before you put a shovel in the ground. Make sure you’ve got certain things done or your clearing limits you need before you start taking down any trees. Let’s not flag them over here where there’s no more trees, and here’s where you should have stopped, let’s identify that first. So, that’s, they get that information right at the onset. (lost words) probably the biggest hurdle we face, after they leave here, is right at the end, getting them to complete the project, compliant completion of the project. I can’t tell you how many times (lost words) somebody said, I didn’t know it was going to cost me that much for all this landscaping. Do you know how much trees cost? I’ve got 400 daylilies that I have to put in around these apartment complexes. I didn’t know there was going to be this many trees. I’ve heard, I can’t plow now because of the curbing. I’m going to dig it up every time. Can’t I just do this without the plowing, without the curbing? Well, it’s there for a reason. (lost words) stormwater design required the curbing to get the water to the place it needs to go (lost words) it’s not going to function. A lot of times, the developer can do lots of things. (Lost words). They’re going to bring the plans (lost words) they might try to roll the dice and say how much can I put in without (lost words) I’m not going to say anybody’s names but it happens, not a lot, but there’s the regular people, regular crew that (lost words). We are tracking them. We do try 39 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) and stay on top of them. (lost words). What we do is we try and confirm we get those final plans we talked about. Let’s get those in house. Make sure we have those so when we go do the inspection, we know what we’re looking for as far as the site issues. (Lost words), look we’ve got all this stormwater stuff in, before I bury it, would you come and look it and make sure it’s the right thing. (Lost words) we’ll do a drive through. Bruce keeps track of all these inspections, all the times we go to the (lost words). Then we’ll go to the file, we’ll send it to the applicant, we noticed that your site’s paved and we don’t see any catch basin. Where’s your stormwater system. That’s an extreme, but we keep that in the file and send it out to them, and there’s time when, take up the pavement and put the stuff in. We’ve had them do that because they don’t do it. Once we get through that, then we get to the final signoff. The list goes to the site, plans in hand, everything’s there. We make sure the final Certificate of Occupancy (lost words). In the past, what we’ve tried to do is we try to work with the Building Department and get them to not issue a Certificate of Occupancy until all the site work’s done. It doesn’t always work because the issuance of the Certificate of Occupancy is administerial. If you meet all the requirements of the Building Code, if you’ve got your smoke alarms and your exit doors and your hot water heater works, if you meet all the requirements for your CO, you’re entitled to it. The Building Department can’t hold it up because you didn’t complete your site plan. We’ve been lucky, I guess, and the Building Department’s been willing to work with us and try and do a little, you know, arm twisting to get these applicants to (lost words) say you can’t have your CO until you get it, but if you qualify, you get your CO, and we have, you know, a list probably half the pages in there are projects that have their CO, they don’t have their site work done, and they have no desire to complete their site work and they have their CO. They’ve got, the Kwike Mart’s open. They’re selling the beer. They don’t care if the trees are in or not. MR. RIGBY-What is there that’s prohibiting you from not issuing the CO until all the site work’s done? MR. BROWN-It’s a Building Code requirement. You meet all the Building Codes, the CO goes for the building. If you meet the requirements of the Building Code, you get your CO. It has nothing to do with your site plan, but like I said, we’ve been lucky to have the Building Department work with us and say, I’m sorry you can’t have your CO, the landscaping’s not done. MR. STONE-Isn’t it occupancy of the property? Can’t argue that? MR. RIGBY-So you can have somebody that, I’m thinking of a case right now, but you can have somebody who develops a building that’s totally out of spec from what was originally approved, you’d still have to issue them their Certificate of Occupancy? MR. BRYANT-No, we’re talking about the site. MR. BROWN-We’re talking about the site. If they’ve got a 3,000 square building where your variance says 2,000 square foot building, number one, they wouldn’t have gotten the building permit. We would confirm that the building permit that gets issued is for the 2,000 square foot building. If they now have a 3,000 square foot building, that’s different from their building permit plans, Dave’s not going to give them their CO because they build something they didn’t have approval for, and that throws them right back into the. MR. RIGBY-I guess the case