Loading...
2006-12-06 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) QUEENSBURY PLANNING/ORDINANCE REVIEW COMMITTEE REGULAR MEETING DECEMBER 6, 2006 7:00 P.M. MEMBERS PRESENT CHRIS HUNSINGER, CHAIRMAN CHARLES MC NULTY JOHN STROUGH DONALD KREBS MIKE BRANDT MIKE WILD MARK HOFFMAN GRETCHEN STEFFAN SENIOR PLANNER-STUART BAKER TOWN CONSULTANTS-SARATOGA ASSOCIATES-GEORGE HOMSY, MEGHAN FLANNAGAN; JOE CATALANO MR. HUNSINGER-The first item, then, is draft revisions to Chapter 183, the Subdivision Regulations. I don’t know if you want to walk us through. I mean, my comment on the first front page is there really wasn’t that many changes. There was some really good clarifications I thought, but. MR. HOMSY-And based on when I asked last time if the Committee had, or especially the Planning Board members had any concerns they want to voice, or Joe just went through and cleaned up some of the stuff that really wasn’t. MR. CATALANO-Yes, and I think it’s really mostly just the procedural, a couple of procedural items. MR. KREBS-I have a suggestion, for a relatively new member, when I’m looking at the documents, I’m not sure which is the latest document. We have sometimes multiple copies of the same article. What I would like to ask is if you could put a last revised date on the document. Then we would know whether we were looking at the last one or the previous one, particularly since I print most of them in black and white and I don’t see the double color. MR. CATALANO-Well, with the Subdivision Regulations, this is the only copy that the Committee has seen so far. MR. HOMSY-Was there any big change that we should point out or no? Did anyone going through it have any big questions? I think we’re in pretty good shape with this one. MR. WILD-I have probably about 20 of them. Let’s start on Page Six, there’s a Subtitle C. Is there any way that we can put some kind of constraint upon the Planning Board that says that they get back to the developers within a certain amount of time, something to the effect of maybe 30 days or 45 days? Just trying to streamline the process. MR. HOMSY-I have no problem with that. It’s up to the Committee. MR. BAKER-Okay. Just so everybody knows, typically what happens is with Sketch Plan review the Planning Board comments are given to the developer and his or her representatives that very evening, and there’s no delay in getting comments from the Planning Board to the developer. That’s been the typical process with Sketch Plan review. MR. WILD-So am I to assume that once they get those comments they can incorporate those comments and go right into the Preliminary review? MR. BAKER-That’s correct. The comments are not binding. MR. WILD-Not binding in which way? MR. BAKER-Not binding on either party, but the developer can incorporate those into the Preliminary design work. 1 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. WILD-I’ve done this once, and the question is, it was hard to get any kind of commitment out of Staff, because they weren’t sure how the Planning Board was going to react. MR. BAKER-And that’s typical because Staff does not speak for the Planning Board. MR. WILD-So what I’m trying to get at is some way to truly facilitate the conversations and make sure that when a proposal is put in front of the Board and put in front of Staff, there is some clear cut process that they can go through, and once they meet these hurdles, they move on and don’t have to go backwards again. MR. BAKER-It’s very unusual for an applicant to have to repeat a Sketch Plan review unless, they’re planning on a substantial change to the design of a project. Typically the way it works is when the applicant is before the Board for Sketch Plan review, the Board makes their opinion known there and then, and the applicant can then take that into consideration as they work on their Preliminary application, which is the next submittal. MR. CATALANO-The way the Sketch Plan part works, first of all it’s voluntary. The applicant does not have to go to a Sketch Plan conference with the Planning Board. It’s encouraged, and you want to keep it on an informal basis as much as possible, one, so that you don’t require detailed submissions, and, two, so that there’s some give and take, and that the applicant gets some feel of how the Planning Board is going to react and what are the major issues that may be involved, but with the limited information before the Planning Board from the Town’s side, you don’t want to commit the Planning Board to any decisions because the details might lead to other conclusions once they’re reviewed. MR. WILD-Okay. On the same page, in Section B, Subsection One, in red, it says it’s consistent with the Comprehensive Plan. We’re talking about the evaluation of the subdivision, correct? What happens in a situation where there are variances requested? As I read this, it said that if we’re not consistent with the Comprehensive Plan, you can’t move forward. Now is there some mechanism in here that circumvents this statement? It seems like a pretty strong statement, that says if you’re going through and requesting variances, how do you go through that process? Is there entitlements within here or guidelines within here to allow that to happen? MR. CATALANO-Well, first of all, what do you mean by variances? You mean waivers, requirements? MR. WILD-Yes. MR. CATALANO-Variances as to zoning requirements. Okay. MR. WILD-Well, if the lay of the land makes it difficult to incorporate what some developer may like to do, and it requires them to be somewhat inconsistent with the Plan, to me it seems like there’s no mechanism to allow that to happen. MR. CATALANO-It’s just under zoning. That would be a zoning variance, especially if it was something physical. MR. WILD-So it’s purely zoning? MR. CATALANO-Yes. MR. WILD-That doesn’t impact anything that the Planning Board would do at all? MR. CATALANO-No. A variance would go to the Zoning Board of Appeals, for an area or a dimensional and a variance, but the thing is the consistency with the Comprehensive Plan is, you know, the Comprehensive Plan has broad goals and so forth. So you’d be hard pressed to be meeting the zoning law requirements and not meet the consistency with the Comprehensive Plan. I mean, if you meet the zoning, you should be meeting the Comprehensive Plan, except in some cases where, you know, I can’t think of any, you know, but some cases where maybe the scale or something is inconsistent. MR. WILD-I guess my concern is that if it’s not totally consistent with the Plan, if you want to do something different, it’s still within the basic intent of what was trying to be accomplished with the Plan. 2 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. CATALANO-Then it would be consistent. I mean, if we’re slightly different, there wouldn’t be a, Mark, did you have a question? DR. HOFFMAN-In terms of clarification, if it’s clearly inconsistent with the Plan, it’s not, the Planning Board doesn’t have the discretion to say okay, then you have to go directly to the ZBA, right, and get a variance? MR. MC NULTY-Well, except the ZBA can’t give a variance to the Comprehensive Plan. MR. WILD-That’s my concern, that there’s no clear cut way to be able to handle this the way it’s written today. MR. BRANDT-I have a real philosophical question with all of that. Do we really know what the plan is here for the next 20 or 30 years? I’ve watched the Plan change, and it changes constantly. So why do we make it rigid and say in the law that it has to be the Plan? The Plan evolves? It always evolves. Nobody sees what’s coming, and so there has to be an evolutionary process. We can’t accommodate that in the law? To me, probably the most important thing most of us are thinking about is right here, is Smart Growth. How do you do that within this zoning law we have? Maybe it’s time you throw the whole damn thing out and start over, and really look at this Town and say let’s let the landowner bring us some good designs, let us look at SEQRA then in those designs, and let us look how to do Smart Growth. We as a Town certainly haven’t shown any propensity to know how to do Smart Growth. Let somebody bring it to us. I mean, it just seems arrogant to me to think that we all know what the plan is for the Town, and then we make this rigid, rigid law that says you’ll do it this way, and if you don’t do it back up this way and they can’t do it because there’s a Catch 22 there, it just seems to me we’re making a crazy law, and it’s time to look at the whole thing and say, how do we correct it? MR. HOMSY-When we got to the Comprehensive Plan part of the discussion, it’s the zoning that sets the rules, and so if something needs to change because there’s a, you know, need for a variance, that happens with the zoning. This consistency with the Comprehensive Plan is a guide that the Planning Board should be using because the Comprehensive Plan is sort of the community’s going forward. It’s the policy statement. This is not, I mean, the Plan, you know, if the Board thinks this is a really good project, and they may need to change the zoning to do it, and in the same motion the Town Board may need to change the Plan, and you’re right, Mike, plans evolve all the time and that would be what the Town Board does when those situations come up. MR. MC NULTY-Would it water down that section that was brought up, the part that says and is consistent with the Comprehensive Plan, would it water it down too much if we said, and is generally consistent? MR. HOMSY-That’s a statement for you guys to decide. MR. MC NULTY-That would put a weasel word in there and kind of say that the Planning Board could do a little bit of interpreting. MR. HUNSINGER-Well, and I’ve been looking for the Section in the Plan for anyone that has it on Page 60, one of the recommendations, and I’ll just read it very quickly. This Comprehensive Plan is a living document. The Comprehensive Plan should serve as a guide for future action by public and private entities in the Town, as with any planning document, this plan should be reviewed regularly to determine if the goals and recommendations found within continue to be relevant based on changing circumstances and updated as needed. So I think if there were a project that the community generally thought was appropriate with the Town, but it didn’t quite fit with the Plan, you amend the Plan. MR. BRANDT-Then strike that language. MR. WILD-Yes. My concern is that if someone finds something in the Plan that doesn’t agree with the proposed project, then it could be stricken and not approved, and without any interpretation or discussion associated with, because this statement being consistent with the Comprehensive Plan, and all the best planning that you have in the world is not going to be able to foresee everything that might come about. So I don’t want to preclude someone with a good idea or maybe a better idea getting something through that might be just a little off from what the Plan is saying. 3 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MRS. STEFFAN-I don’t think, if there’s a good idea or a better idea, the Planning Board would certainly consider that. I’m thinking of an example of this might be somebody who comes in with an application for a subdivision and it comes in through Sketch Plan for example and it might meet all the zoning criteria that we have in the Town, but yet the parcel is large. They’ve done a cookie cutter subdivision, and the Planning Board believes, based on the Comprehensive Land Use Plan, that the applicant should come back with a conservation subdivision, and so that would be an example of using the consistency of the information in the Comprehensive Land Use Plan to make a recommendation to the developer. So I think the language is okay. Just because we’ve had things that have come in front of the Planning Board that, you know, the Comprehensive Land Use Plan is a subjective document. I mean, there’s a lot of room for interpretation in there. There’ve been things that we’ve thought were good planning and good design maybe weren’t defined in our current Comprehensive Land Use Plan and we’ve certainly moved the project forward, but I don’t see this language as a problem. The document, the Comprehensive Land Use Plan, there was a lot of public input on that document, and I would hate to circumvent that document by taking this language out. I don’t think that would be a good idea, in my opinion. I guess I was building on your comment and Mr. Brandt’s comment. MR. STROUGH-It might be helpful if you had something specific, Mike. I mean, otherwise, there’s been a lot of collective community effort that went into this. Now, if there’s something specific like Mike Brandt suggests, and we have another person here that’s suggesting something different, I think we have to be open minded. This is the process where we’re, we let this thing evolve, and then if you think that there is something wrong, now is the time to speak up, and I want to hear about it, and give it due consideration, but if you’re saying, you know, after all this work and community and Committee and everything else, we made a mistake, which is entirely possible, as Chris points out, this is to be a process that’s reviewed, and I think we should review it annually, and we could put this into the report, if that would make you feel better, and if there’s an error or we could do something better, that’s the time to speak up, and that’s the time to amend it. We can amend it. It’s not written in stone. It’s a fluid document. So, I can sympathize with your concerns, but I can also hopefully allay them by just reinforcing what Chris had pointed out. MR. WILD-Well, again, my concern was just that if someone didn’t like it, it could be precluded, just because of the fact that it’s. MR. STROUGH-Only momentarily. MR. WILD-Well, for a year or whatever. MR. STROUGH-No, then you go to the Town Board and the Town Board opens the process to discuss the idea and, you know, with members of the community and the builder and the landowner all get to put their cards on the table, and I think that this community in most cases has proven to be most of the time pretty reasonable. MR. WILD-I would be fair with that process. DR. HOFFMAN-I’ve been impressed in this particular process that the zoning as written, the draft seem to be very close to the Comprehensive Land Use Plan. I’m having difficulty imagining a situation where you would meet the zoning requirements but not the Comprehensive Land Use Plan. MR. HUNSINGER-Okay. You said you had other comments? MR. WILD-On Page Seven there was a comment for the Committee about the scale. Why don’t you just limit it to a D or E size drawings, D, E, alphabetical size drawings that would help drive the. MR. STROUGH-My comment to that is that we’ve been using 50 feet, you don’t need the zero inches on there, okay. It’s like saying for the Christmas tree lights that it’s for indoor/outdoor use only. So you only need 50 feet, but it’s something that we’ve had for several decades. It’s worked, and not only that, it’s referenced in several places in the document. I made note of it on 183-10, 183-11, 183-15. So if you’re going to change it, you’re going to break a consistency. MR. CATALANO-Right. My note was here, and it would have been throughout if the Committee decided to change it. 4 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. STROUGH-So my position would be it’s worked. It’s already interlaced in this document and other documents that maybe we ought to keep it. MR. CATALANO-Okay. I mean, the reason why, I really just, once I heard from the Committee from last meeting that, you know, there’s been success in dealing with these regulations from the Planning Board level, I didn’t want to change the specifics, but I just know there’s a few comments you can see throughout where I wasn’t sure. So that’s why that was there. MR. STROUGH-That’s just my comment. MR. CATALANO-Is everybody else in agreement with that? Okay. MR. WILD-On Page Nine, Section D, the landscape plan, there was a change from 20 to 10 lots. I’m curious why that was made and then secondly I’m wondering, in the Preliminary Stage, whether you really need to have a landscape architect create a plan and go through that expense for the Preliminary Stage versus doing it at the Final Stage. So landscaping plan, there was something that could make or break a deal on a development. MR. STROUGH-I saw that, too, Mike, and let’s open it up for discussion. I mean, if there is a rationale behind that change, I’d like to hear it. MR. CATALANO-Well, the rationale, principally, was to have a discussion about it. Because again, this is one of those policy issues where I really have no, you know, I don’t have a preference one way or another, but I thought that, you know, if you’re doing 20, what’s the difference between 20 and 10? And so I wanted to hear a little bit back from the Committee on that. If you like the 20, that’s fine, we can keep it. I also do agree, though, you know, a landscape plan at the Preliminary Stage might be a little bit, you know, front loading the process a little bit, because at Preliminary Stage you don’t have the layout finalized yet. So that might be one of the things where you could put some language in there that, you know, it could go later on, too. MR. STROUGH-Well, what we run into, too, is this, and I understand the reasoning, but if the landscape isn’t in the Preliminary, and they put it in the Final, and they have to make major adjustments to it, that means the applicant has to come back again. We’re trying to make it easier for the applicant. So if the applicant loads this up front, then when he comes to Final, there’s probably fewer issues. They could just list them on the resolution and the applicant goes away hopefully happy. MR. CATALANO-Okay. I can see that. MR. WILD-My thought is just concept landscape plan. Instead of going through the expense of having an architect do that. MR. STROUGH-For smaller subdivisions, I suppose, but on the bigger ones I don’t think price comes into play. MR. CATALANO-And that supports having more lots for that requirement. Okay. So we’ll change that back to 20. DR. HOFFMAN-Do the people on the Planning Board feel that they need, in order to determine whether a smaller subdivision is going to be aesthetically pleasing, do you need a landscape plan for a 10 lot subdivision or do you feel that it’s not necessary for you to evaluate? MRS. STEFFAN-I’m just thinking about in light of the new regulations we’ve talked about, because some of the subdivisions are, the requirements are for more land, less lots, and so maybe it is a good idea for to move to 10 from 20. MR. HUNSINGER-I guess the comment that I was thinking of is the Planning Board has always taken the position of, we won’t approve this until you give us what we want. So if someone came in with a 12 lot subdivision and we wanted to see the landscaping plan, we’re going to ask for the landscaping plan, you know, irrespective of the number of lots. MR. KREBS-But I think the crux of the problem here is that it’s a licensed landscape architect, a plan by a licensed. 5 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. HUNSINGER-Yes, that’s how I read this as well, and I’ve always been of the opinion that we should not be mandating signed and stamped drawings, except for the subdivision plot itself. MR. KREBS-And certainly not in the Preliminary plans. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes, and I even wonder if some of the plans that we’re currently seeing are actually prepared by a licensed landscape architect. Is a licensed architect also a landscape architect? I’m showing my ignorance on this, because I really don’t know. It’s a special license. MR. HOMSY-Well, they are different licenses, but I think in State law, can’t engineers stamp? MR. CATALANO-Engineers and architects can stamp the landscaping plan, I believe. MR. HUNSINGER-Because that’s what we’re getting now. They’re not specified landscape architects. MR. CATALANO-Right. MR. HOMSY-Well, maybe you want to see the landscape plan but don’t necessarily need the licensing? Because at least it’s going to give you the idea but. MR. WILD-In the Preliminary. MR. HUNSINGER-The thing, I mean, the Final plans have to be stamped anyway, in order to be filed. MR. CATALANO-Why don’t we just say a landscape plan, and the other thing is shall be prepared in cases where the Planning Board requests it, rather than putting a designation of the lots. I mean, some land development really has no landscape plan. You’re just creating driveways off of roads and stuff like that. MR. HUNSINGER-I was going to say, a lot of times what we end up doing is instead of asking for landscaping plans is we ask for cutting plans because the subdivision is in the woods. We’ll say show us the clearing limits. MR. MC NULTY-That’s covered in the other section. MR. HUNSINGER-That’s more typical. MR. STROUGH-A lot of times we’ve waived the landscaping plan for subdivision. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes. So I guess the answer is it seems to be working the way it is. Is that fair, Gretchen, do you think? MRS. STEFFAN-Yes. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes. MR. CATALANO-So just take out the licensed landscape architect language, and leave it up to the Board’s discretion as to what you’ll accept, because if you’re accepting ones from engineers and architects, you could just say a licensed professional. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes, that would be better. MR. WILD-Moving forward, Page 11, as well as a few subsequent pages, there’s a date on the, not a date, but a timing of 62 days versus 45 days. This is on the very bottom of Page 11. I was just curious as to why the change. MR. CATALANO-State law. MR. WILD-State law? MR. CATALANO-Yes. Since the Subdivision Regulations were originally adopted, State law was amended and changed 45 days to 62 days. 6 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. WILD-Thank you. Page 12, in the bottom paragraph, lower paragraph, there’s references to Orange County. MR. MC NULTY-There’s at least three in that paragraph. MR. CATALANO-You can tell that’s where I cut it from. MR. HUNSINGER-I had a comment on the top of Page 13, while we’re right there, about agriculture data statement. I don’t think we have any Ag districts within the Town, do we? MR. BAKER-We don’t. MR. CATALANO-But you could, I mean, could you possibly in the future? Because it’s based on. MR. BAKER-It’s possible. We don’t have an awful lot of agriculture left in Town now, but it is possible. MR. CATALANO-Well, it doesn’t matter if you leave it in or out. It doesn’t apply right now. It could apply if the district does come up, but if it’s going to cause confusion, you might as well take it out. MR. HUNSINGER-That was my question. Do we need this? MR. BAKER-It might be worth taking out. I mean, there hasn’t been any interest in having an Ag district in Queensbury, to my knowledge. MR. CATALANO-Okay. MR. WILD-Page 16, Section F, Subsection One, the very last two lines. Failure of the Planning Board to act within 62 days or otherwise agreed upon period shall constitute approval of the Preliminary plat. My question was, so what? Because the Planning Board could then come by and disapprove the Final. MR. CATALANO-Yes, but only in the sense where the Final is different than the Preliminary. So if there’s a layout, say, of a particular say a 10 lot subdivision, a particular layout that’s on the Preliminary plat, and that plat is deemed to be approved because of this default, the Planning Board cannot deny the Final plat based on that layout. So it is a significant thing, non action. MR. WILD-But there could be other reasons why they would deny it. MR. CATALANO-There could be other reasons, but. MR. HOMSY-But there can always be other reasons. MR. CATALANO-Right. All this stuff that the Planning Board has the authority to approve in the Preliminary plat would be deemed approved, and the Planning Board cannot go back on that. MR. WILD-So is this truly enforceable? Does this make a difference to the Planning Board? MR. CATALANO-Well, it’s enforceable in the courts, State law. MR. WILD-Page 14, top of the page, Section Three, I just had a note about a checklist, on notation with approved, any items that might require further development. Is there a checklist? I think it was discussed before, that it would be prepared by the Planning Board, or for that matter the Zoning Board, that would say, here’s all the elements that you have to submit. Here’s our comments back, in a pretty much organized fashion, instead of having to go through 60 pages. MR. BAKER-That would be part of the motion at Preliminary. Typically Preliminary approvals are typically conditional approvals wherein the Planning Board lists specifically the changes they want to see made in the Final submittal. So that would be the list. MR. WILD-So there is a checklist? 7 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. BAKER-Provided in the motion. So the motion would provide a play by play of what changes are required for the Final submittal. MR. CATALANO-Do you mean a checklist as far as what’s required for the application? MR. WILD-Both, is what I was really looking at. MR. BAKER-Well, the checklist for the application is in the application itself, and it mirrors the items that are listed here in the Code. MR. WILD-The same page, and this is in the Final plats, and this is the Final approval? Is that what I’m assuming that is? MR. HUNSINGER-Yes. MR. KREBS-And in conjunction with that, we use Final plat some place. We use subdivision plat some place. They’re both the same, right? MR. CATALANO-Yes. MR. KREBS-Should we consistently be one way or the other? It talks earlier about a two step process, but we refer to three different things as you go through that might be confusing to people. MR. HOMSY-I guess like a Final subdivision plat is really what it is. MR. CATALANO-Well, the Final plat, yes. MR. BAKER-Yes, having consistent language would be helpful. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes, if you look at the last term at the end of Item Three there uses the term subdivision plat. MR. CATALANO-Right. That certainly should be Final. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes, that should be Final. MR. KREBS-There are some places, other places in here that I found that you use subdivision plat. MR. CATALANO-Yes, I didn’t change those. Those are what are currently in there now, but we will look and make that consistent. MR. WILD-Okay. Moving forward in the Final plats, Section B, Subsection Five, to ensure all of the features of the subdivision, including each proposed lot, can support the proposed development, to me that seems it would be discussed in Preliminary Stage, not Final. MR. CATALANO-Not necessarily. At Preliminary Stage you might not have all the details about whether the septic system design has been approved or you have done your deep hole tests at that point, well test, things like that. You want to probably save that for the Final Stage. MR. WILD-Okay. Page 18. Sorry, that was the 45 days versus the 62 days again. MR. HUNSINGER-Okay. MR. WILD-Page 22, bottom of the page, Section D, Subsection Two, in the event that any such modification is constructed without Planning Board approval, the plat approval shall be deemed null and void and the Town shall institute proceedings to have the plat stricken from the records of the County Clerk. That, to me, seemed awfully harsh, if someone made a mistake. MR. CATALANO-It is. Well, I don’t know if it’s a, yes, you say it’s a mistake, but it could be, in other terms it could be just going ahead without Planning Board authority. MR. MC NULTY-Yes, judging from our experience on the Zoning Board, we get these in and we struggle with them every time, not necessarily this particular thing, but a case where some builder did something. You look at it after the fact and say, how the heck 8 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) did he do that? I made a mistake, and it may be deliberate. It may be a stupid mistake or not paying attention, but at some point you do have to put the foot down hard and say, pay attention ahead of time. We’ve hit things on Zoning Board, people using a tax map to determine where they’re going to position a building, and then they come in later, oops, I’ve got a whole house here, and what do you make them do? Do you make them spend $30,000 moving the house, or do you grant him a variance? MR. WILD-Maybe it’s, instead of shall be deemed, now may be deemed null and void. MR. BRANDT-Give the Zoning Board the right to do that, say it may do it, but it doesn’t say it shall do it. So that they can use their discretion. If they think they’re getting worked over, they can, you know, lay the wood to them. If they think it’s an honest mistake, they don’t have to throw it out. MR. CATALANO-Yes, no, I think that we could go with may. See, what I just tried to do, in my addition, is the text right now currently says that the Board shall institute proceedings to have the plat stricken from the records. Well, why. Well, because the approval would be null and void in that case. So I just tried to add that, but you could put may, and you should also then put may institute proceedings. MR. HOMSY-So the harshness was always there. MR. BAKER-Yes, but it becomes a discretionary rather than required action by the Town. MR. CATALANO-That’s fine. I’d be okay with that. MR. BRANDT-It gives them the authority to do it. MR. HOMSY-Does everyone agree with that? MR. STROUGH-That’s fine, except, who has the authority? MR. BRANDT-The Board. MR. CATALANO-The Planning Board. MR. STROUGH-It says the Town. MR. CATALANO-See, the Planning Board would have the authority to decide whether the modification should be approved or not, and so the Planning Board has the authority to determine whether the plat is null and void. The Town Board would have the authority to institute any proceedings. The Planning Board doesn’t have that authority. MR. STROUGH-Well, Board is stricken. So it’s left with the Town. MR. CATALANO-Right. I left it open as to whether the Zoning Administrator or Town Attorney. MR. STROUGH-Should we leave it open? MR. CATALANO-Ultimately the Town Board makes the decision because the money, you know, it’s a cost thing. The Town Board has control over the part of the budget. So we could put Town Board there. MR. HOMSY-Should we it say, should it reflect that if the Planning Board deems it null and void, then the Town Board shall institute, so the Town Board doesn’t have to wrestle with whether or not this was approved, but the Planning Board makes that decision. The Town Board just administrates their decision? MR. STROUGH-That makes sense to me. MR. HOMSY-Okay. MR. CATALANO-I just thought of this. How about the plat shall be deemed null and void, because if you constructed the modification, the plat shall be deemed until the Planning Board approves it, and if the Planning Board doesn’t approve it, then they could go into further proceedings to have it stricken. We’ll say may still. 9 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. HOMSY-Some people wanted shall. MR. STROUGH-No, I could see the reason for may. MR. HOMSY-Okay. MR. STROUGH-I like the way George worded it earlier, too. It kind of had a hierarchy. If the Planning Board thinks that this modification is unacceptable, they can then give it to the authority of the Town Board to then do something about it. MR. CATALANO-Okay. MR. STROUGH-I mean, that seemed to make sense to me. MR. CATALANO-Okay. So deemed null and void until the Planning Board approves the modification. Because that would provide incentive for the applicant to come back in, get it worked out, without having to go to the ZBA. If the Planning Board approves the modification, that’s fine, it’s got approval, and if the Planning Board doesn’t approve it, then it goes on for the Planning Board can refer it to the Town Board for further proceedings. Does that sound okay? MR. STROUGH-Yes, that sounds good. MR. WILD-Is may still in there? MR. STROUGH-Yes. MR. WILD-Okay. Thank you. MR. CATALANO-But not the first one. The plat shall be deemed null and void until the Planning Board approves it. Because you want to hold that over the person so that the property isn’t conveyed, the lots are not conveyed out of the plat in the meantime until the Planning Board has approved the modification. MR. HOMSY-Yes. MR. STROUGH-And what usually happens, because this does happen, the Planning Board usually works out something with the applicant. MR. CATALANO-Right. If it’s no big deal, you know, an inadvertent mistake, then the Planning Board would just approve that modification, perhaps re-stamp the plans. If it’s a blatant, you know, or a very difficult one, then you could always have some negotiations about it. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes, usually we just do a lot line adjustment. It’s usually a pretty simple process. MR. CATALANO-Yes, right. MR. HOMSY-Okay. MR. WILD-Page 23, the very last sentence, in red, The Town Board may also decline to accept dedication of any street or road for any reason. That seems awfully harsh also. If I did a small subdivision. I had $100,000 in infrastructure and road, and for any reason the Town Board can decide not to accept that? MR. CATALANO-Yes, and that’s the current state of the law. The Town Board is under no obligation to accept the dedication, unless they have previously agreed to accept it. That’s a different case. MR. WILD-Well, it says shall not accept any roadway except, basically built and approved by the Highway Superintendent. So if the Highway Superintendent is approving it, the Planning Board approved the subdivision, and it was built according to plan, then the Town Board can come through and say, no, we’re not going to accept this, after all that investment? MR. CATALANO-That is correct. MRS. STEFFAN-Yes. 10 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. WILD-That’s okay? MR. CATALANO-I mean, that’s what the State of the law is. The Town Board is never under any obligation to accept the dedication of land or improvements, infrastructure. MRS. STEFFAN-Because the Planning Board is a volunteer body. MR. BAKER-So that would be the case whether that language is added in to the Sub Regs or not. MR. CATALANO-Right, I put it in there just as a warning. MR. HOMSY-A warning to the applicant. MR. CATALANO-Yes. MR. STROUGH-Well, the only time I can think of, Mike, where we’ve used this is, see what they do is they put a rough coat down on the road, and then they do their construction work, and then after most of the houses are built they’ll put their final. So sometimes they haven’t done the final, even though they’ve left money in escrow. Sometimes it’s kind of a, not enough to cover the final. We don’t have to accept that road until they live up to their agreements. I mean, I don’t know of any roads that we’ve ever not accepted, only that occasion where we’ve said we’re not accepting this until you put the final coat on, and then they did and we took the road, and that was it. We have that power, though, and they know that. So we get a road that’s done right. MR. WILD-For any reason? MR. CATALANO-Well, with this language in there, if the Planning Board says this is fine, you’re offering it as a public road, that’s fine, but this, but the Planning Board cannot bind the Town Board to accept a road, and neither can the Highway Superintendent. So if you’re a developer, before you make an investment, you’re going to go to the Town Board and you’re going to say, if I build this to specs, are you going to accept dedication of this? You’re going to get that in writing or at a meeting in the minutes. Then if you go ahead on that reliance, then of course, after that, the Town Board would have to accept it, if it’s completed. MR. WILD-So this is another step in the subdivision approval process that you need to go in front of the Town Board if you plan on conveying a road? MR. STROUGH-No, usually you don’t go in front of the Town Board. It’s all paperwork. If you’re denied, and you want to know why, you might go before the Town Board, but we never see these people. MR. WILD-But in reality they should, and try to get comments from the Board if everything’s done to specifications that you should accept it. MR. CATALANO-For dedication of any infrastructure, it’s always a good idea to get the Town Board to sign off on it sometimes. MR. STROUGH-Yes, but I mean usually we just sign off on it. If everything’s done right and the Highway Department says it’s fine, the Planning Board says it’s fine, we usually just give approval. MR. WILD-I realize that, but the law says a certain thing, that you can deny for any reason, right? And what you’re saying, that the developers should, in effect, go in front of the Town Board, either by letter or in person, and request that a statement of commitment. MR. CATALANO-That they accept the dedication, yes. MR. WILD-If everything’s done to specifications. MR. CATALANO-Right. MR. BRANDT-What’s the population of Queensbury? MR. STROUGH-26,000. 11 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. BRANDT-Okay. When the Town become a Town first class, 25 or 30,000? MR. CATALANO-I’m not sure. I think it’s much higher than that. MR. BRANDT-We’re close to it. MR. BAKER-I think it’s 25. MR. CATALANO-Is it really? MR. STROUGH-I think we’re already first class. MR. BRANDT-Well, a Town of first class can do away with the Highway Superintendent and mold it into a DPW and get out of all these conflicts that Queensbury has been into from Day One, and that’s State law conflicts with the Town Board and the Highway Superintendent can argue, and they do, I’ve seen it, I’ve experienced it, and it’s crazy, and then you could also consolidate a whole bunch of departments and save a lot of money. Just an idea. MR. MC NULTY-You’ve got the first part of that paragraph they highlighted, talks about the no building permit for a lot or parcel that doesn’t front on a Town roadway. MR. CATALANO-Yes, and that’s one of the things, I’m glad you brought that out. So the Town doesn’t allow any private roads. This is what this is saying. MR. MC NULTY-That’s what it’s saying, that that’s not the case. MR. CATALANO-Okay, and that’s why I wasn’t sure what was the case. So, if the Town does allow private roads, this should be taken care of. MR. MC NULTY-Well, it’s at least the Zoning Board does, because you’ve got this kind of a situation in multitudes around Lake George, for instance, where there’s a whole myriad of little tiny driveways that access lots, and it’s come up before in Zoning Board in some other places where there’s essentially a landlocked lot that they’re trying to develop. I don’t know what the answer is, but it’s a conflict we’re constantly hitting on Zoning Board. DR. HOFFMAN-What section are we looking at, now? MR. MC NULTY-The same section, Section A that we were just talking about. MR. WILD-The highlighted portion. MR. MC NULTY-The first part that says zoning of the Town of Queensbury provides that no building permit shall be issued for any lot or parcel of land that does not front on a Town accepted roadway. MR. CATALANO-Town accepted means that it actually has to be accepted by the Town as a public road. MR. MC NULTY-Yes, it’s got to be a public road. MR. CATALANO-Instead of Town approved. That’s a major policy issue, and this brings up about the fact that, you know, the Town Board doesn’t have to offer a dedication of any road. So if the Town Board denies the dedication of the road, as a public road, and you don’t allow private roads, well then that particular development is done for. MR. MC NULTY-Well, they show up in front of the Zoning Board is what they do, and there’s another portion here, too, that expands this, and requires at least 40 feet frontage. DR. HOFFMAN-My recollection in the new zoning is that private roads in certain areas are allowed. MR. STROUGH-Yes, we do allow private roads. MR. CATALANO-Well, that’s why we highlighted this because we seem, there seemed to be some consensus from the Board that in the right situations private roads may be okay. A lot of new developments now like the idea of private roads because they have 12 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) some control over the use of that road, and they’re willing to pay the cost for maintaining it, and that lowers the Town’s costs in, with what to do with the revenues coming from that. So I kind of like the idea of allowing private roads, and leave it up to the developer to decide. They would still have to be done pursuant to specifications to make sure they’re safe and emergency accessible. MR. BAKER-Still built to Town standards so that it wouldn’t preclude in any way a Homeowners Association, years down the road, deciding they want to become a public road after all. MR. CATALANO-Right, and they could offer it. MR. BRANDT-You might have an association where they want alleys and narrow roads and they’re willing to take them over themselves so that they can have that, because the Town expects pretty wide roads and very large radiuses. So I know in our own development that we’re doing in Luzerne, there would be a lot of private roads. MR. CATALANO-Right. I’m working on a development right now where the roads are narrow, and the municipality does not really want to, you know, they had their mindset you need wide roads and I don’t think, the developer doesn’t want to do that, so it might just be it would have to be private roads in that case. MR. BRANDT-If you’re trying to get compact growth, sometimes you can’t go with Town road standards. So you basically have to go to private roads. I think you want to leave that as a possibility to encourage Smart Growth. MR. HOMSY-So strike that out is what we’re talking about? DR. HOFFMAN-Well, I had a couple of comments. I don’t necessarily disagree with any of that, but it seems like there’s several issues. One is whether the standards for roads should be changed. If we don’t like the way the, if we feel the roads are too wide, the Town roads, maybe we need to look at that, in fact I think we should, and that may be a separate issue, as to whether it should be private or public. The only concern I have about private roads, if it’s over done, and we have too many developments like that, then we get into the type of situation where you have a community full of these walled off closed, gated communities where, you know, nobody really is allowed to go anywhere except their own community. I’m not sure we want to be that type of community. MR. MC NULTY-Yes. I brought it up mainly because it is an issue. I’m not sure but what the answer may be leaving it the way it is, and let the Zoning Board issue variances. We’re left guessing that probably the reason that it was put in there originally was for emergency vehicles and that kind of thing, but we have no basis for that other than guessing. On the other hand, thinking back to some that we’ve approved on Zoning Boards, some of them are pre-existing, narrow roads on the lake, but there’s been a few, I can think of one that’s off Oakwood now that’s got three or four lots that are being developed there, that they specifically asked for a private road because they didn’t want to build it to Town specs. They wanted it narrower and felt it was more appropriate there, probably they could save some money, too, but there was some good arguments for having something substandard to a Town road, but it got some examination because they did have to get a variance. MR. HUNSINGER-And we still made them put in access for emergency vehicles. MR. MC NULTY-Yes. Normally the question comes up about emergency vehicles, because, like I say, we’re guessing that that was the logic behind it, and usually you end up asking the local fire department to certify that they can get one of their vehicles in anyway. MR. HOMSY-And they usually can because a lot of places have narrower roads and it is, I mean, both Mike and Mark are right. When we go into developments or try and promote smarter growth, walkability is a big issue, and big wide roads are not good for, you know, they tend to make traffic speed along. So we tend to try and narrow them. I will say in this part of the, this is one of those other things that’s not, it’s in a completely different chapter. So we won’t be tackling it. They’re not, the road widths aren’t covered under this. MR. CATALANO-But your road standards are very detailed, and I think you could pick particular road, they have different road types. 