I’m thinking of is the case where the CO was issued and they didn’t comply with the building permit. MR. VOLLARO-One of the things I’d just like to check on, have you talk about when you get a chance, is the use of the Temporary CO. MR. BRYANT-Is that another workshop to talk about? MR. BROWN-Yes. It happens all the time. Typically what, and I don’t want to get too far into this, but I think what the Building Department does, and it happens, I don’t want to say the majority of building permits, but many, many building permits. An applicant wants to get in the building and occupy it. If it’s a commercial building, we want to get our staff in here, before we’re ready for the public, we want to at least get our staff in here and get them familiar with the building and train them. The Building Department requires that they have all the safety stuff in, all the exit lights and emergency lights and crash bars on the door. They might not have all the handicap rails in the bathroom. They might not have an awning 40 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) over a door outside that’s required, but they have everything (lost words), but as long as they’re satisfied that the building is safe to occupy, they give them a Temporary Certificate of Occupancy to occupy the building, while they’re finishing the rest, towards their goal of a final. MR. VOLLARO-Does that have a time limit on it, that Temporary CO? MR. BROWN-Typically, they take, depending on the amount of additional work, 30, 60 or 90 days. MR. VOLLARO-And it can be renewed, I suspect. MR. STONE-Craig, what is the carrot? Is there no carrot to finish site plan? MR. FRANK-Yes, they’re going to go to court. MR. BROWN-Well, you can go to court. MR. STONE-But you don’t want to go to court. MR. BROWN-What we may do is look, what I would suggest that we have the PORC Committee do, we’ve talked about this before, is look at instituting a policy of Certificate of Compliance, that’s issued by the Zoning Department, if you comply with your site plan. If you don’t comply with your site plan, you don’t get this Certificate of Compliance. If you don’t get your Certificate of Compliance, that’s another enforcement tool we can use, without going to court. (Lost words) MR. METIVIER-What about doing like a deposit? MR. BAKER-Bruce has actually done some good research on different enforcement techniques that other municipalities have had, that the Ordinance Review Committee is going to be reviewing. MR. BROWN-Tony asked a great question. What about a deposit? What about a performance bond? What about a letter of credit? All tools that are available to the Planning Board right now. MR. FRANK-Yes, you just don’t utilize them, but you could if you wanted to. MR. METIVIER-We did that once. MR. BROWN-Subdivisions or site plans where you’re concerned that it’s not going to get done, or, you know, if you make it a matter of course, people are going to expect it. Come up with an estimate you think it’s going to cost to build this road or construct this building, and a letter of credit. If you don’t have it done by a certain date, (lost words). It’s a tool that’s in the Code right now. It’s certainly available to you. MR. FRANK-It’s utilized a lot in other municipalities in the Capital Region right now. MR. BROWN-It’s usually going to be in the form of a letter of credit. Performance bonds are, I don’t know if anybody’s familiar with them, (lost words) insurance company. A letter of credit is much easier. The applicant’s probably prefer getting a letter of credit to a performance bond. MRS. STEFFAN-There have been a couple of folks in front of us who’s financing was shaky, and, you know, when you’re looking at extensive landscape plans and other things, that would be the last thing they’d have the money to do. So, it’s been worrisome. MR. VOLLARO-Well, I think on my seven years on the Board, I don’t even remember once when we’ve instituted a letter of credit requirement. MR. METIVIER-We did one. MR. VOLLARO-We did one? 41 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) MR. METIVIER-Yes, it was last year. MR. VOLLARO-One in seven years. MR. METIVIER-It was for easement for a subdivision, attachment of a subdivision, up on Sherman. MR. VOLLARO-Okay. Yes. All right. I think we did that one, yes. MR. BROWN-So follow up with the whole Staff, follow up signoff is, this is an on-going inspection process. Even after they get their final CO, Bruce has been to the site, the site looks great, we issue a final signoff, close the file, put it away. They’re required, as part of the approval, to develop that site and maintain that site. If a tree dies ten years from now, I mean, they’re supposed to replace that as part of their site plan. If a light pole falls over, they have to put it back. (Lost words) a bunch of parking spaces because they never use them. If they do those things, they all need to come back to the Board (lost words) and we don’t do as many of those types of inspections because we have a lot of current, open ones, complaints, inquiries to deal with, but there are times that we’ve gone through sites and seen trees (lost words) on Bay Road (lost words) Lowe’s. Trees have died. We’ve talked to them about planting more trees, and they were good. They put the trees back in, and now they have a buffer between the garden area and Bay Road, it looks, it’s filled in. It’s an ongoing process. So that’s a quick look at the approval process. MR. VOLLARO-It was good. MR. BROWN-The last thing on the agenda that you guys want to talk about tonight is both the Planning Board Chairman and Zoning Board Chairman had a conversation about applications that require review by both the Planning Board and Zoning Board, what about the option of requiring the applicant, up front, to appear before the Planning Board for a recommendation on the project. That recommendation is sent to the Zoning Board, so the Zoning Board has that before the variance. We talked about this last year or two years ago (lost words) I sent out to both Boards. (Lost words). I don’t know, I think, we’re of the opinion, and I’ll (lost words) from Bob and Chuck, but of the opinion that it would be helpful to have as much information when you make your decision as possible. The Board, the Planning Board, this goes way back to one of the first things I said tonight. The Planning Board has original jurisdiction. You’ve got the authority to look at a project right from the beginning. (Lost words) denial and people come to you because they have a use that’s allowed. Part of that original jurisdiction, (lost words) that I don’t think the Planning Board right now realizes that they have, and they can apply certain techniques and certain methods of review to compel the applicants to do the plantings in the way you want them done according to the Town Code. If they don’t do those, you know, they don’t get what they want. I’m not saying you should start denying projects if they don’t have 47 trees (lost words), but I think there’s a lot of untapped potential that the Planning Board has at their discretion, like we just talked about, a performance bond, or letter of credit. A great tool to use. It’s not used. There’s a lot of other tools like that that are in the current Code, that if the Planning Board does this recommendation that says, for instance, we’ve got a project that wants to have too many parking spaces. They need a variance. They’re going over their permeability, too many parking spaces. They need a variance from the Zoning Board and site plan review from the Planning Board for their use. The process is now they go to the Zoning Board, get their parking variance, their permeability variance. They’re successful, they take that variance to the Planning Board, and they stand at the table with that hammer in their hand, and say, I’ve got my variance. You can’t tell me I have too much permeability now. They wield that, and any clever attorney is going to know how to use that pretty successfully, especially if SEQRA issues come up. You’ve got to be careful when you do that, and the problem with a recommendation from the Planning Board, and again, it’s not a decision of the Planning Board, we like this or not, and it can certainly be worded in a way that reserves any decision in the future about the project. So if you recommend that they drop it down to 60 spaces instead of 70, they get their variance for 60, it still comes back to the Planning Board and you can still not like it and deny it, even though you recommended it, and you can word it in a way that it’s safe for everybody to still have the right to make a decision either way. I think that gives the Zoning Board a lot of information to make a decision. It also may, the Planning Board may be able to look at this project, provide some comment to the applicant and say, I like it or don’t like it. It may (lost words), but it may empower the applicant to change their project to the point where, now they don’t need a variance. They’ve heard the comments that the Planning Board made. They’ve taken it to heart. 42 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) They’ve revised their plan. They don’t need a variance. They come back to you with a plan you’re going to like hopefully because you’ve made some comments on it, and you get a better project in the end. MR. ABBATE-And this is important, too, because rather than parking spots, I wish you would have said signs. It’s extremely important that I think the Planning Board take a close look at all of these things first, and then submit their recommendation to the Zoning Board of Appeals, and if they did that in the past, we would have avoided a lot of things recently that have come up before us. MR. VOLLARO-Signs are within our purview. In 179 it talks very definitely about signs in site plan review. MR. BROWN-Sure. MR. ABBATE-Exactly. MR. BROWN-You want to look at what the signs are for the project, what impacts they have on sight lines and visual and aesthetic value. You certainly can’t tell somebody they can have a sign that’s outside the Code. That’s strictly for the Zoning Board, but if you want to look at the