13 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. HOMSY-In that chapter. MR. CATALANO-Yes, I think so. MR. KREBS-Well, I was going to say. I lived in a subdivision in Massachusetts, and it was about 50 townhouses, and it had two private roads that went in and dead ended. They did not have public roads. They did not have public roads because they didn’t want the width that was the standard road for the Town, because it took too much green space away. Okay, and I think you have to look at the circumstance, and that circumstance, certainly, with a maximum of 25 or 30 vehicles traveling back and forth per day, you didn’t need a 65 foot wide road. Okay. So I think we need to somehow make it possible to look at those situations. If you want the rural atmosphere, you don’t want all pavement, don’t make the roads that large. MR. CATALANO-Right, and I don’t think I’ve met a Highway Superintendent that didn’t want always a wider road as possible because it’s easier to plow. MR. BRANDT-That’s the issue, snow removal. MR. WILD-We’ve maintained that, I mean, the people who lived there paid for the maintenance of those roads. MR. CATALANO-Yes, and I mean, if, we could change it to simply on a Town approved road, because even, the Planning Board and the Highway Superintendent would still have to approve private roads, but the Town accepted means that it has to be public roads. MR. BRANDT-But why would the Highway Superintendent have to approve a private road? MR. CATALANO-The Planning Board would need to get somebody to look at, you know, the road, the specifications for the road to make sure that it’s going to be okay for the long term, you know, and also to get the fire company, you know, just make sure that there’s not problems, especially with dead end streets, there’s not problems with turnarounds. So you want to have somebody, you know, the Planning Board could take that up and decide who they want to do for that as well, you know, or an engineer. MR. HOMSY-That’s a simple solution. So just go from accepted to approved. Is that okay with everyone? MR. BRANDT-That’s fine by me. MR. HOMSY-Okay. MR. WILD-Page 32, Section E, talking about dead end streets. There was a change in terms of the number of lots. It’s kind of in the middle of the paragraph, subdivisions containing one/five lots. Is that 35 lots it was and now you’re turning it to 15 lots? MR. HOMSY-Yes. MR. WILD-Shall have at least two street connections. Okay. MR. CATALANO-Yes, and this is another one I just did just for purposes of discussion, but I thought, it jumped out that 35 lots is an awful lot. So you could have 34 lots on a dead end street. I mean, that’s basically what that’s saying. That seems a lot. MR. WILD-I tend to agree. I didn’t realize your nomenclature here, and I thought you went from five lots to three lots to one lot. MR. CATALANO-I see. No, I just thought 15, you know, if you come up with a different number, I’m fine with that, too. MR. STROUGH-So what you’re suggesting is 15 lots? MR. CATALANO-Fifteen lots, you’ve got to come up to a point where you’ve got to say, that’s enough, you need to have a loop street, you know, so what is that number? I don’t know for sure. MR. STROUGH-Yes, and so it was 35 before? 14 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. CATALANO-It was 35 before. MR. KREBS-But there are circumstances, again, where you could do that. You could have a long narrow piece of land that you’re going to put houses on both sides, and at the end of that you put a large cul de sac, so the traffic flow is going to be good. MR. HUNSINGER-But see that’s the problem we have now, and what happens is if you have a bunch of those all feeding onto one road, that one road gets overwhelmed with traffic, and that’s exactly what’s going on in parts of the Town now. MR. WILD-Okay, but look what you’ve done on Meadowbrook. You have apartment complexes that have one access to the road, which you approved, okay, and you’ve got 50, 60, 70 homes in there. So I don’t see the difference. MR. CATALANO-Also we’ve got to point out that this was done where you required all roads to be public streets, and so there’s always, I know the highway guys never want to plow a long dead end street, so that that was another reason, but now that we’re having private roads, then I don’t know whether that changes the equation. MR. STROUGH-Well, I don’t think it changes much because most private developers generally want to hand the load over to the Town for maintenance and re-paving. MR. CATALANO-Right. MR. STROUGH-So in this snow country, we don’t see so many private roads and gated communities as we see in Florida. If you pave them once, they’re good for 20 years, and what kind of maintenance do they have? Up here we’ve got a big maintenance bill. So it kind of deters that, but in addition to what Chris said, and Chris’ point was, if he doesn’t mind me re-emphasizing it, is we’re trying to incentivize interconnections, and so that’s one reason, but another reason that we constantly came up with on the Planning Board was that if that one roadway going to all those homes is blocked and there’s an emergency situation, all those homes, you can’t get to them. If there’s an alternate route to those homes, it’s not likely that both entrances are going to be blocked at the same exact time. I mean, not likely. So that’s one reason for, another reason for multiple accesses to larger developments, and because we may have approved a single access to a rather large apartment complex off of Meadowbrook Road doesn’t make it right. MR. CATALANO-Okay. MR. HOMSY-Well, does anyone object to 15, then? I don’t think I heard much objection. We were just sort of discussing it, which is fine. MR. STROUGH-I kind of like it. MR. HOMSY-Okay. We’ll leave 15 then. MR. WILD-Two more. Page 48, very top of it. There’s a sentence in there that says that the Planning Board is empowered to modify the minimum lot area and minimum lot width requirements of the Zoning Ordinance. To me that seems contradictory to some of the other statements that I’ve read. MR. CATALANO-This is for cluster or conservation subdivisions. MR. WILD-Right. MR. CATALANO-And that is true. In a case for a conservation or cluster subdivision, the Planning Board does have the specific authority to modify the lot sizes and lot widths to get smaller lots, without having to go to the Zoning Board of Appeals. MR. WILD-So instead of going for, this goes back to the statement I was making much earlier when we were talking about going in front of the Board and being in concurrence with the master plan, and we had a big discussion about you have to be in concurrence with the master plan. Here you’re saying that the Planning Board actually has, is empowered to modify those lot area requirements, which may cause you to be in effect not compliant with the master plan. MR. CATALANO-No, because the master plan actually throughout the Plan encourages cluster development. 15 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. BAKER-That’s correct. MR. HOMSY-And this would actually make it easier. Instead of go through a second Zoning Board, you could just have it all done by the Planning Board. MR. CATALANO-But in order to get that adjustment of the minimum lot sizes, you have to do other things, which is mainly conserving open space. So you can’t just, you’ve got to follow the purpose and the objectives for the. MR. WILD-So, in my words, this is allowing the Planning Board to allow the density additions that come with conservation subdivisions. MR. CATALANO-Yes. MR. WILD-One more, and that’s Page 54. This had to do with SEQRA extensions, and there were comments there that the SEQRA process may have to be extended. Is there any reason why we shouldn’t put a limit on that, in terms of how long a SEQRA extension should require? MR. CATALANO-Well, this is actually meant that the process, you know the 62 day timeframes, that may have to be extended depending on the SEQRA process. MR. WILD-No, I understand that, but how long would you extend it because of the SEQRA process? MR. CATALANO-Well, it depends. Usually, and the difficulty in putting a timeframe on it is because a lot of it is up to the applicant. If a Draft Environmental Impact Statement is required, the applicant decides when to submit that. There’s no timeframe for the submission. Once the DEIS is submitted, the Planning Board has 45 days to review it and determine whether to accept it or not. If the Planning Board doesn’t accept it, then it goes back to the developer to make adjustments, but there’s no timeframe for bringing it back. MR. WILD-Okay. So this is really just the developer. MR. CATALANO-It’s really developer driven, or applicant driven as far as how quick you can do the SEQRA process. Because once the things get submitted to the Board, the SEQRA law provides its own timeframes, by law. So that’s why I would refrain from doing that, because then you could come into having a contradiction with the SEQRA law. MR. WILD-Okay. So this is more for public information, then, the reason this is in here, because it’s already defined somewhere else? MR. CATALANO-Yes, right, because the SEQRA, yes, it’s just trying to integrate some aspects of the SEQRA law into the process. MR. WILD-Okay. Thank you. That’s all I had. MR. HUNSINGER-Does anyone else want to jump in with comments or questions? MR. STROUGH-I’ve got a few. Now looking at it in hindsight, I kind of wish we had kind of gone through it page by page, but my first comment is on Page 183-3, in the beginning again, and it’s talking about Sketch Plans and purpose, and then under B-3, it says determine the application of clustering as required by Article Nine. If you go to Article Nine, it sends you to Chapter, Article Eleven in 179. DR. HOFFMAN-So skip the middle man and go straight to 179. MR. HOMSY-This reference might be wrong. Yes. MR. STROUGH-Yes, if you go to Article Nine, which is the appropriate reference, because if you go to Article Nine, it does address cluster conservation zoning, but right then and there it says almost directly, if you really want the elaborate version of clustering and conservation zoning, go to 179, Article Eleven. What I’m suggesting is either add that or see Article Nine and/or Article Eleven Chapter 179. I just don’t like the idea of giving the runaround. 16 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. CATALANO-Yes, I agree. MR. HUNSINGER-Good catch. Yes. MR. MC NULTY-While you’re on that page, down a little lower, 183-6, Section A, first sentence is a sentence fragment the way you’ve got it, and the second one may or may not be, depending on whether you really intended to stop by saying a licensed professional, period. MR. STROUGH-Also, just a question. When we’re listing, as we are in B, I’m still in Section B, the purpose of the Sketch Plan, the purpose of the Sketch Plan, and especially in the requirements, should we also give notice that they’re also going to be held to, for example, Federal ADA standards? I mean, do we have to state that, or maybe just because it’s a Federal standard you don’t have to state it, but I mean, if they’re going to put in sidewalks, the sidewalk widths and the curbing and the slope, the vertical slopes, I mean, there’s all kinds of ADA requirements, for things such as sidewalks. Should we add has to meet Federal standards? I know it has to, it’s got to meet Federal standards anyhow. So you almost don’t need to say it. MR. CATALANO-Right, and I think in the Sketch Plan part, and I don’t know if you want to get into that much detail yet. MR. STROUGH-Okay. Well, it was just a question. I didn’t feel strongly about it one way or the other. MR. CATALANO-Yes. MR. STROUGH-Okay. I had a question on 183-6, 183-6, Paragraph C up in the top half, it says Planning Board recommendations, and then it’s got it highlighted, intrinsic development suitability map. I have no idea what that is. MR. BAKER-That’s actually a map that was created by the consultants that did the 1989 Comprehensive Plan for the Town, and was basically a compilation map of all the natural resource constraints, Town wide, piled one layer up on the other upon the other, resulting in this intrinsic development suitability map. We still have that map in the office, and since this language is currently in the Code, Staff actually refers to it, but it’s nothing that anybody else ever looks at anymore. MR. STROUGH-No, well either eliminate it or if it’s a good idea to keep it, I’m not sure which, and now I’m just starting to understand what it was, see Appendix A, or description of it, but just to hang it out there, boy, it’s really got me baffled. MR. BAKER-No, I think it’s appropriate to scratch that reference. MR. STROUGH-Okay. MR. CATALANO-I’m glad, we missed that the first time around. So study the Sketch Plan in conjunction with other maps, with maps and information. MR. STROUGH-Yes, okay. Scratch that, and on 183.7, again, my argument of one inch equals 50 feet, and you’ll see that up in Paragraph A, and I don’t think we need the zero inches. MR. CATALANO-I took that out, the zero inches. MR. STROUGH-Yes, well, you know, and again, it’s another reference, and I mentioned there’s going to be several. So to keep that consistency, I think we ought to keep that in, and so I have no further comment on that. The other comment I have is on Page 183.9. Down at the very last item, slopes are greater than 25%. What are we going to do, guys? Are we going to go with 15%, or are we going to go with the 25%? We’ve run into this problem before. I mean, and density calculations, subdivisions they’re different. I mean, should we try and make them the same or what? That’s just a question I had. MR. BRANDT-I had a question on that, too, because I own a bunch of that kind of thing. MR. STROUGH-Did we change it on the other one to make it 25? If we did, fine. I just didn’t know that. DR. HOFFMAN-I thought we were going to 15 on everything? 17 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. STROUGH-Well, if we’ve gone to 15, then maybe we better change this to 15, but that’s my point, one way or the other, whatever way we want to go. MR. BRANDT-Where do these figures come from? Where is this magic of 15 or 25 or 30? I’ve seen stuff done, it’s a matter of utilities, if they work. It’s a matter of driveways if they work. Why, I mean, why are we so restricted? Do we have to only build in cornfields? MR. CATALANO-This is not having a restriction at all. This is just that you have to show it on the map. MR. BRANDT-But the Ordinance goes way into restrictions and density. Densities don’t count if you’re over a certain percentage, and it’s a matter of utilities, and I just don’t see the logic in it. To me it’s terribly restrictive. It’s all aimed at forcing all of development into flat land, and that’s farm land. You’re giving away your best land, destroying all your best land. They’re doing it all across the United States. What’s the logic? MRS. STEFFAN-I think that the restriction on the 15 to 25%, a lot of the discussions we’ve had, is just to make sure that all the stormwater and all the controls are put in place, so that it doesn’t effect the environment. Because, just as an example, in the Town, there’s been a lot of single family residences that have been built on slopes, and they haven’t put any of the stormwater controls in and then we have the erosion, the runoff. MR. BRANDT-That’s a given. I agree with you totally, but if you do all those things correctly, why is there a constraint on percentage? It means that if you’re into steep land, you’ve got to do things correctly. You’ve got to spend more money on it. It doesn’t mean you can’t use it. It shouldn’t mean that you can’t use it. You shouldn’t be restricted from it. It should just be clear that you have to do it correctly. MRS. STEFFAN-And I also think that part of the problem is that folks haven’t done a good job with it in the past, and so that’s why you have to have zoning. I mean, that’s why we have a lot of the regulations that we have is because folks have not done a good job in the past. MR. BRANDT-But why not allow people to do it right? Why regulate them out of that? MRS. STEFFAN-Because unfortunately there’s too many folks who don’t do the right thing? MR. BRANDT-Well, I mean, then go kill the ones that aren’t doing it right, but the ones that are doing it right, leave them breath. I think that’s a very. MR. HOMSY-Well, let me jump in here for a second. I don’t think, check me on this, Stu, that we actually say you can’t build on that land. I don’t think you actually say that anywhere. MR. BRANDT-But your density calculations are, you don’t get any of the credit for it. MR. HOMSY-Yes, exactly. MR. BRANDT-Well, that’s. MR. BAKER-And actually the language that’s used on Page 183-30 under Density sort of defines slopes of over 25% as unbuildable. MR. HOMSY-I think they said we changed it to 15, right? DR. HOFFMAN-I believe in the Zoning Ordinance it was changed to 15. MR. BAKER-Yes, I believe the Zoning Ordinance says 15, but John’s point is that we need to make sure the Sub Regs are consistent, especially on 183-30, it’s still saying 25. MR. STROUGH-Because if 15% is going to be the identifying thing as we think that’s significant so we want it included in our study, and our thought process, and we want it included in the density calculation, and then we also want to include it in the clearing plan because 15% or above means something to us, then we want to stay with the 15% I think. 18 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. WILD-Is there anything in the regulations that said a certain percentage above a certain percentage is unbuildable? MR. STROUGH-I don’t remember that per se. MR. KREBS-Any any buildable areas of the lot such as wetlands, rocks, outcrops, slopes over 25%. So it says right here. MR. BAKER-Yes, it’s effectively defining it, areas with slopes over 25% as unbuildable. MR. CATALANO-For purposes of the density calculation. You can still build on it. MR. WILD-That doesn’t mean anything. When you subtract it from the density calculation, basically you can’t control that. DR. HOFFMAN-When the Town contracted with Mesigner, his group to do the build out calculation, that was all based on the idea that slopes greater than 15% were unbuildable. So if you’re going to have building on up to 25 or higher, potentially you’re talking about a much higher population for Queensbury, with all the impacts on school and everything else. Also, you know, you have aesthetic issues in terms of visibility, what do people want to see on the slopes. You’ve got the issues of stormwater runoff. You’ve got fire, you know, how easy is it going to be to get a fire engine up a steep slope. MR. WILD-You can’t make a blanket statement of anything over a certain percentage is unbuildable. There are techniques to allow you to do that. There’s elements within the Plan that say that you have to conserve land. So now you want to conserve even more land, and I realize that that’s the intent of some in the group to conserve as much land as possible, but you need to leave somebody who’s trying to develop a certain parcel the ability to breath. DR. HOFFMAN-Well, at some point you’re going to run out of land. MR. WILD-Exactly. DR. HOFFMAN-So it’s a question of whether, at what point. MR. WILD-But to make a statement of over 25% or over 15% is unbuildable, I think goes above and beyond the intent of I think what was being done with the conservation subdivision. MR. STROUGH-Well, how about this, Mike? How about for the purposes of density calculation, and for purposes of a clearing plan, and elsewhere, that we would like to see, where slopes exceed 15 or above, but we do not put the limitation that they’re unbuildable. MR. WILD-I think that’s fair, and I still believe that we need discussion about whether we’re conserving land in this greater than 15% or 25% or whatever it is, doesn’t get included in the conservation of land. MR. STROUGH-So the Planning Board will evaluate that without the absolute. Okay. MR. BRANDT-And you can say right in your law that when you’re into steep lands you must give special consideration to, name it, all the things that concern you. So that it’s all going to be reviewed. I think that makes all the sense in the world. MR. STROUGH-And you’ve said that before, too, Mike, but when we get to mountainside that there should be clearing standards. MR. BRANDT-Absolutely, visibility standards, so that you don’t. DR. HOFFMAN-So, just to clarify, our current standard says essentially 25% is unbuildable, and we had a lot of discussion about going to 15%. Now we’re eliminating that completely and we’re going to say nothing’s unbuildable. MR. STROUGH-No, well, right. DR. HOFFMAN-I mean, I just think this is going exactly the opposite to the way, and if you go to all the public meetings that we’ve had in terms of how to deal with slopes. 19 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. BRANDT-You’re telling me the public understands this? The public understands building on steep slopes? They’ve never done it. It’s easy to sell that concept and sell them that you don’t want it. You sell them, hell, they’re going to strip all the trees off the mountain and you’re going to sell all these horrible things, and it’s a big lie. MR. KREBS-But, Mike, I went to a lot of those preliminary meetings that they’re talking about, and part of the problem is that we never put any cost with their desires. So I, as a citizen who moved here, I don’t want anybody to build anything anymore because I like it just the way it is, all right, and t hat’s what you allowed the people to tell you at those meetings. All right. Now, had you said to them, where we’re going to change one acre zoning to ten acre zoning or to forty acre zoning, the Town will have to compensate the landowners for the value that we are taking from them, you might have gotten different reactions at those meetings. See, everybody just thinks that, you know, I’m here and I don’t want anything more, and I’ve sat through a lot of those meetings, and that was exactly what was expressed. MR. CATALANO-I mean, these are existing, I mean, this Committee hasn’t, I mean, the slopes in excess of 15% in the zoning was in the zoning to begin with, and the 25% here that you see in the subdivision has been in the subdivision since the beginning. MR. HOMSY-I think John had something when he said that, we’re not saying that, we already don’t say that these areas are unbuildable. So let’s not get too far astray. MR. WILD-I’m sorry. Can I just ask Stu? Can you verify that for us for the next meeting, that there’s nothing in the regulations that says a certain percentage above a certain percentage is unbuildable? MR. BAKER-I think I can pretty much confirm that now. I don’t think we have anything in the current Code or in the proposed Code that says you cannot build on slopes over X percent. MR. WILD-Except that this density factor says that it. MR. HOMSY-Well, no, that’s poor wording, because that’s only meant to be for density. So we need to fix that. MR. MC NULTY-If we can take the word unbuildable out and put something else in, that might solve a lot of the concern. MR. HOMSY-And then for the purpose of the mapping and these kinds of things, we were talking about moving it to 15%. MR. HUNSINGER-Well, we can just take the word unbuildable out of that density calculation. MR. HOMSY-Just so that we don’t get that confusion later. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes, because you can build on wetlands, too. Just fill them in. It’s been done for hundreds of years. MR. MC NULTY-You just require additional steps for something over 25%. MR. HUNSINGER-Right. So we’re going to take the term unbuildable out of the density calculation. MR. STROUGH-Yes, and change everything to 15%. MR. WILD-And 15%, this is just for clarification, that’s all. I have no problem with that. MRS. STEFFAN-Well, I just want to make one point before we leave that, because I think Dr. Hoffman had a legitimate point, and that the density calculation, not the density calculation, but the build out study that was done, that was shared between the School District and the Town of Queensbury, identified that those areas that were over 25% slopes were unbuildable in the Town. DR. HOFFMAN-Actually we referred to 15% in the build out study. 20 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MRS. STEFFAN-And so that will dramatically change the outcome of that data, and we, you know, and the Town in other documents, we’ve made decisions and we’ve used that information as a basis for other decisions, and so I’m concerned. MR. HOMSY-I wonder, though, if you’d use it for the density calculation, it won’t be, because all we’re saying is you can build there. It doesn’t change the number at all. It just says if you can figure out, as Mike said, how to build there well and want to spend the money to do it, go ahead. MR. BRANDT-There’s another fallacy in the thinking about the School District, and that’s where this all comes from. It’s a matter of, if you’re going to build on steep slopes, you’re going to fill the School will too many kids. The truth is that if you’re going to build on steep slopes, it’s going to cost a lot of money. So you have to get high prices. Who buys high prices? It isn’t the family with a lot of kids. It’s the retiree, it’s the second home. We just did a whole study on 2400 units. We went down and we sat down with the School Board in Luzerne and showed them the study and showed them what it shows, and they said, well, at 2400 units you’re only going to bring us, under these calculations, an extra 125 kids. We’d rather have 250. We think you’re not bringing enough kids. I think that we’re kidding ourselves as to who is buying this property, and rather than have everybody in a panic about who’s buying it, let the prices happen. Let the market happen. Read what Harvard just put out for the two years in a row who the markets are for people. It isn’t people with children. The children, the people who are having a lot of children are inner city. The people that are moving out into our areas are not the families with a lot of children. That’s the way it is. MR. WILD-I have one comment and one question. I’ll start with the question first. Have we totally defined in the zoning regs what that density is? Has that been defined? Have we gone through that process through some other Article? MR. HOMSY-Yes. We have gone through the density articles. MR. WILD-That was done in what Article, if I may ask? MR. HOMSY-Three or Four. MR. BAKER-Which you should have a copy of, I believe. MR. WILD-I’ll look it up. Second, in terms of the build out study, I don’t think we can reference that as fact because we’ve changed the zoning today. So we were at one acre zoning. Now we’re going to three or ten acre zoning. So that’s going to drop density as a whole on top of it. So maybe, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but maybe we should have taken those instead of five maybe to ten and twenty so we don’t get that many units, but to reference that build out study, that was done on the old zoning. This new zoning, I don’t think anyone really even understands what we’re going to have in terms of the amount of buildable units. So that’s one of my problems with the Plan is we haven’t done an economic impact analysis, and I brought this up to the Board. We don’t know what this is going to mean for the local economy. We’re just throwing numbers out and said this is what we want. MR. STROUGH-Just on 183-10, again there’s the reference up in “F”, near the top of the page, where it says grading and erosion control plans. It goes on to speak of one inch equals fifty feet zero inches. Again, there’s the one inch equals fifty feet reference. So we’ve maintained our consistency and probably should knock out the zero inches. On Page 183-11, towards the, two-thirds of the way down under “A”, application, Number Three, the Planning Board is the first three words. It goes on to say, at its regular monthly meeting shall review and determine the completeness of an application for Preliminary plat approval. The date of the official submission of the Preliminary plat shall be considered to be the date on which the Planning Board determines that the application is complete. Now we’ve wrestled with this before. The Planning Board, as a whole, do they vote on it, the Chairman? I mean, never in my memory have we ever said Planning Board let’s have a vote. Do you consider this application to be complete. Never has happened, not to my knowledge. So when we say the Planning Board determines it to be complete, and it’s become an issue in this Town before, of an application, because once it’s deemed complete, the applicant has certain rights, and the community has lost certain rights. So I think we have to clarify, is this going to be done by a vote or are we going to allow the Chairman of the Planning Board, and maybe we ought to let the Planning Board speak to this and think this out, but I think it needs clarification. 21 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MRS. STEFFAN-Because the current practice is the Chairman decides whether it’s complete or not. MR. STROUGH-Yes, but that’s not what it says. MR. CATALANO-The only thing I added was the official submission, because that term was referenced. MR. STROUGH-And there’s nothing that you did. MR. CATALANO-Right. So this, I read this, the Planning Board determines that the application is complete. That means that the Board has to vote on it. MR. STROUGH-That’s what I read it, too. MR. CATALANO-Okay. MR. STROUGH-And I don’t mind keeping it that way. MR. CATALANO-And my personal thing is that that’s the better practice. First of all, because this is a very crucial point in the process, because as you said, it gives, once (lost words) the timeframe start, so the applicant has certain rights and can pressure the Board to make a decision or if it doesn’t make the decision, it’s deemed approved in some cases. So it’s very crucial, and you don’t want to, again, we were trying to streamline the process. You don’t want the Planning Board, the applicant to come back and all of a sudden the Board says, we need this information, come back next month. We’re trying to avoid that, and so I think the Board should consider changing its policy and having the Board make it as a decision of the Board. The Chairman can report to the Board, perhaps, and say I’ve looked through the application, I think it’s complete. That’s fine, but I don’t know if you want to have that responsibility just on one person. MR. HOMSY-On one person, yes. Not a member of the Staff, either, which is how some people do it. MR. STROUGH-I’d just as soon leave it that way, but just so long as we understand that we’ve never voted on the completeness of it. I mean, you know, there’s always the implied, since you’re taking the application, there’s the implied consent there, of it being complete because you’re accepting it and you’re dealing with it. So that has a certain implication of completeness, but it never has been formalized, and that’s fine if we leave it like this, I guess. MR. MC NULTY-Well, if it’s been a problem, do you want to leave it like this, or do you want to say, Planning Board determines by vote that? Do you want to put something in there that clears this up? MR. STROUGH-Well, I don’t know if I want to put that burden on the Planning Board. That’s why I said to Gretchen if she would take this back to the Planning Board as a discussion item and then get back to us, okay. MR. MC NULTY-Another picky thing in that same paragraph. At the top it says the Planning Board at its regular monthly meeting. The Planning Board doesn’t have a regular monthly meeting. It has at least two. MR. HOMSY-Let’s just strike that, yes. MR. CATALANO-We’ll just take out that phrase entirely. MR. HOMSY-Yes. MR. CATALANO-It could be done at a special meeting. MR. STROUGH-Yes, good point. MR. BRANDT-I wonder why we require sidewalks to nowhere on subdivisions of seven, eight, ten lots? I mean, I don’t think the Town wants to handle the sidewalk. I don’t think the property owner wants to handle them. The way we plow snow, we throw all the snow onto where the sidewalks normally are. That’s the normal plowing routine. So I’m wondering why on earth we’re encouraging that, demanding it. 22 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. CATALANO-Where are you getting that? MR. BRANDT-I’m getting it from a neighbor who’s trying to get a subdivision approved. MR. HOMSY-That, again, is in that other section that we’re not tackling now. It’s not in the Subdivision rules. MR. BRANDT-Well, there’s nothing we can do about it. MR. HUNSINGER-Any other comments on Chapter 183? MR. STROUGH-One more, if I may, Chris? MR. HUNSINGER-Okay, sure. MR. STROUGH-Which is actually a question more than a comment. I’m on 183-33. It talks about street grades and such, street intersections and street design curves and such. Over and over again, and I think Gretchen and Chris can verify this, especially to the, talking about curbing of roads, to get larger vehicles, and emergency vehicles in. We’ve been using, at least when I was on the Board, a 30 foot radius, and it got the concurrence of most of your drivers of large vehicles and your emergency vehicle people that the 30 degree radius works. It was something less than that, because it’s gone to sometimes 35 degree or 35 foot radius, but 30 foot radius seems to work in most cases. I don’t know if it needs to be put in here or not or if we want to. I just thought I’d bring it up for discussion. DR. HOFFMAN-As opposed to, what is it now? MR. STROUGH-It’s not defined. MR. HOMSY-Is that defined in the other section, or is this just a, in the streets, whatever chapter is the streets? I don’t know. I mean, we looked through it once because we wanted to see what was in that versus this, but we didn’t spend much time with it. MR. STROUGH-Well, it’s on the section on street design, and I didn’t know if. MR. HUNSINGER-It seems like the appropriate place to put it, yes. It talks about guardrails and everything else. MR. STROUGH-I wasn’t sure. I thought I’d ask. We’ve always struggled with this, because sometimes they come in with 20 foot radius, and that’s tough for emergency vehicles to use, especially if there’s curving, and it’s like what we had at Home Depot. They’ve got a 20 foot radius on their front entrance, which is fine for cars, but if you’ve noticed the sidewalk is destroyed. The trucks use that entrance, regardless of the signage, which tells them to use the entrance towards the back of, not Home Depot, did I say, Lowe’s, to use that front entrance, and you see the sidewalk? It’s destroyed. The big trucks, and I’ve seen them go right over it. If it was a 30 degree radius I think they’d get in there better, and the same thing holds, if that 30 degree radius. MR. HUNSINGER-You’re talking about driveway entrance, though. MR. STROUGH-Yes, I know, but it’s a large vehicle. So I’m saying if we’re talking about large vehicles, if you’re talking about emergency vehicles, should we just, and it’s not a huge standard. MR. BRANDT-It’s reasonable, I think. MR. STROUGH-It’s a reasonable standard to say 30 foot radius should be included on all roadside curves. I don’t know if we want to make it mandatory. I just thought we’d bring it up because it keeps coming up again and again, and I know Tom Nace, a local engineer who represents a lot of applicants, he just standardizes the 30 degree radius because of the issues in the past with emergency vehicles. MR. CATALANO-I think that we could put that right under the curves, that all curves must be a minimum of 30 degree radius. MR. STROUGH-Well, that’s what I was suggesting. 23 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MRS. STEFFAN-We had a problem with Outback. We had a problem with The Golden Corral. Because the large delivery trucks. MR. STROUGH-And the applicants don’t care if it’s 20 or 30. They just like knowing. They just don’t like you putting it at 20 and then you want it changed. They’d rather know up front. If you want 30, we’ll give you 30. Tell us, though. MR. HUNSINGER-But one of the examples you gave, and I don’t mean to be argumentative or anything, is driveway entrance, not a street. So we ought to include it in the driveway entrance as well. DR. HOFFMAN-Are we talking, also, about certain size streets or commercial districts or residential districts? MR. HUNSINGER-Yes, good point. Yes, because we certainly don’t need it for a home driveway. MR. STROUGH-Yes, I don’t think we need it for home driveways. I think for roads in general, the 30 foot radius. DR. HOFFMAN-Now I have a recollection that there’s something in the, somewhere in the revised zoning or subdivision that we’re trying to encourage narrow turning radius for traffic calming. Isn’t that in there? MR. CATALANO-I think there was some effort to try to minimize the width of streets. DR. HOFFMAN-I distinctly remember something about turning radius. MR. HOMSY-Well, I mean, and that is something that would do that. It depends on where you sort of put those. If you have a corner, you know, and you want people to slow down, you make it a sharper corner. DR. HOFFMAN-Right. MR. HOMSY-The question is, is this number 30 the one that will, is that going to still slow people down in these places and still allow trucks to get by and buses and such? That’s the question. I don’t know the answer. DR. HOFFMAN-Well, I mean, it’s a technical issue that has to be resolved, but one of the points I was going to make, when I had my chance to go around with this, is there is stuff in here about roads and specifications and technical matters, and one of the major points in both the Comprehensive Land Use Plan and also the revised zoning has to do with traffic calming methods, and we need to make sure that the stuff in here is compatible with that and get whatever kind of technical advice we need to make that, to do that properly. Otherwise it’s not going to happen, because it’s covered in a little bit of a superficial manner in both the Comprehensive Land Use Plan and the Zoning Code. MR. HOMSY-And most of those street standards, again, do fall under this other Chapter which we’re not tackling, and I suspect that’s where you would get more into those, into more of the traffic calming things. Now we do have this curves here. I mean, we can look into and see if the 30 is a number that the people back in our office think works as well. MR. STROUGH-All right. Well, let’s do that. I don’t know when we’re going to do a follow up. I know at almost every meeting we have these loose ends, and sometime we’ve got to tie them up. MR. HOMSY-Yes. I actually have lists of answers to your old questions, but we just never get around to getting to them. We could do that at the end of tonight if you want, from the questions from last time. MR. STROUGH-Well, I don’t know, tonight might be a long one. DR. HOFFMAN-Again, just to clarify. For example, we’re talking about making roads narrower. Do we, is that something that’s going to happen, or does that have to all go into that separate Chapter that we’re not dealing with? MR. HOMSY-The narrowness of the roads is under a separate Chapter, street widths. 