lighting on the sign, how’s this going to affect the lighting plan for the site or colors. All that stuff is a part of Planning Board review. I don’t want to sound like I’m trying to sell this too hard, but another benefit of the Planning Board review before the Zoning Board would be those instances where you’re going to do coordinated review. Likely the Planning Board is going to be Lead Agency on that coordinated review on a project that doesn’t require Town Board action because the Town Board is going to want to be SEQRA Lead Agent if it requires review from all three Boards. So they’re going to go to the Planning Board anyway for the SEQRA review, and along with that SEQRA review, that recommendation to the Zoning Board on the variance could (lost words). The trickiest part, if the consensus is to go in that direction, is to make sure that you work closely with Counsel to get that recommendation, not a decision by the Planning Board, get that recommendation worded so that it doesn’t paint you in the corner where you have to approve it when it comes back because you said, we like this or we don’t like that. MR. VOLLARO-This is where, again, I’m going to sound like a broken record here, but the Sketch Plan would also help in that area, where we might see that in Sketch and say, you know, that’s too much parking, or the permeability’s not good. We don’t like the permeability. So they wouldn’t put something in that plan that has to go to the ZBA for a variance if we caught it up front at Sketch. MR. BROWN-Right. I mean, (lost words) subdivision when we’re Sketch Plan, but. MR. VOLLARO-Yes. MR. BROWN-If they’re at the Sketch Plan stage, they’re probably not before the Zoning Board anyway for a variance for lot widths or a generic identification of the lot (lost words). At Sketch you want to flesh out everything we talked about. MR. ABBATE-Yes, and there is a safety valve here, before anybody gets upset, and the safety valve is this. By statute, the Zoning Board of Appeals does not have to take the advice of an attorney, of the Town or of the Planning Board. So there’s the safety valve. MR. BROWN-Well, the other safety valve is nobody likes this idea. We don’t want to do this Planning Board first because it’s going to add delays and the development community’s going to be up in arms against it. Any project that comes before the Zoning Board, if they’re not comfortable with the information they have before them, can refer it to the Planning Board. MR. ABBATE-Absolutely. MR. VOLLARO-It’s in there now. MR. BROWN-Right, it’s in there now. MR. ABBATE-And we do that, too. 43 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) MR. BROWN-Right. My only reservation with that is, if the thought is going to be try and do that on a regular basis, that’s not fair to the applicant. Now you’re getting in the pipeline through the Zoning Board. You get them in a meeting. You’re going to tell them, I don’t like this, not I don’t like this. I’m not comfortable to make a decision. I’d like a recommendation from the Planning Board. Now you’re backing them out of your process and getting them into the Planning Board process where they have to wait a month to get on, because they’re past the deadline. If we’re going to do that, we should tell them right up front, here’s what you need to do. They expect it. They know what they need to do, and the reason that it seems like it would work better, use the site plan for example. Any time you do site plan review, you’ve got the entire site before you. The Planning Board can see the entire site. A lot of times with a variance, and I’ll pick a sports complex, for instance, and they may be before the Zoning Board for a height variance, or say, for a big white dome, okay. What the Zoning Board’s going to look at, they’re going to look at an elevation drawing that says, I’m supposed to be 40 feet tall and I want to be 68 feet tall, and can I have a height variance. Well, they’ve got a generic concept site plan that shows where the building’s going to be, so you can get an idea of where is it going to be visible from, where is it not going to be visible from, but it’s likely, the way the process is now, because we have the Zoning Board first and not the Planning Board, that concept plan doesn’t show the limits, the accurate limits of all the clearing, all the landscaping that’s proposed. They’re going to have a plan where if I don’t get my height variance, I’m not going to develop this whole plan to sit before the Planning Board. If you do it the other way, you have the Planning Board review it first, the Planning Board’s got the entire site plan review application, all the nuts and bolts, landscaping, lighting, stormwater, grading, all those things that you would look at at the site plan review application, now you see the entire plan and can make a recommendation on either a global review of the project or a specific recommendation based on what your variance request is. It can go in either format, but it seems like the entire site plan review, at least a recommendation on that plan, would help the Zoning Board. MR. ABBATE-Yes, but let me go back earlier to what a couple of the Board members said, and Allan was even more explicit about it. It would help, in my opinion, it would help me, the more information that I have concerning an appeal, the more intelligently I can make a decision. So, bouncing the appeal from the Zoning Board with conditions that, yes, we approve it based upon the approval of the Planning Board, based on the approval of this, based on the approval of that. We could avoid all of that. So that when we get our recommendation from the Planning Board we have, in my opinion, more information than we had before to make an intelligent decision. That’s my opinion. MR. BROWN-Well, with the example that you gave, hopefully somebody at the Staff table would jump up and scream and say don’t do that. You never want to issue an approval that’s based on the performance of another Board. If that Board doesn’t approve it, does that mean your approval’s not a valid one. You don’t want to put it outside the control of the applicant. If they need to do something. MR. ABBATE-Right. MR. BRYANT-I don’t think he meant that. MR. BROWN-Okay. MR. BRYANT-It speaks to the issue of having as much pertinent information. MR. ABBATE-Right. MR. BRYANT-Whether it be a recommendation, in the form of a recommendation, in the form of minutes for the meeting, and so that we can tell what the content is. MR. ABBATE-Exactly. MR. STONE-See, I have a little difficulty with this thing. I would love to see the part you talked about where the Planning Board could look at it and say, well, if you do this, this, and this, you don’t need a variance, but if a variance is needed, then I have a problem. MR. BROWN-I tell them that when they come in. MR. STONE-Well, I know. 44 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) MR. BROWN-You need a variance for this, this, and this. They know what they need the variance for. MR. STONE-Yes, but then if they look at it, and they still come to us with a variance request, I have a little difficulty with that. I would love if they could get rid of the variance request by saying, why don’t you put the building three feet over and maybe you don’t need that, and that would be valuable to them and to the Town, but I’m not sure that having them say, well, we need a variance, and this is what we would be comfortable with, and then send it to us, I have a little problem with that. MR. ABBATE-No, that’s not the concept of what we’re talking about. MR. MC NULTY-It may be terminology, but I’ll agree with Lew. I have a problem if the Planning Board is recommending to the Zoning Board that we approve a 60 foot variance or something. MR. ABBATE-No, no, no, no. They can’t do that. MR. MC NULTY-If what we’re getting from the Planning Board is just their first reaction to the overall plan. MR. ABBATE-No, they cannot recommend, nor would I accept it, the fact that they’re recommending to us what we should do. That’s out of the question. MR. STONE-Then I’m not trying to figure out what they’re recommending, outside of making suggestions that would eliminate the need for a variance. Then it doesn’t come to us. MR. VOLLARO-That’s what the idea is of us even giving you a recommendation. For example, if you’ve got permeability in there that doesn’t meet the Code, the way to do that is to get rid of some parking spaces and make it grass. That eliminates the fact that they have to come to you for a variance, and you wouldn’t see it, if he does that. If he does that, you wouldn’t see it. He wouldn’t need a variance. MR. STONE-I agree, and that is of value, but if you say, well, we can’t see 60%, we can see 62. MR. VOLLARO-No, no, no. MR. STONE-Well, that’s the concern that I have. MR. VOLLARO-No. We’ve got to make sure that we only give you a recommendation to help you, and never tell you what to do. It’s a recommendation. Therefore, we’re not telling you anything. MR. MC NULTY-The first thing you’ve got to do is take the word “recommendation” out. If you’re recommending to us what we’re going to do, there’s going to be a bunch of us that object. MR. RIGBY-I don’t think the recommendation is to us. I think the recommendation is to the applicant. They’re saying to the applicant, look, your permeability is all out of whack, now this is what you can do, and now maybe they still come to the Zoning Board and they say, okay, we’ve been to the Planning Board. They’ve told us, they said that these are some good recommendations. We’ve done this. Now you guys, we’re asking for a variance. What do you think? MR. ABBATE-Leo, you’re right. MR. RIGBY-So it’s not to us, it’s to the applicant. MR. ABBATE-You’re absolutely right, and I didn’t explain it properly. You’re right. When the Planning Board talks, I don’t know what you call them. We call them the appellant. When the Planning Board talks to an applicant, they are discussing it strictly with the applicant and they are not addressing it to the Zoning Board of Appeals. If they say to the applicant, we think it’s a good idea for you to do this and do this, that