24 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) DR. HOFFMAN-Okay. MR. HOMSY-That we’re not tackling in this process. MR. CATALANO-And from a practical perspective, you’re not going to narrow any existing roads that you have now, most likely. It’s really only for new development, and that’s why we were targeting more of the mixed use areas and getting (lost word) in relation to the new developments rather than dictating what your existing road system is. DR. HOFFMAN-So, I’m not sure, how does that relate to the issue here, in terms of what we need to do? MR. CATALANO-I’m just saying that the width of the road is not going to be a major factor because it’s only going to apply to new development. DR. HOFFMAN-Well, that’s mostly what we’re talking about, isn’t it? MR. CATALANO-Okay. Well, I thought you were talking about existing roads being a problem with the existing roads? DR. HOFFMAN-Well, I mean, this whole process deals with development and re- development, so that seems, that’s what we need to deal with. MR. STROUGH-Well, wouldn’t your discussion go under Design Standards better? DR. HOFFMAN-A lot of it is already mentioned in Design Standards, but not in great detail, and not to the point where I could say we would be able to convince the Highway Superintendent or the Fire Marshal that, yes, this is a good thing. I just wonder whether we need to get more data together and beef up that whole process. MR. HOMSY-Well, I wonder, again, if we were tackling all of the land use controls in the whole Ordinance that you guys have. See, in the whole Code, we don’t want to write something in the Design Standards today that’s going to contradict something that’s somewhere else in your Code, because that’s just going to be a mess for now. So, the street design standards, or anywhere else. I mean, this comes up in a couple of places. It’s not just street design. We usually hit this at least once a meeting where it’s referenced somewhere else. MR. STROUGH-And I just came across an article in a planning magazine, well, actually it was a couple of months ago, and the Europeans are working on these traffic calming, making roads both automobile and pedestrian friendly, and using plantings, vegetation, chevron striping, and other amenities that does tend to slow down traffic down and make it more pedestrian friendly, and they even have a Dutch word, I think it’s rollman for this, but anyhow, I did get a copy of that, and I’ll share that copy of that article with everyone at the next meeting, and if they want to add things. They had some good ideas, some standards, tighten that up, and that was it for me on this for me. MR. HUNSINGER-Other members, comments or questions on 183? DR. HOFFMAN-Could you let me flip through these papers? I had a bunch of things, but I think most of them have already been addressed. Let’s see, sentence fragment. MR. HUNSINGER-While Dr. Hoffman’s looking, one of the things I mentioned at the last meeting, and I guess I would bring it up again is, you know, one of the ways to make the meetings shorter, and not go on as long is to try to get, you know, particularly your questions, you know, we can certainly use e-mail and try to get some questions on the table and maybe even answered before we get to the actual meeting, so that maybe the meetings could be more productive. I guess I’d throw it out there again. We do try to get these drafts to all members in advance of the meeting so that we can begin to do that without spending a lot of time at the actual meeting itself. I mean, it certainly doesn’t bother me to go at this the way we have been. I just don’t want people to feel frustrated because we’re here for a long time while we address specific questions and comments. That’s all. MR. WILD-Chris, may I suggest maybe we get the current versions of the drafts two meetings ahead instead of one week ahead, which would give us a chance to find time to review this. Because it literally took me hours and hours to get through this. MR. HUNSINGER-Sure. 25 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. WILD-And one week in advance just isn’t enough. MR. HUNSINGER-Okay. MR. WILD-To be able to do that, and to organize those comments and get them back on e-mail. MR. HUNSINGER-Okay. That’s fair. MR. KREBS-Yes, to read a 69 page Subdivision Regulation and not fall asleep is very difficult. MR. HUNSINGER-I guess that’s where there’s an advantage to being on the Planning Board. DR. HOFFMAN-On Page Six, this has come up already, this issue of the Intrinsic Development Suitability Map. MR. HUNSINGER-See, I knew what it was. I’m surprised that other people didn’t. DR. HOFFMAN-I had a comment current status of this map, and after listening to the discussion, I’m wondering whether we should look at that map. Maybe we should have a map of that sort and updated, because the Planning Board may be flying by the seat of their pants somewhat, sometimes when they look at applications, but if they had a map that, you know, listed the wetlands and the slopes and the depth to bedrock and all those kinds of things, it would be a tool that would be helpful to the Planning Board. MR. BAKER-Well, we essentially have in our current GIS system all the variables necessary to create that current and updated version of that map. We can certainly do that. MR. CATALANO-I’d rather not leave the reference in. Why have the Planning Board that they shall refer to this particular map. We just have a shall refer to maps and information that may be appropriate. MR. HOMSY-Yes, good point. MR. CATALANO-So it can be that map, but why? DR. HOFFMAN-On Page 23, Number Three, I guess it’s Section 16, Number Three, it’s talking, again, about ownership and maintenance of parks and recreation areas. When a park, playground or other recreation area or open space shall have been shown on a plat, the approvals of the plat shall not constitute acceptance by the Town of such area. Same issue as with the roads. The Planning Board shall require the plat to be endorsed with the appropriate notes. The Planning Board may also require the filing of declaration of dedication for any such area which shall dedicate that area for the common use approved by the Town Board which declaration shall be recorded by the Clerk at the developer’s expense. Such common area shall be assessed from the time of filing of the approved subdivision plat to all parcels in the plat benefiting there from. I don’t understand. Are they talking about tax assessment? What kind of assessment? If the Town is taking it as Town property, why would it be assessed to the property owner? Unless you’re talking about a neighborhood association. MR. STROUGH-A recreation fee? MR. CATALANO-Yes, that’s a very good question. I think what the intention was that if it was not, you know, if it was not a public park. If it’s a private park and it’s owned by a Homeowners Association, the assessment of that park would go to various members of that Homeowners Association. DR. HOFFMAN-All right. Maybe I’m not reading it properly. Is that what it says, or does that need to be clarified? MR. CATALANO-Well, I think what it says, it could be clarified. MR. HOMSY-You know what confuses it is the words dedication in the middle. MR. CATALANO-We can clarify that. Yes. 26 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. HOMSY-Okay. Yes. MR. CATALANO-But by the use of the term common area, that means that it’s still a private, you know, homeowners association type common area. DR. HOFFMAN-On Page 183, at the bottom of the first paragraph, it makes reference to Town Comptroller. We don’t have a Town Comptroller any longer. MR. HOMSY-Which page? MR. STROUGH-183-24. DR. HOFFMAN-The bottom of the first paragraph. MR. STROUGH-Good catch. You can just eliminate Town Comptroller. You can just put Town Board. MR. CATALANO-Yes. DR. HOFFMAN-On Page 183-26, it says, this is under Land Dedication, B, this is the second sentence, recreation space shall be provided by the subdivider on the basis of at least 1,000 square feet per lot but in no case shall the amount be more than 10% of the total area of the subdivision. I didn’t understand why that would, are they saying that you can’t have a recreation area more than 10% of a subdivision, and why would you want to say that, and does it contradict the whole conservation zoning thing? MR. CATALANO-Well, recreation space is different than open space, first of all, but I guess that there is a Town policy that 10% of the total area of the subdivision may be enough. I don’t know offhand, I don’t know if there’s any legal maximum, I mean, any maximum specified in the State statutes. I don’t think so right now. MR. BAKER-Yes, I don’t know why that figure’s in there. MR. HOMSY-Why don’t we just strike it. Why would we restrict the developer? MR. MC NULTY-Well, yes, but this is saying recreation space shall be provided by the subdivider, and what it’s doing is protecting the subdivider. So if the calculation of 1,000 square feet per lot ends up exceeding 10% of his total subdivision, you’re not sucking up 50% of his subdivision in recreation area. MS. FLANNAGAN-What if you just put a notation, shall be required and not be more than 10%, so they have the option. MR. MC NULTY-Right, that would leave them the option. It’s just that you’re not going to require them to go above 10. DR. HOFFMAN-I guess the recreation fee is in lieu of this 10%. MR. MC NULTY-Yes. DR. HOFFMAN-But at any rate, we’ll get rid of that absolute maximum. MR. WILD-Then does this become inclusive in the open space calculation? This is part of the open space calculation, right? It doesn’t come out of density. MR. STROUGH-No, it doesn’t. MR. CATALANO-It can be part of the open space calculation. MR. HOMSY-Yes, it should be. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes. MR. CATALANO-The way it was written is to apply to both conventional subdivisions and conservation subdivisions. DR. HOFFMAN-Okay. Again, this relates to this whole issue of traffic calming under 183-31, Page 183 Section D, Local Streets. Subdivisions shall be designed as to 27 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) provide a street pattern which shall be based upon a local residential street pattern connected to a residential collector system, should be a capital letter there I guess. Local streets shall be laid out so that their use by through traffic will be discouraged. I’m not sure, you know, it doesn’t specify how they’re going to discourage traffic, on the bottom of Page 31, very bottom of Page 31. MR. CATALANO-It’s on 32. DR. HOFFMAN-I mean, you can discourage through traffic through cul de sacs and that may be how this will be interpreted, but the zoning revision seems to, the design features of the Zoning Code seem to discourage cul de sacs, but if we don’t specify how they’re going to do it, I don’t know what kind of guidance we’re giving the developer. MR. STROUGH-Well, for one thing, you discourage through traffic by putting in curved roads. MR. HUNSINGER-I was going to say, curves or stop signs, yes. MR. STROUGH-And you encourage through traffic with straight roads and no stop signs and no traffic calming. You encourage through traffic. So I think what Dr. Hoffman is suggesting is that we be more descriptive here. DR. HOFFMAN-I think maybe do a little bit more detail in, you know, just beef that up with detail and make sure it’s in a manner that’s going to fly with the Highway Superintendent so that’s really going to happen. Otherwise, you know, the Zoning Code is talking about creating grid pattern and so forth, theoretically creating a lot more through streets, and unless there’s traffic calming built into that, I think you’re going to have a lot of unhappy residents who are going to see traffic coming by their houses that were never there before. MR. HOMSY-Okay. DR. HOFFMAN-I think that’s it. A lot of the rest of it I didn’t understand. So, I guess it’ll just have to go by. All right. That’s it. MR. HUNSINGER-Anyone else? Questions, comments? DR. HOFFMAN-I’m sorry. There’s one other thing. It makes reference, on Page 183-45, Number Four, there’s reference in the middle of that paragraph with regard to retention ponds that makes reference to the Town Environmental Committee. Do we have an Environmental Committee? MR. BAKER-Good catch. We no longer have that. MR. HOMSY-We no longer have a Committee. MR. HUNSINGER-Just take out by the Town Environmental Committee. MR. HOMSY-Yes, just have determined to have significance. DR. HOFFMAN-I had just a very naive question. Subdivision Regulations here. Does this refer only to residential subdivisions? MR. CATALANO-The subdivision is defined as the division of a parcel into two or more parcels. So it would not necessarily be only residential. DR. HOFFMAN-There is, under 183-47 C, there’s some detail regarding street streets, this is Page 47, Number C, there’s reference to how street trees should be planted, what the intervals should be and so forth, and I didn’t know whether this is actually compatible with what’s in the design guidelines for the Zoning Code, particularly in the mixed use, the commercial design criteria, I think there are separate tree design guidelines. So it has to be compatible with that. MR. HOMSY-It’s not. Meghan just said it’s not. So maybe by reference, if we settle on the design guidelines, we’ll refer people to design guidelines for the commercial areas. MR. STROUGH-Yes, so not even put it in there, just make the reference to design guidelines? 28 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. CATALANO-Well, the design guidelines doesn’t go to, we don’t have any requirements for residential. MR. HOMSY-No, just for the commercial areas. MR. CATALANO-Yes. So we can just put for commercial developments refer to the design guidelines. DR. HOFFMAN-Okay. That’s it. MR. HUNSINGER-Anyone else before we move on? Okay. Chapter 179, starting with Article Four. MR. STROUGH-The parking? MR. HUNSINGER-Parking. Anyone have any questions or comments? MR. MC NULTY-I’ve got a comment. It’s on the first page down near the bottom. We’re talking about off street parking spaces, on C, and we’ve changed from at least to no more than. So now we’re saying that no parking space anywhere can be more than 162 square feet and no wider than nine feet, no longer than eighteen, and I’ve heard a lot of comments from a lot of people saying that the size of our parking spaces that we’ve got now in Town are too small, especially for older people that need to open their doors wide to get out. My personal preference would be to say that it had to be larger than that, but I think at least if we went back to the at least, that would at least allow a retail establishment that wanted to establish at least a few spaces larger than that the option of doing so. MR. STROUGH-Well, interesting, a little history here, is it used to be 10 by 18, and with the smaller cars and such, with the last Zoning Code, because I was on the Zoning Committee, we reduced it to nine by eighteen, which, again, seems to work in most cases, but Chuck’s comments have to be noted, and I’ll agree with Chuck on that. We should keep the at least, and instead of the no more than. I’ll agree with him on that. MR. MC NULTY-Yes. It’s hard to say how vehicles are going to go. There’s a preponderance of SUV’s again, now, and a preponderance of people that can’t park straight, and can’t stay in their own lane when they turn corners, and we can’t solve all of that, but if we at least had the option for somebody that felt that their area needed a little wider space to let them do it without having to get a variance. DR. HOFFMAN-What about just providing a range and let the merchant decide how big a space? I mean, they’re not going to create parking lots that are not going to be inviting. They’re going to want to get as many customers as they can. So it seems if you give them the flexibility. MR. MC NULTY-The term at least would do that, if we went back to the term that we had there before. MR. STROUGH-And I agree with that. MR. HOMSY-What it doesn’t permit, though, is smaller spaces. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes. MR. HOMSY-And that might be what Mark is going for is that if the merchant wants a smaller space. MR. STROUGH-But the thing about it is that we did have and we do have the smaller option space, and to my knowledge nobody’s ever used it. I mean, maybe some day the cars might get even smaller, but nine by eighteen is probably about as small as you want to get right now. DR. HOFFMAN-I have been in places, not here, I have been in other places that have parking spaces that are designated compact car only. MR. HUNSINGER-I was going to throw that out there, too. DR. HOFFMAN-And since I have a compact car, I’m more than happy to take those spaces. 29 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. HUNSINGER-Yes, me, too. MR. WILD-There are regulations in terms of number of spaces that are required, and there are requirements for permeability. So you have to balance all of that, right? MR. CATALANO-We could preface the whole thing by just saying generally, you know, generally each off street parking space shall consist of, and then provide a range. MR. HUNSINGER-How do members feel about using the term generally to determine the size, and then let the applicant? MR. STROUGH-Well, I think there’s too much of a tendency to go with the smaller lots to meet the other Town requirements. MR. WILD-Right. MR. STROUGH-And even though it might be uncomfortable for people like me who have got an Expedition to get into them, that’s another whole story, but we won’t get into that. I don’t know. I was kind of comfortable with at least, like Chuck was saying. MR. MC NULTY-Yes. It strikes me that, on average, the nine by eighteen is as small as we ought to go. MR. STROUGH-And I’m still, at this day and age, and this time, I don’t know if we should force the applicant to devote 10% to smaller spaces, but I don’t feel strongly about that. People that have got compact cars, and I do have one of those, too, my wife does anyway. MR. HUNSINGER-I guess compact cars, you know, we certainly wouldn’t have a problem with that, and you’d want to be able to allow them to do so. MR. STROUGH-Why don’t we say applicant may set aside. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes. I think the examples that we’re thinking of, we’re thinking of shopping centers, and we all know where the tight parking spots are and where the good parking spots are, you know, around Town. MR. STROUGH-Okay. Well, leave it as an option for the applicant, then. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes. MR. MC NULTY-Yes. If you left may in there, for the smaller ones, and then somebody that’s got an extreme situation can always come in for a variance. MR. HUNSINGER-I know one of the things, you know, I think California always kind of sets the trends in automobile stuff, but one of the things that’s going on out there is they’re setting aside big spots for the oversized sport utilities. That tends to be controversial in some communities, but in some communities they’re demanding them, you know, having extra large spaces for the larger super sized trucks. MR. WILD-And make those spaces as far away from the front door as you possibly can, because I’d have to walk, too, John. So don’t worry about it. MR. HOMSY-Okay. So keep the at least and just parking lots may devote. Okay. MR. STROUGH-And then E, for lots over 24 spaces, 162 square feet of landscaping which is about 10 by 16, it doesn’t explain or describe where the landscaping should be located, to help break up the sea of pavement. I know in our current Code we show examples of how the landscaping could be implemented to help break up this sea of pavement. Here, it doesn’t give any guidelines. They could put all their landscaping in one spot and still have their sea of pavement. MR. HOMSY-Well, we tried to tackle that in the design guidelines, and if we didn’t do a good job there, we should, because we’re going to try and refer to that there, and that may be where we, you know, you hold us to count if we didn’t do that right. MR. STROUGH-And I ran into the same problems with the design guidelines. I don’t think we really did tackle it. 30 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. HOMSY-All right. MR. STROUGH-I didn’t really have any problem, but I’ll have the Planning Board members speak to this, too. I never had a problem with the way our parking lot landscape design is currently, I’ve never had a problem with that. I’d have thought it was kind of a compromise between applicant interest and community interest, and it would help break up that sea of pavement, and it was more definitive. So we had applicants come before us, and they’ve never really argued too much about this and that, maybe a little bit about this tree and that tree, but they generally it was very descriptive. It explained what we expected them to do. They went along with it. Now here leaves the door wide open, and it’s the ambiguity I thought we were trying to get rid of. MS. FLANNAGAN-We do note in the design guidelines that no parking space, just for example, no parking space shall be more than 50 feet from the (lost words). MR. STROUGH-I know it, but take a look, compare what you’re saying with what we’ve already got, and I would like all the members of the Committee to do that. I’m suggesting that between the two, I’m almost more comfortable with what we had originally, but it’s only my opinion, and so we’ll get to that when we get to that, but we may have to come back to this to deal with that, okay, because they’re all interrelated here. MR. WILD-I’m just curious about the, you know, we’re talking about 12%, one in eight, for landscaped area. Is that a reasonable number? MR. STROUGH-I don’t know how that compares. I’ve got that question, how does this compare to what we have, because we never really had a problem with what we had, so I don’t want to open up a new Pandora’s Box if everyone, even applicants, is happy with what we had. Do you see what I’m saying. So I guess, Mike, you have to go back and look at what we had and then compare it. That discussion’s going to be coming up again tonight. MR. WILD-Okay. MR. HOMSY-All right. We’re going to work on that. MR. STROUGH-And I’ve got more, and I know Chuck does, too. MR. HUNSINGER-Go ahead. MR. STROUGH-Again with residential, if I didn’t bring it up, I’m sure Chris or Gretchen would, especially with apartments, and I’ve wrestled with this, and I sit out there in the audience and I’m trying to think of Schermerhorn and others coming before us, and our current standard isn’t working, and we know that the tendency is for one family, one couple, they’ve got two cars, and if they’ve got a teenager, that’s three cars, and if they’ve got a two bedroom apartment, that’s entirely likely, they’ve got three cars, and then you have an elderly couple, and maybe they only have one car, but that, you know, that’s not that common, but I think it’s going to get more common. So what I’ve seen other communities do is they’ve said, okay, well, two parking spaces per unit and then for every, I worked it out, 2.25 spaces per unit, for every four unit, there was another car space, but they allocated those five car parking areas to what they called pocket parking. In other words, there wasn’t on side street parking. They every like so many units, what did I say, 10 units, every 10 units they’re going to have a set aside for five parking spaces, that’s for visitors and/or overflow and for things of that nature, and it wasn’t on side parking. So it kept everything looking clean and neat, but they had these pocket parks. They kept everything looking pretty good and kept everything orderly, but it also gave more parking, and so after that discussion, where we see a two family dwelling at 1.25 spaces I don’t think is going to work. What do we have now? MR. HOMSY-I think we started down this path before. We had this discussion, and we’ve already gone through that, and I think we went up to two and a quarter is what we. MR. STROUGH-Yes, that’s what other communities that I’ve felt comfortable with is 2.25, and what they did was the 2.25 they also suggested, and again it was a suggestion. It wasn’t mandatory, because you don’t know what the layout of the apartment complex is going to be, they suggested trying to incorporate the excess parking into pocket parks, rather than on side. MR. HOMSY-Excess above the two, the .25 gets, okay. 31 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. STROUGH-But sometimes they incorporated it into the general parking, but sometimes, you know, some apartments are laid out where your driveway is your parking and they don’t have additional parking, and then you’re forcing parking onto the street. What they did was offer these pocket parks in those kind of situations. MR. HOMSY-Okay. MR. STROUGH-And then other apartment complexes have your general parking area where the pocket parks was a moot point. MR. MC NULTY-Before you get down too far, I found another little thing. DR. HOFFMAN-Before we leave this subject of the number of lots per car, or spaces per apartment, I guess, you know, is it going to be the same if you’re dealing with like a Waverly Place that’s sort of a little residence with a subdivision or if it’s going to be a mixed use area. You’re going to have the same formula for all these different places? I mean, I was at Waverly Place the other day, and somebody was having a party, and they have room for a couple of cars in the driveway and the rest of the people parked on the street. So what was the big deal? I mean, so you park on the street, what’s wrong with that? I mean, it’s a nice little side street. I mean, you wouldn’t want to do that on Aviation Road, but if you’ve got a little subdivision, there’s no problem with parking on the street. MR. KREBS-I think the difference, Mark, is what we’re talking about is consistent use, versus once in a great while. I mean, I live in a subdivision, and when people have parties they park as many cars as they in the driveway and then the rest get parked along the street. I think that’s pretty usual, but we’re talking about an apartment complex where if you only had 1.25 parking spaces per unit you wouldn’t have sufficient parking in their parking area. That’s what we were talking about. DR. HOFFMAN-All right. I just threw that out. MR. MC NULTY-Jumping back up one Paragraph to F, each parking space shall be reached by an access drive. I’m wondering whether we need to say no wider than, or whether we can say at least as wide, again the same argument as far as the size of the parking spaces, because I’ve also had comments about, well, Northway Plaza is the biggest example of the problem. If you go in there and try to turn into the Post Office and then park, technically the turn in to the Post Office is wide enough for two cars. Practically, it’s not. Everybody has to wait until somebody clears that before they can turn it. MR. STROUGH-Right, and I think I’ve got to agree with you, Chuck. I think ITE standard is exit aisle is 24 feet. Twenty-two feet, and I’ll concur with Chuck on this, is tight, 24 is tight, but that’s a minimum, and to go to 22 I think is not comfortable, and as a matter of fact I think ITE suggests 24. MR. HOMSY-Okay. MR. STROUGH-So I’ll agree with Chuck that it has to be at least 24 foot wide, which is currently the way we have it. MR. HOMSY-Yes. MR. STROUGH-With no change. MR. HUNSINGER-Anything else on this page? MR. STROUGH-I wanted to talk about the office parking. Now currently it’s one space for 300 square feet of leasable floor area where most other towns in their professional office parking varies from four or five to seven and eight. Okay. The more urban you become, the higher the density per square feet. The average between rural and urban is around five. So I was at my cardiologist yesterday, and they’re proposing a new office building on Bay Road, but it goes in hand with our Bay Road complex. So I asked him about parking. He’s currently in 90 South Street. They have a comparable size building, and it’s going to be about the same size, 15,000 square feet, and they’ve got 50 parking spaces, which is very insufficient, and so if you do 15 and 300, you’ll come out with 50. So our standard, with our discussions, and this is not new because I brought this up before, our standard isn’t working, for professional offices, and whether you want to talk 32 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) about the proposed offices on the new connector road, I mean, our standard is so low we’re the lowest of any community. Now I’m not in favor of making more parking, but I am in favor of parking that works. I don’t want them to come to the Zoning Board for these waivers one after another. I want to provide them with something that works. I don’t want to go overboard, so they’re going to be (lost words) waivers. So I’m going to suggest five parking spaces for every 1,000 square feet of office space, which is in the middle. It’s not on the low end, it’s not on the high end. It’s in the middle, and that would give, for example, just to get a handle on what our needs are in our community, that would give him 75 spaces. I asked him how many he wanted. He said I’d like to see 100. Okay. It doesn’t give him 100, but it gives him more than the 50 that he has now that he says is insufficient for his 15,000 square foot building, and he’s building another 15,000 square foot building. What we’re going to offer him is 75, and then the Planning Board has a 15 or 20% capacity to increase that if they deem appropriate, but I think it’s a working standard I think for our region, I think that’ll work, and as you know I’ve worked pretty hard on the professional office study with that, and that would be my suggestion, for professional offices, would be five spaces per thousand square feet. DR. HOFFMAN-So are you saying that has to be exactly that, or is that going to be a maximum, a minimum? MR. STROUGH-That’s a middle guideline. DR. HOFFMAN-I’m just saying, in terms of the Code, are we going to say you’re going to build this building and you have to have exactly this number of spaces? MR. STROUGH-Well, that’s what we’ve been doing. MR. MC NULTY-Well, the Code, though, doesn’t have, I’ve forgotten what the percentage is, but it allows up to X percent more than what, 20% more. MR. STROUGH-Twenty percent more, and there’s an offer to make it 15%. I don’t know, I’ll let you speak to that when we get to it, and when you talked about design standards, there’s an offer to change that to 15%. I don’t know if you want to go that way or not, but you’re right, Chuck, it does offer a flexibility to go an extra 20%. So that’s why I didn’t say, I didn’t say seven, eight or nine or even ten cars per 1,000 square feet which some communities have. I went like with the five and I talked to him and I’ve talked to other people, I’ve talked to Richard Schermerhorn. I’ve, you know, tried to get a good feel for this, and, yes, some of them like to see six or seven. We’re only offering them three. I’m saying okay well let’s go to five. I think it’s a happy medium. MR. HOMSY-So one for every 200 square feet in office, for office. MR. STROUGH-Yes, one for every 200 square feet, if you want to word it that way, yes. MR. HOMSY-And then allow them to go, do you want more than that or no? MR. STROUGH-Well, when you come to design standards, it gives the power to the Planning Board to increase that to 15 or 20% as it currently is. Somebody suggested slashing that to 15. We could argue that point when we get to it. DR. HOFFMAN-What about giving the option to go less? Give the option to the person building. Because a cardiologist is going to have a very intense use for a parking lot, but maybe some other use would be less intense. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes, that’s the problem I had. MR. STROUGH-So should we make it a maximum of? DR. HOFFMAN-Maybe provide a range. MR. KREBS-Well, look what’s happening to office space, though. I mean, you know, you go back 30 years ago a typical middle level executive had a 15 by 22 foot office. Today he’s got a 10 by 10 cubicle. Okay, or less, maybe a seven by ten foot cubicle. So you’d need more parking spaces. You’ve got to go at least five. MR. MC NULTY-Yes. You don’t want to undersize too much or they’re going to end up parking on the road. MR. KREBS-Right. 33 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. STROUGH-And that’s true, too, Chuck, and recently we had a fast food restaurant who tried to argue they didn’t need that kind of parking, and there were other people that felt, you know, based on what I see in other places, you do need that kind of parking. Well they were trying to argue for less parking because they were trying to squeeze it into a smaller lot, and, you know. MR. HOMSY-See, I have to say, I kind of like that, because you’re trying to limit the amount of pavement that you have in the Town. MR. STROUGH-Yes, you do, but you also want to make sure it works. MR. HOMSY-Well, if it doesn’t work, if the client screws up, he’s going to go out of business and a shop will go in there that could replace it. MR. MC NULTY-The trouble is in the meantime he’s parking on the side of Quaker Road. MR. HOMSY-Well, and that’s when you get the Sheriff down there to start ticket and towing. MR. STROUGH-We don’t want to go there. You don’t want to go there. You don’t want to make problems for yourself. You want to try and foresee the problems and solve them ahead of time. I mean, if you’ve got a parking lot that’s too small, then you’re asking for stacking and queuing up on the main road which could be blocking traffic there. I mean, I think you should try and do things right. MR. HOMSY-I see what you’re saying. You are right. Other communities try and make sure that that doesn’t happen through good Code Enforcement, which is an important thing that goes, and let the people decide if, again, because, you know, trying to keep the amount of pavement as tight as possible. If, you know, if you don’t want to go that route, you certainly could give that range, you know, maybe set the amount you want, and then not only allow 20% higher, but with Planning Board approval allow 20% less. MR. STROUGH-Well, and then you speak to me and I’m not speaking for everybody, I’m not uncomfortable with that range with professional offices, three to five cars per every thousand feet. Fine. For a fast food restaurant, I may not want to give them the lower option. MR. WILD-John, maybe what we need to do is really define this a little bit more. As a consultant, can you define and research what best practices are for different level of parking codes? MR. HOMSY-It all depends on the community. I mean, when we re-did these Codes we were going on two things, one the community wanted more walkability which naturally means smaller parking lots, and two, we have a book that has a whole range of codes in it from different communities across the country and we tried to look at the ones that were less urban and tried to pick something that seemed reasonable, as a starting point for discussion. MR. WILD-Yes, but a radiologist, at 10,000 square feet in Glens Falls is going to pretty much have the same amount of parking spaces as somebody in San Francisco, a radiologist with 10,000 square feet. MR. HOMSY-No, actually not, because in San Francisco, they have an awesome public transportation system. MR. WILD-Point well taken. DR. HOFFMAN-A radiologist is going to need a lot less parking than a cardiologist, or it depends on what he’s doing in his radiology office. MR. HOMSY-And that’s the other thing we’re trying to get away from is you could define to the Nth degree all these different uses, and so what we tried to do with the other thing was to try and make it smaller and easier, and if you think that retail stores are different than restaurants, okay, maybe we need to break something out, but we’re trying to make the Code simpler as well, and in a lot of places that are going to a simpler code, they say commercial is X, office is Y, and not care what kind it is, you know, of office or commercial. 34 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. CATALANO-But also in Paragraph Nine there we put in the fact that if the applicant wants to have more spaces than what’s indicated above, then all they need to do is demonstrate that to the Planning Board. MR. HUNSINGER-Right. MR. CATALANO-I mean, I think, my personal approach is that the standards should be more like guidelines and you should try to fit the parking to the use, and that’s going to change, and how are you going to really know until you get into the details of what the use is. MR. HUNSINGER-And I think the issue is, I understand your points that you’re making, John. The thing is, if you drive around Town, there are far more examples of where we have more parking than we need than examples where there’s too little parking. MR. STROUGH-I know, but that was under the previous Code, too. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes. MR. STROUGH-And we did tighten it up with the new Code. MR. HUNSINGER-I realize that. MR. STROUGH-And you know with the Wal-Mart one because we worked on that together, we reduced the parking less than the Code, and you know what, it’s never been a problem. So I’m in favor of less parking when, it’s like these retail outfits, I think less parking’s better. I mean, K-Mart. MR. HUNSINGER-K-Mart is the. MR. STROUGH-Biggest blunder. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes, absolutely. MR. STROUGH-But the new Code, a lot of those approvals were before the new Code. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes, that’s true. MR. HOMSY-Well, is the fact that they’re allowed to add or subtract, you know, in Paragraph Nine, enough to let the Planning Board wrestle with it? And that these other things end up being guides. DR. HOFFMAN-Well, it’s a little bit onerous on the applicant that says that he’s got to do a study, it has to be reviewed at his cost by the Town engineer. That might be a little bit prohibitive. MR. HOMSY-Well, maybe we can just take it out and say he has to prove it to the. DR. HOFFMAN-I would just be in favor of, I don’t know what the right number is. I think John is right that maybe we need more than what we have now, but I would be in favor of a more flexible approach, both in terms of minimums and maximums, just, you know, people generally speaking who are trying to make a living are going to try to pick a good number for what fits their circumstance. MR. HOMSY-All right. Do you want us to come back with different minimums and maximums and we can start with that? I mean, is that the way people want to go, or do you want to go more like you were saying, John, and just pick one number for offices and then perhaps another one, a lower one for retail because you think there’s two much of that. MR. STROUGH-Well, I’m always, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. If it is broken, fix what’s broken. So I look at our Code as it exists, and I say, what’s wrong with it, and I come to Planning Board and Zoning Board meetings just to get a sense and a feel of what is wrong and what’s wrong with our community planning, plus I have to make sure that my students are here who say they were. If I’m not here, they were all here getting the extra credit, but I’ve seen the two problems recur, and that’s on apartments and on professional offices. I’ve seen arguments over fast food restaurants, but it seems like nobody on the Board was really uncomfortable with the determination. They were 35 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) uncomfortable with what the applicant was asking for. It wasn’t our Code they were uncomfortable with. So, if our Code is fine, with the exception of apartments and professional offices, then why are we doing a drastic change? It’s readable. It’s a pretty easy to use chart. I mean, maybe I’m wrong. MR. HOMSY-It’s up to you guys as you apply it. MR. STROUGH-Well, that’s what I’m saying, if there’s some things in our current Code that we’re comfortable with working with, we have worked with it, unless there’s a compelling argument to go otherwise, why don’t we keep what’s in the Code, and then alter that where we’ve had problems, and it makes that better. MR. HOMSY-Would you like to take out, limit the number of uses, I mean, not the number of uses, but broaden the categories of uses so that it might be, you know, you divide, there are a whole bunch that are 300 square feet, it says office, personal services, I wonder if we could combine things to make it easier and more generic in case someone comes in with something that’s not right here but might be, you know, an office use, do we care whether it’s a medical office use or it’s a, you know, whatever offices there are, planning offices. MR. STROUGH-Well, it’s not easy. I mean, we could just say what you’ve said, we’ll use ITE standards, but then the argument was well that doesn’t apply to every community and every situation. Nothing’s going to be prefect here. So that got me back to what I was saying before. If the chart that we were using, everyone was fairly comfortable with on the Planning Board, because they’re the ones that have to work with this on a day to day basis, and the Staff, if they were uncomfortable with what we had, I wasn’t hearing it. I mean, I wasn’t hearing it, and if I wasn’t hearing it, maybe that’s my fault. MR. BAKER-Well, let’s go back to one thing George said earlier, which was part of their rationale for re-working the parking standards was to follow up on the goal in the Draft Comprehensive Plan of more walkability, i.e. less pavement. If we don’t substantially re- work the parking standards, we risk missing that opportunity to improve walkability. MR. STROUGH-Well, have we done that here? I mean, if you did a chart by chart comparison from what we have and what’s being proposed, is this proposal making something more walkable? MR. HOMSY-There are less spaces under the new Code required, and it’s capping, see what we tried to do is get away from minimums where people could build a lot of parking and try and get to caps, but allow overages when need be. MR. HUNSINGER-And require sharing, which we don’t have now. MR. HOMSY-And require sharing. Maybe that’s enough. MR. WILD-In reading John’s document, if you set the office complex or whatever it is up properly, where you have the walkability along the road or between that and the office building and you have the parking behind the building, then who cares how many parking spaces are behind the building? You’ve provided the walkability, to start out with, in your zone. MR. HOMSY-Yes, in the office zone that might be true. In the denser zones, you know, often parking is what defines how much land you can actually build, and that’s why builders don’t like a ton of parking because that’s unproductive space. MR. STROUGH-Well, and what I’m also saying, too, George, and I may not be right, but what I’m also saying, too, is that we have a standard where really I’ve only noticed two problems with it, and if we go to something else, are we going to, are new problems going to crop up that we didn’t identify here because we’re not familiar with it? Sometimes something doesn’t come up until you start working with it. I mean, and we’ve got something we’ve been working with and really hasn’t been a problem with only two areas, and we can solve those by saying, okay, for apartments it’s going to be 2.25, or up to 2.25, or you put the range in. You can put 1.25 to 2.25, and then for professional office, three to five cars per thousand. I don’t care, if the range fits. DR. HOFFMAN-Just one example, I’m not sure if I have the facts right. On Wal-Mart, didn’t you have to get a variance so they could put less parking in just so they could put in something that you wanted, the landscaping thing? 