information, based 45 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) upon what they decide to do, in the event that they need a variance, will come to us and we will see what they’ve told the applicant, not the Zoning Board of Appeals. MR. RIGBY-Chuck, now our catch, as the Zoning Board, is we’re going to have to do some preliminary review before the applicant comes to the Zoning Board, just like the Planning Board’s going to do with their potential review. MR. ABBATE-Yes. MR. RIGBY-So we’re going to have to do some type of review of what the applicant submitted to determine whether it should go to the Planning Board before it even comes to us. So we’ve got to have probably a couple of people on the Zoning Board to do preliminary review. MR. BRYANT-Either that, or we’ve got to do it in the process that you do it when the Chairman sits down with Staff to help set the agenda. MR. BROWN-Well, there’s probably a couple of different ways you could do it. You could come up with a criteria list that says all projects that require both Planning Board and Zoning Board need a recommendation, or you could break it down and say, all commercial projects. You could start dividing it up on what projects should get this recommendation or not, but then there’s always going to be that one that’s in between and how do you pick which way that goes. The way I’m talking about is everything that needs both Boards reviews gets a recommendation from the Planning Board first. MR. STONE-Well, what is their recommendation? I think that’s the concern that Chuck and I are both expressing. What do they recommend to us? MR. RIGBY-Not to us, to the applicant. MR. STONE-No, no, no, it would be to us, Leo, not to the applicant. MR. ABBATE-That’s absolutely incorrect. The Planning Board directs its comments to the applicant, not the Zoning Board of Appeals, and when the Planning Board gets done with it, we then get that information. MR. VOLLARO-Or you may never get it. MR. ABBATE-Or we may never get it. MR. STONE-What creates this request for a variance? There’s got to be numbers in the request for a variance. MR. RIGBY-There may not be a request for a variance. MR. ABBATE-There may not be a request. Absolutely. MR. MC NULTY-We don’t have to worry about it, then. MR. STONE-We don’t have to worry about it. MR. BRYANT-I think that we’re beating a dead horse here. MR. VOLLARO-I think we ought to let the process run a little bit and see how it works. If it doesn’t work good, we’ll can it. MR. BRYANT-See, I don’t think it, the word, you’re right, the word “recommendation” should be nixed, and that’s not what they’re referring to. If the Planning Board decides, at the end of hearing all this thing, that, well, you’re still going to need a 60 foot height variance, they’re not going to make a recommendation to us to either grant it or not grant it, but we are going to then see all the data that, concerning that project, and that’s a valid point, and we’d also see their attitude toward certain issues that we might not discuss, like stormwater, or environmental issues, and these are things that we, a lot of times as a Zoning Board, don’t necessarily delve into, where they’re going to cover it with their review, and that might be helpful for us to make a decision. So they’re not recommending anything, what I’m 46 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) understanding, they’re basically saying, yes, you’re going to need a variance, or, no, you’re not going to need a variance, if you do such and such and such a thing, but then we use their data to make an informed decision. Originally, I was opposed to it, I think, when you circulated the e-mails. Frankly, the way it’s presented tonight makes sense to me. MR. BROWN-Well, you know, first of all, this isn’t the plan. Nothing’s going to happen tomorrow (lost words). This is all still up for discussion, and how it happens, is it a recommendation to the applicant or is a recommendation to the Zoning Board, is it a memo, is it a copy of the minutes? I don’t know. I think that’s why we want to have this discussion. I think you probably first should decide, is it valuable to get some sort of review of it to the Zoning Board before they make a decision, from the Planning Board. If that’s valuable, look closer at how you do it. MR. STONE-It’s interesting, if a guy comes in to you with a project and you say the way it stands now, you’re going to need some variances, okay. That’s what you’ve said to him, but, if you want, we can give it to the Planning Board to see if they can eliminate the need for variances. Now that’s a very different thing, by their review of the site plan. MR. VOLLARO-See, a lot of times, Lew, when a plan comes to us with a variance that’s been granted, our hands are tied big time, okay. MR. STONE-No, I understand that part. MR. VOLLARO-And we want to make sure that when you, before you grant that variance, and we’re not going to tell you to grant it, not to grant it, for how much, how high, but if that variance goes through, it’s going to cause us a problem in site plan review. Because now we have to, by law, we have to follow this variance. We’re stuck with it, can’t get away from it at all. We can’t go back to you and say, gee, can you help us, no way. We’re going to have to do it. MR. ABBATE-There is no, certainly the ZBA Board members know me. I wouldn’t tolerate for one instant the Planning Board telling us what to do. Trust me, and there is no indication that they’re going to do that. What I’ve attempted to say to Craig and to Bob is that, look, we need as much information as we possibly can and perhaps if the applications were to go to the Planning Board first, we could benefit from the review of their minutes of the meeting to see why they did what they did and what they said, and that would help us, I do believe, in making a more intelligent decision. MR. STONE-Bob is saying that we’re tying his hands, and I think I’m saying that they’re tying our hands. MR. ABBATE-Absolutely not. I don’t perceive it that way. MR. RIGBY-It’s nothing but benefit to us. MR. STONE-I don’t agree. MR. BROWN-If it’s a memo from the Planning Board that says, we’ve reviewed this application, and it could be some paraphrase, one of the members had concerns about traffic counts. MR. ABBATE-Sure. MR. BROWN-Had concerns about permeability, had concerns about whatever, now however you want to fold those into your review, fold them in. MR. STONE-That’s fine. That’s fine. MR. BROWN-If you want to interpret we had issues with permeability into, maybe we don’t want to grant this much permeability. MR. STONE-Yes, I don’t want to hear that. I want to hear their concerns. That’s absolutely right. 47 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) MR. BROWN-(Lost words) conversion in your own mind that says, we have issues about permeability, and you take that to say, let’s not grant as much parking relief. MR. STONE-That builds on what Al said, and that’s good. It gives us more information and insight into the thinking of the Planning Board, but I don’t want to go beyond hearing their thinking. MR. MC NULTY-Yes, I don’t want to see an application come over to us where the Planning Board has looked at it and said, okay, we think we can give you this approval if you get a 60 foot variance. Then that ties our hands. MR. STONE-If the seven people on the Planning Board look at it and say, we’ve got concerns, and I love that word, because it doesn’t say they’re bad or good, but we’ve got concerns about permeability, about the location of the building, blah, blah, blah. MR. VOLLARO-Let me give you a parallel. MR. STONE-Go ahead. MR. VOLLARO-When there’s a zoning, if the Town Board is confronted with a zone change, very often, at their discretion, they will ask the Planning Board for a recommendation. Whether they accept it or not, who knows, but we give them a recommendation on whether this is a good idea or not a good idea in zoning. This is exact parallel of what we’re trying to do here. MR. STONE-It’s not an exact parallel. MR. VOLLARO-Sure it is. MR. STONE-It’s not exact at all, because the Town Board’s powers are very different than the Zoning Board’s powers, and you’re taking away our powers. They already have the power to re-zone. They’re asking for some advice from people who are very knowledgeable and who care. MR. BRYANT-And we have the power to rule on a case without the Planning Board’s approval. MR. STONE-I appreciate their information, their concerns. I don’t want to hear any dimensional comment. MR. VOLLARO-I think we’ve made that clear like ten times, Lew. MR. BROWN-Yes. MR. STONE-That’s not the way it’s been said. I think we’re getting there, Bob. I think now we’ve gotten the language, the word “recommendation” is off the table, and that’s important. We’re talking about hearing concerns. MR. VOLLARO-We’re going to replace it with Planning Board concerns. Is that what you want? MR. STONE-Yes. MR. VOLLARO-That sounds okay. MR. ABBATE-I don’t have a problem with that. MR. STONE-I have no problem with that. MRS. STEFFAN-Okay. MR. BRYANT-Are you done with this thing? MR. BROWN-Yes. 48 (Queensbury Joint ZBA/Planning Meeting 1/11/06) MR. BRYANT-I have a comment. I just want you to know that I really appreciate this workshop. I get a lot out of the workshop, and the first time I’ve met most of the members of the Planning Board, and I really appreciate that, and I think we ought to do it more often. MR. BROWN-Well, that’s what I’m trying to do. MR. ABBATE-You did a good job, Craig, and I’ve learned a lot this evening. I was delighted to meet the members of the Planning Board, and I think we can work closer than we have in the past in the spirit of cooperation. MR. BROWN-That’s the goal. Anybody has anything you want to e-mail me tomorrow or next week, you think of something you want to see as a workshop topic, feel free. MR. STONE-I think we should thank all the Staff for getting this information. MR. ABBATE-Absolutely. On motion meeting was adjourned. RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED, Robert Vollaro, Planning Board Chairman Charles Abbate, Zoning Board of Appeals Chairman 49