36 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. STROUGH-Well, that’s true, too. So we might want to take a look at retail and reduce that. Chris brought that up, too. MR. WILD-I agree with John. It makes sense. Don’t fix it if it’s not broken. MR. STROUGH-Well, let’s just tweak the one that we have, and I don’t know, what do we have for retail now? Does anybody know? MR. HOMSY-It’s five per thousand for up to one hundred and fifty thousand square feet. This is enclosed, sorry. I think it’s the same for. MR. CATALANO-It’s the same as enclosed. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes, the same as enclosed. MR. HOMSY-Then 4.5 per thousand, then 4 per thousand, sorry, these are rate at 150,000 square feet, then 150 to 500,000 is 4.5 per thousand, and then four per thousand for above 500,000 square feet. MR. MC NULTY-Yes. I don’t think in normal practice we’ve had any real problem with retail. K-Mart’s an old thing, and Wal-Mart, I think we’ve got it pegged just about to the Nth degree, and I’ve talked to a few people lately that say that lot is full at times. MR. HUNSINGER-This time of year it is, yes. MR. MC NULTY-But they’re not parking on the road. MR. HOMSY-What’s the density there? Does anyone remember offhand? MR. STROUGH-Just a little bit less than Code. Let me find retail. MR. MC NULTY-And that has a safety valve there, too, because some of the landscaping that the Planning Board put in is designed so that it could be converted to parking if necessary, and I’m trying to think of what’s come before the Zoning Board. About the only other one was the Outback which came in and asked for additional spaces, because they said their type of restaurant and the way people came in and out of it didn’t, they didn’t fit the fast food category, which is what they theoretically had to go by on our existing charts, but that’s only an occasional one. So variance is the way to handle those. MR. STROUGH-I think for Wal-Mart, didn’t we go with the 4.5? It was less than what was required. I think they were required to do five. MR. MC NULTY-Yes. I think you may be right. It was a little bit under what the requirement was, and I know on Zoning Board we made them go back and come back to us with documentation that they’d done that at some of their other stores and it had worked. MR. STROUGH-Yes, well that was 230,000 square feet. So that fit in to the 4.5. So it must have been less than 4.5, because it says 4.5 between 150,000 and 500,000 and that was 230,000. So it was something less than 4.5. Well, if five, I think you’ll agree, is too much for retail. Why don’t we just make 4.5 the top option and then take it down to four for even bigger places like the Mall, and just eliminate five cars for that, and that’ll make retail, that’ll make even less a sea of pavement for the bigger stores. MR. MC NULTY-Right. MR. STROUGH-So now in our new Code what did we say for retail, or the proposed Code? MR. HOMSY-Well, it’s under commercial. So it’s way less than that. It’s only one for five. MR. HOMSY-Five hundred, yes. So that would become four per thousand for retail. We’ll break out retail as separate from office now. MR. STROUGH-So four per thousand. MR. HOMSY-A range between 4 and 4.5 per thousand. 37 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. STROUGH-And if we tweak what we have, we’re going to make 4.5 the standard, but if it’s above 500,000 square feet, it will be four cars per thousand. Based on our experience, I think that would work for us. MR. HUNSINGER-It sounds good. MR. STROUGH-Okay. So to get back to what I’m saying, if what we had was working and it just needed a little tweaking, then why don’t we keep what we had, tweak it and go on. MR. HOMSY-If that’s what you want, that’s fine. MR. STROUGH-Okay. MR. HUNSINGER-I definitely agree with John on the residential, though. MR. STROUGH-Because if you look at the next. MR. HUNSINGER-That is the single biggest issue we have right now, is really the apartment buildings. MR. STROUGH-And I think 2.25 would solve that. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes, I think so, too. MR. STROUGH-And if you look at the rest of the off street parking schedule that’s being proposed, I’ll tell you, it just got complicated. I mean, I’m trying to read that chart over there use and sharing factors and Table Two and .80 co-efficiencies and I’m saying, my golly, gee, I just like the chart. I read the chart, and like I said, the chart’s been working. MR. HOMSY-So you don’t like the idea of sharing? MR. STROUGH-Well, I do like the idea of sharing. It just was complicated to me. So don’t go by what I said. Maybe you can help me with that. MR. HOMSY-Maybe I can clarify it, because it’s possible that it’s not clear enough, but the idea of sharing and figuring out a way to reduce parking based on uses that may share a lot is something that the Committee likes. MR. STROUGH-And you’re right. We don’t have a discussion of shared parking in our current zoning. So you’re right there, George. MR. HOMSY-Okay. All right. So I have to clarify it. MR. STROUGH-And then it says that, on Page 51, right at the bottom of the page, Number 10, it says that in no instance shall the Planning Board or Zoning Board of Appeals allow parking in excess of, we had 20. It was switched to 15% over the amount specified in this section. Do you see where I am? So is everyone comfortable with the change to 15%? MR. WILD-I don’t know. MR. HUNSINGER-I had it circled, too. MR. WILD-No, leave it at 20. MR. STROUGH-Has the 20% been working okay? MR. MC NULTY-I think the 20%’s closer to reality, yes. MR. STROUGH-Yes, well that’s what I was wondering, too. If it’s not broken why fix it, and I see what they’re trying to do is just reduce the parking spaces, but the Planning Board will have the latitude of going 20% or 15 or 10. MR. MC NULTY-The Zoning Board, as a group, is also going to have a problem with the in no instance shall they do anything. They’re going to say they’re an independent appeal and nobody’s going to tell them what to do. 38 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. HUNSINGER-I’ve read that in your minutes. MR. HOMSY-Then the 15% doesn’t mean anything, either, I mean, 20% means nothing. MR. CATALANO-For the Planning Board it means something. The ZBA can say 50% if they want. MR. HOMSY-I see what you’re saying. MR. STROUGH-And this is how it would work. The Planning Board could increase 20%, and if they weren’t happy with that, then they could go to the ZBA. MR. HOMSY-Okay. That’s all right. That’s a double appeal. That’s fine. MR. STROUGH-All right. So you’re going to word that. Okay. That’s all I have on parking and regs. MR. WILD-I had one on the very last page about the bicycle facilities. It looks like we’re changing things to make more bike racks required. Is that really necessary? DR. HOFFMAN-Yes. MR. WILD-Why can’t we leave it to the discretion of the business owner or the property owner if he sees he has more bicycles out front, he can buy another rack, instead of forcing him to put one there. DR. HOFFMAN-Because it’s something that’s good for society in general to encourage bicyclists. MR. WILD-We’re also talking economics and the economic viability of the community. DR. HOFFMAN-Well, also the economic viability of forcing people to use their cars and burn oil that’s expensive and sending people to Iraq to. MR. WILD-Okay. We can debate this forever. I would like to open it up to discussion for the Committee to see if they feel the same. DR. HOFFMAN-Also the economic viability of the heart attacks that we have to pay for because nobody’s getting out of their cars and bicycling and walking. MR. KREBS-Sure, and had we started out with real planning early in this Country we would have done what they do in Europe and everybody would have lived in villages and you would have gone to work by train, and you wouldn’t use the petroleum, and you’d walk to the train station in the morning. So you’d get your exercise, but we didn’t do that. We’re a suburban country, so you’ve got to live with what we have. DR. HOFFMAN-The bottom line is a bike rack can’t cost more than a few hundred dollars at the most. MR. WILD-It doesn’t matter. Don’t impose it on the business owner. If he sees that his business would benefit by having a bike rack, he will put it. DR. HOFFMAN-We’re imposing a certain minimum number of parking spaces, why should we impose that? MR. WILD-I don’t like to impose anything, to be honest, Mark. I’d like to have the business owner make his own decision, but the community makes the decisions for the benefit of the community. This is one that goes too far in my belief. If the business owner believes that there’s a benefit of having bike racks out there, he’ll do that. If the plan is effective enough to promote more people riding bikes. DR. HOFFMAN-So if somebody wants to ride his bicycle and he’s got no place to park it and he has to attach it to a street sign, that’s not a good solution either. It’s not good for public health. MR. WILD-So for every 25 parking spaces you need six bike racks, six bikes? MR. HUNSINGER-No, it just requires one. 39 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. STROUGH-And it only kicks in after, you’re talking a business that has 25 or more parking spaces. MR. HUNSINGER-Right, per 25 spaces. MR. STROUGH-Any use that has 25 or more parking spaces shall supply one three by six rack. MR. HUNSINGER-I don’t know if we’ve ever enforced that. I can’t think. I mean, I can think of some examples where they did put in bike racks, but I don’t remember ever saying, you know, how come you didn’t have one on your plan. DR. HOFFMAN-Why should we have handicapped facilities, or ADA compliance? I mean, why force the merchant to do that. Maybe the handicapped people aren’t that economically viable for them. MR. BRANDT-It’s a Federal law. That’s why we do it. MR. STROUGH-My bike, like many of the bikes today, are expensive. Okay. They’re like $300 and up. I would feel more comfortable riding my bike to Stewarts or Sokol’s because I live in that neighborhood if they had some bike racks, but they don’t. When I ride my bike over to Stewarts, I’ve got to set it down on the curb, tie it to the picnic table. I mean, I shouldn’t have to do that. I should have a bike rack there where I can put my bike. There is no bike rack there. There’s no bike rack at Sokol’s. MR. WILD-So is this going to be retroactive, this all Stewarts and Sokol’s? MR. STROUGH-No, it wouldn’t be retroactive, but they’re saying new businesses coming in, if you’re going to have 25 or more parking spaces, in other words, they’re doing a good business, that they put up a three bicycle. I mean, I think, what are they, a couple of hundred dollars? MR. WILD-Okay. MR. BRANDT-One rack. We just stopped the heart attacks in the United States. MR. HOMSY-Do you want to make it retroactive? We can do that. MR. WILD-Please. MR. KREBS-John, the only way to get a rack out there is to go to Mr. Sokol and say, do you want me to continue to come to your store, I’m coming by bike, I need some place to put my bike, and I’ll tell you, very shortly he will have his bike rack out there. MR. STROUGH-Well, I will talk to Matt about that. MR. KREBS-I’m serious, or Stewarts or any retailer. They want you to come. MR. HUNSINGER-All right. Any other questions on parking and loading? DR. HOFFMAN-Can I make a suggestion, before we go on to the next section. We have guests who I think were planning to make a presentation, and I know the usual thing is to wait until the end, but I think they’re expecting to make the presentation. It might be reasonable to have them do that. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes, you were kind of reading my mind. I was going to ask the Committee. I mean, I certainly don’t see us getting through everything that we had on the agenda this evening. Is everyone in agreement? MR. BRANDT-Absolutely. MR. WILD-Sure. MR. MC NULTY-Yes, it makes lots of sense. MR. HUNSINGER-The floor is yours. Go get them. While they’re pulling their stuff together, we have several, I think, lengthy discussions left on the agenda. Do we want to decide now which ones to put off to our next meeting, or how we want to handle that? 40 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. WILD-Design guidelines, I have an awful lot of comments on. MR. HUNSINGER-Okay. MR. STROUGH-Me, too. DR. HOFFMAN-Me, too. MR. HUNSINGER-Okay. Do we want to skip design guidelines and have people e-mail their comments? MR. WILD-Why don’t we do the same for the PO? MR. STROUGH-Yes, we can do that, because, to be honest with you, I hope I’m not alone, but I usually wait about two days before the meeting, then I start reading like a fish, you know, and I get through it all, but I’m consumed with this. I don’t even have time for e-mails. MR. HUNSINGER-Right. MR. STROUGH-And so I’m sorry for that, but now I have read all of it, and I do have comments and I can provide those in e-mail. MR. HUNSINGER-Okay. MR. STROUGH-Now, for that, but it just doesn’t work well otherwise. MR. HUNSINGER-So, do we want to put off discussion on Article 7, 11, 12, and the PO zone and have people e-mail comments around? MR. BAKER-What I’d ask is that you e-mail the comments to me. I’ll consolidate them all and distribute them to the Committee as a whole. MR. STROUGH-Yes. MR. HUNSINGER-Is everyone in agreement on that? MR. STROUGH-Yes, okay, and while they’re doing that, I’ve got two handouts, if I can, Chris. MR. HUNSINGER-Sure. As long as you have copies for everybody. MR. STROUGH-I do, and one is, I’ll tell you what they’re about. If they’re worthwhile, I’ll pass them out. One is on grass paving, which is big in Europe. It’s not here, and so I have a company, now this isn’t the best grass pavement, but today I said, well, I wanted to give you a sample of what grass paving is, and so this is a fairly good product. I’ve seen better products used in Europe. I don’t know why we don’t use them here, but for your overload parking, you keep your lawn, you keep your grass, and you can also do parking here, but I wanted to pass this out, and the other handout I have, too, is when we get to the Main Street designs standards, and you see this in Europe, too, and it’s on plazas and squares, and how we don’t have that concept written into our Main Street program, but I’d like to see it written in. So there’s a website. It’s dedicated just to plazas and squares, and so I gave you just a little taste of it. For example, it introduces the website, and then it gives you 10 principals for creating successful squares, because if you do the build to line, and you stick to that as a Code and you don’t allow squares, you cut out a whole lot of retail development that could happen. In other words, if you just go one way, you’re going to get so many linear square feet. If you allow squaring to occur, you’re going to increase your development potential, at the same time creating human spaces, and it works for everybody. It’s part of the new urbanism concept anyway. MR. HUNSINGER-Sure. MR. STROUGH-So I have those two articles, and if I can, I’ll just hand those out. MR. HUNSINGER-Sure, thank you, and while you’re doing that, the handout that Stu provided, Getting the Growth You Want, that he handed out tonight, was something that I had asked Stu to share with everyone. I came across this just this past week, and part of 41 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) the reason why I thought it was really useful was because it’s very simple, but that’s just for your own edification. Okay. Anything else? MR. BAKER-I’d like to just give a brief introduction and preface remarks to Mr. Macri’s presentation. Last month he had a discussion with the Town Board at one of their workshop meetings about his proposed development on Quaker Road East, and the Town Board recommended that he come to this Committee, make the presentation here and that this Committee provide a recommendation to the Town Board. I think, as you’ll hear, the scale of development that they’re considering for his properties goes a bit beyond the extent of what’s currently encouraged and proposed in the Draft Comprehensive Plan and in the Draft Code language, but the Town Board was interested enough to ask him to make his presentation again to this Committee, and specifically the Board did ask this Committee for its thoughts and a recommendation back. MR. HUNSINGER-Thanks for the introduction, Stu. The floor is yours, gentlemen. VIC MACRI MR. MACRI-I’m just going to have Bob kind of walk you through everything. Just a little history on the property. The property was a commercial plaza development that was approved in 1987 by the Town of Queensbury, which was the first phase what was planned, it was a Planned Unit Development that was proposed in the Town that never took off. These are remaining properties that we currently retain. We also retain access to County Line Road, and I’m just going to let Bob kind of walk you through what we’re talking about. BOB SWEENEY MR. SWEENEY-As Vic said, I’m Bob Sweeney. I’m an attorney for the project. Just for purposes of orientation, and I’m sure you know most of this, but we’re looking the Quaker Road section here. Vic’s holdings are here. There’s a Niagara Mohawk power line in this location right here. There are about 40 acres south of that, a portion of which fronts on Quaker Road, and there are about 85 acres north of that. As Vic said, this property has been under a development proposal for a great number of years. His concept is this, that this is a business technology park location for a lot of different reasons that we’ll touch on as we go through this. That area that is planned for that is the 85 acres north of the Niagara Mohawk power line, and what we want to talk about, that’s currently zoned Light Industrial and there’s Highway Commercial zoning to the south, and let me put up what is proposed for the site, and this should be an excerpt from your proposed zoning map, and I think it’s fairly current I don’t know that anything has changed on it, but the site, again, is located right here, and this is the frontage portion down here. This is proposed to be zoned industrial. This strip here is the multi-use Quaker Road frontage piece with 500 feet depth to it, and then the rest of the property is proposed for industrial. Vic’s development concept, as I said, has a business technology park format in the back and he would like to have commercial retail usage in the front, which brings us to the first issue, resulting in our going to the Town Board to look at some relief to this, and that would be natural features. On this particular site along Quaker Road we have a great deal of wetlands fronting on Quaker Road. So the 500 foot zoning line which runs about through here is basically unstable on the front 40 acres of the property. So what we would like to do is to ask this Board to look at some methods to allow us to have some retail commercial development in front, which is really the engine that’s going to drive the business technology park in back, and find a methodology to allow us to have our commercial retail development instead of street front, and we respect the design considerations that the Board is looking at, but I think what we want this Board to see is that this is a bit of a different site than most of the strip frontage that you’re looking at along Quaker Road. Vic’s got a lot of property here. He’s got a lot of acreage. It has a great deal of potential for the Town, but we do need some kind of different treatment than the standard that’s being applied through the Comprehensive Plan and proposed rezoning. So we would like your recommendation to the Town Board, and I guess we’ve looked at it a couple of different ways, and possibly, and I know your planned development district is a residential district, but consideration of a planned commercial district, with limitations, so it doesn’t open the door all over Town, but to allow us to have commercial retail usage in the front and the industrial park in the back. This is just another look at the site. It’s an aerial of the site, but it gives you a better look and some things that we should point out to you. The site’s potential is something that I think we ought to talk about for a minute, and you know the area well, but County Route 52 is over in this location. This site, the industrial park part of it, will have access up here to County Route 52. The proposed Warren County Industrial Park would be directly across the 42 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) street from that particular location, and the airport, as you know, is just north of this particular site. So there’s a lot of elements to the site that would promote its use in this fashion. There are a lot of aspects about the retail frontage that make a lot of sense on this particular site. You will have, under your Comprehensive Plan proposal, a very long strip of street front development, in accordance with your design plans. This would be an exception to that, but it’s the appropriate site for that exception. You have the natural feature constraint in front. You’d preserve all of those wetlands. Your retail would be in behind that. The retail would service the industrial park and the whole area and these other industrial parks as well, but what it would take is an extension of your retail use, the multi use district, back to the Niagara Mohawk power line, and I think the proposed zoning for the industrial park would work with what he has, but we’ve looked at your land use plan and also the proposed zoning, and without re-writing the whole thing, it would appear that a planned commercial district may be a vehicle that could accommodate this kind of use. It would give the Town Board and the Planning Board a great deal of flexibility on how to design what goes in here, but again, it’s a step away from the standard that’s being applied right along the road frontage, but this is probably a unique parcel with the amount of acreage and the potential given its location and connections. Vic has taken great strides, too, in furthering the business technology park aspect of this. He has a Build New York approval. So he has some State funding to get this shovel ready with approvals if he can get his zoning package put together, and it’s also in the Empire Zone. So the retail’s the economic engine that’s going to fuel that, and it’s also going to service that, but it’s a concept that this Board could give us some help with so we can keep it moving. MR. MACRI-Whenever get RFP’s for any large, industrial commercial user, typically even State organizations or Federal organizations, I’m thinking of one we just dealt with with GSA, first thing that they ask is what’s close by, how far do employees have to travel, what services are available. They want to see restaurants. They want to see retail. They want it to be site specific or within a reasonable area. Now what we’re talking about here is hopefully, and we don’t know how it’s going to develop, and we’re not willing to pigeon hole a bunch of roads here like may have been done several years ago at the Carey Industrial Park. We want to see this thing develop as the need requires. So assuming that the first two or three users that come into this park will determine the size of the lots, and how the thing’s going to grow. We’re hoping, obviously, with the developments that are happening down in Malta, that this parcel will be something that people will look to as a very desirable site. There’s a lot of desirable aspects to this site, specifically the access to the airport. Obviously the quality of life in the Town of Queensbury and Warren County is something that I think is desirable to people who come into the area, and we’re committed to make this technical park grow. We’ve met with the State Economic Development Corporation. They’ve awarded us a $200,000 grant to get the super structure in for getting this shovel ready and we’re in the process of doing that. We’ve delineated all the wetlands already as you can see by the map. So that’s one of the pieces out of the way. We will now go into archeological studies, get those out of the way, and if things go the way we see them going, you could see even, and I know Bob talks about retail and maybe hotels may not be the greatest thing to see in the Town of Queensbury, but there may be a need for that kind of service there, too. So what we’re trying to say is we want to keep our options open on our abilities to provide services to whoever’s coming into the park. MR. BRANDT-Vic, doesn’t that site actually have pretty good access to sewer connections with the City? MR. MACRI-I’m assuming that Stu passed along to you our Build Now New York application which the Town had asked us to get to Stu to get to you, but if he hasn’t, Stu has it available. There is fiber, there is sewer, there is water, there is gas. I mean, that was one of the things that really attracted the people from New York State. We were one of probably 30 projects that submitted for grants, and out of those 30 I think five or six were given grants. I think one was a municipality. The rest were private developers, and the reason that the State wanted to give a grant to us is they feel that private developers can move projects along quicker than a municipality can. So, that’s how we got that grant, so, yes, but there is, I mean, all the necessary services are there. Sewer line was run. It’s been about two years now, but there’s a force main that runs right through the site, and if you look at the application that we submitted for the Build Now New York grant, you will see the services, the 13 KVA power and fiber optics by three providers, and it’s just all there. MR. HUNSINGER-In terms of access to the rear property, the northern property, wouldn’t you extend the boulevard that’s already there down the Quaker Road, the dotted line, that white dotted line right there? 43 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. MACRI-This is the existing boulevard, and the plan is, retail development is here. Restaurants, a cluster of restaurants, there may be some small services like a dry cleaner in this area. Part of the concept we currently have. Bringing the road up through, however it’s going to meander. MR. HUNSINGER-Right, but you would provide access from Quaker Road as well? MR. MACRI-Right. So we’ll have access. MR. HUNSINGER-Okay. MR. MACRI-Hopefully through County Line Road. We see, and everybody knows that within the next year there will be a National Guard facility being built over in this property here. So there’s going to be, at any given weekend, maybe 1500 troops, couple thousand troops. So they’ll be able to hopefully access our property in this direction, and we’re also in discussions with the County and the airport of possibly extending the road up in that direction. MR. HUNSINGER-I was going to say, I know a while ago the Transportation Council was looking at extending the boulevard up to County Line Road. MR. MACRI-Well, originally they were talking about back at our other property farther up where Sanford Street. MR. HUNSINGER-Sanford Street Extension, yes. MR. MACRI-Yes, Sanford Street Extension, but there’s wetland problems all through that area. That’s basically the swap, and this is the logical, I mean, we’re outside the wetlands area, which basically runs here. This is a logical place to run that path. MR. HUNSINGER-There has been some speculation and I’ve heard rumors about a specific user for the retail area that you’re talking about. Is there any such? MR. MACRI-We are in discussion with several retailers at this point. MR. HUNSINGER-Okay. MR. MACRI-So, I can’t say. I mean, we haven’t committed to anything. A lot’s going to depend on whether or not we get this thing rezoned. So MR. HUNSINGER-Okay. MR. BRANDT-I have to tell you that I’ve always felt, that’s a huge piece of land that’s idle. It doesn’t produce any real taxes for the Town. You’ve got electricity. You’ve got every utility you could want. It seems to me the best thing in the world that can happen is to intensively use it. MR. MACRI-Well, it’s our hope, too. I mean, obviously it’s going to make the Warren/Washington County Industrial Park more desirable, too, if we can get these connections. DR. HOFFMAN-I have a question on the industrial zoning, Light Industrial, there’s some commercial that’s allowed in that, isn’t there? MR. HOMSY-Yes. DR. HOFFMAN-What can or can’t he do? MR. HOMSY-No uses are defined. It’s a dimensional use. It has to be within 500 feet of a public road. Which is why you guys did that on the map. DR. HOFFMAN-And I mean, I guess the main reason he’s here before us is he wants to have an area rezoned from Light Industrial to Commercial. Presumably because he can’t do what he wants to do in a Light Industrial, and I’m just trying to determine what, if there is some commercial allowed in Light Industrial then what is that and is that not sufficient for him to do what he needs to do? 44 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. CATALANO-First of all, it’s my recollection that in the industrial zones, retail uses were only allowed along the frontage of roads for maximum depth as 500 feet, and also the buildings themselves were limited as to the size. Basically we wanted small retail fronting the roads and the industrial to be in the back, and so this particular situation, I think you’ll come up against two potential obstacles in the fact of the wetlands uses up that 500 foot area fronting the roads, as well as the fact that, I don’t know if the limitations on the actual retail size would probably be a problem as well. DR. HOFFMAN-Well, I’m not sure, the wetland, the problem there is that the wetland takes up area that’s currently zoned mixed use. MR. CATALANO-Well, that would allow them to do the commercial on the front of their property, yes. The wetlands take up that. DR. HOFFMAN-What I’m asking is that, for the part of the property that’s going to be, that is zoned Light Industrial, what limitations are on that? MR. CATALANO-Under the current zoning, retail uses are not allowed in Light Industrial, and I think we continued that in the proposed new zone. MR. STROUGH-And what I suggested is, and I think there was general agreement on this Committee to make the newer industrial zoning more flexible, and I’m making a suggestion to make Professional Office a little bit more flexible, and this is what I’m suggesting, which could also apply to Light Industrial, is that retailing be allowed if it’s accessory, ancillary, you know, customarily incidental, to the Light Industrial use. For example, what came up was this guy manufactured a product and he wanted to have a little showroom and sell his product, and our current Light Industrial zoning wouldn’t allow it, and just about everybody thought that was a sin, but that’s what the Code said, and so, you know, I would suggest that as well as you know we might want to consider personal services businesses if they are, again, accessory, ancillary or customarily incidental to the primary use, which in this case would be Light Industrial. So you would allow some flexibility, and we’ve all agreed, now I don’t know where we’re going to end up with the language on this, but I think there is general agreement that we do want to become more flexible in our Light Industrial zone. Now, enough so to allow a separate retail establishment? I don’t know if we’re going to go there, but again, it has been. MR. HUNSINGER-Well, I don’t think that’s what they’re asking. DR. HOFFMAN-I think in the proposed zoning there is some commercial allowed in Light Industrial, and do we know what the square footage limitation is? MR. MACRI-The square footage limitation, I’m looking right at it, says industrial zones where commercial uses are permitted, the entire footprint of the building containing a commercial use shall be within a 400 foot, 400 feet of a public road and a maximum of 40,000 square feet. DR. HOFFMAN-So 40,000, how big is Hannaford, for example? MR. MACRI-Hannaford, we built that building up there, it’s 83,000 square feet. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes, I was going to say 80,000. MR. MACRI-That just doesn’t make sense to me. It doesn’t make sense to me for a lot of reasons, because what we’re trying to do here isn’t the typical industrial project. Okay. What we’re trying to do is bring in high tech office commercial development, hopefully, you know, a lot of employees, maybe not a lot of manufacturing. We’re not talking about crinkled tin buildings that you see down in the Warren/Washington County Industrial Park. DR. HOFFMAN-What kind of retail do you need that would be over 40,000 square feet? MR. MACRI-As I brought up to the Town Board, I mean, if you look at, and I’m not saying this is going to be a Wolfe Road, but if you look at Wolfe Road, for the amount of building there and the amount of commercial use that’s there, you have that mixture, and you can’t have that mixture in this Town, which is not an attraction for bringing in a large commercial light industrial office user of any kind. If a State agency, for one, or a government agency for another or any back office operation like a call center or anything, they’re going to look for those services that are quick and easy for their employees to get to, and this is what we’re proposing. 45 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) DR. HOFFMAN-And require retail larger than 40,000 square feet? MR. MACRI-Absolutely. Because, you know, 40,000 square feet of retail isn’t even a small grocery store anymore. The new Hannaford stores that they’re building are at least 50,000 square feet. MR. STROUGH-I think Aldi’s was a 40,000. MR. MACRI-And that’s not really what I would consider a grocery store. MR. STROUGH-No, but if you want to get a conceptual size, I think Aldi’s is about 40,000 square feet. MR. MACRI-CVS, I think, is 30,000. MR. SWEENEY-Just another angle on Vic’s point is that the limited footprint frontage retail development, and I’m not sure what the distance is, but you’ve got the lengthy strip that will be nothing but that, and to limit this to the same thing backed off of the road by 500 or 600 feet isn’t going to add a lot to the services that are going to populate that area. His development concept is to have the flexibility to attract different tenants than you’re going to have hundreds of. MR. WILD-That strip of Quaker is also very wet, isn’t it? Is there a certain amount of that land that cannot be developed because it’s? MR. HOMSY-I don’t know for sure, but that (lost words) do you come in conflict with those regulations at all, those allowed uses or anything? MR. MACRI-Well, as it sits right now, it’s all planned as industrial, and we’re saying, that hasn’t worked in the Town, it continues not to work in the Town, you get small little operations. We have no large industrial users. MR. CATALANO-So you’re saying that you’re looking for the Town to do something so, to not only just with respect to the retail in the front, but also to be more flexible for the acreage in the back and stuff? MR. MACRI-Absolutely. MR. HUNSINGER-I’m glad you asked that clarification, because I didn’t understand that. MR. CATALANO-Yes. MR. WILD-I think I heard earlier, this is like a PUD, but on the commercial and industrial site. MR. CATALANO-Well, I mean, if you’re looking for solutions to this, your solution would be you allow, you know, you keep the regulations as they are, but you allow planned development in the Light Industrial zones. That would be a possible. MR. SWEENEY-And there are ways to control that, too, because I know Boards are concerned about opening up too much, and you can put a minimum number of acreage on a planned commercial development and make it 50 acres or 80 acres so you don’t have every small parcel looking for it. You can confine it to certain zones, Quaker Road or Route 9 North or whatever is appropriate on your thinking on where this might work, but there are things you can do in that kind of district and it’s, you know, you can take your residential district and on that model, if it works for you, make it a commercial district, change some of the criteria, procedures would stay the same, and it’s fairly, I could propose a draft of it for your people to look at. We’d just throw that out there because instead of wholesale re-writing of all the stuff that you’ve worked so hard on, that may be a real answer to allow a development with some merit like this to go forward. MR. HUNSINGER-I know one of the things that, you know, we heard pretty loud and clear from the community is there’s a real reluctance to lose any Light Industrial or, you know, industrial space to other, you know, lesser uses such as retail or whatever. MR. WILD-But there’s also, at the same time, Chris, I’m sorry to interrupt, but there’s also this desire to bring industry, more businesses into the area, and I think that the point that really struck me is that businesses today are really looking for that combination of 46 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) services that are closer to their facilities, and if they can’t get that, they’ll find somewhere else where they can get it, and we really need to do something to attract this type of, some other type of high tech industry here, and if we have the regulations that limit that combined service, if that’s truly what people are looking for, then we’re going to lose them to Wilton, we’re going to lose them to Malta, we’re going to lose them to Saratoga, and all down the line. MR. STROUGH-And if you’re monitoring the pulse of the community, Chris is right. The community is sensitive to losing light industrial, mostly losing Light Industrial to Residential. MR. HUNSINGER-Right. MR. STROUGH-That’s the real hot button, but I don’t think there’d be outrage on behalf of the community, from what I’m reading, to enlarge a Highway Commercial to enable a Highway Commercial development that would also compliment some kind of industrial development at the same time. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes, I didn’t finish my comment, and I think a lot of us are of similar mind. Because I think, you know, part of the problem that the general public has is, you know, the only way that they can equate quality jobs is by Light Industrial, and they don’t realize that you can create quality jobs. I like the term that you used, business technology I think was the term you used. MR. MACRI-Well, the project itself is the Quaker Ridge Technology Park. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes, and, you know, one of the things that you see around the State is quality jobs that are not the traditional manufacturing or assembly type opportunities, and I’m not really sure how much we’ve thought through a more complete economic development strategy, if you will, that’s outside of, you know, sort of the traditional, well let’s set aside some industrial land, you know. MR. HOMSY-Well, Light Industrial does now, under the proposed zoning, allow for offices as well. MR. HUNSINGER-I know, I realize that. MR. HOMSY-So that would help capture a lot of that stuff. MR. MACRI-That helps to capture it, but it doesn’t provide the services. MR. HOMSY-The retail’s a whole different thing. MR. HUNSINGER-That’s why I thought all they were asking for was to have the lot south of the NiMo right of way rezoned. MR. MACRI-Basically we’ve come in for a rezoning application for this area. We put that on the back burner, waiting for the Comprehensive Plan to find its way through. We get a little concerned about how the process is going, what the plan reads. So we took our rezoning application and we said, we want to take it to the Town Board and see what the Town Board has to say, because we want to get, if we’re in conflict with the Comprehensive Plan Committee, we want to get it in front of the Zoning Board and get our project moved. Originally when we met with the Town, I think we started maybe in January of this past year, we had a target of breaking ground in the spring of this coming year, and if we don’t do something to make that work, we’re not going to hit those targets. MR. HOMSY-On the technology part or on the retail part? MR. MACRI-Well, on that would be on the retail, and it would also, we will, I mean, the plan is to also have the studies completed by Spring, for the technology part, which would be listed as a Build Now New York ready site. MR. HOMSY-Okay. So you’re not negotiating with anyone for the back part yet? MR. MACRI-No. MR. HOMSY-You’re still doing the studies. 47 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. HUNSINGER-So the Light Industrial zone that’s currently on the northern parcel, doe that, is that zone okay for what you think you might do there, or are you looking for some change? MR. MACRI-If we have a heavy office user who has people who travel in and out of Town all the time, if a hotel is something that needs to be put in that area, we should be able to do it. If we have research development operations all the time require housing for people, and that’s a possibility. I’m not saying it would happen, but to pigeon hole it that that’s all got to be industrial I think is a mistake. We need to let the market tell us what it needs to be. MR. BRANDT-I think we get wrapped up in old terms and we’re in a new economy, and the State of New York has dedicated an enormous amount of money and effort to bring in high tech industry, to bring in Nano Tech industry, and none of us know where it’s going to go or what it’s going to require, and we ought to have flexibility to give these people what they need and get these jobs here. They’re the best jobs you can have, and one of the things, certainly I’ve heard from the public is they really hate to see that their kids can’t find quality jobs in the area, and to me this is it. Let them have it, and if the mix changes, who cares? What we care is that they bring in good jobs and they work together with the high tech industries that are coming, assuming they come. MR. WILD-Generally, Mike, I agree with you. I think that the public is worried about allowing them to do all the retail portion of it and never come through with any of the industrial portion. MR. MACRI-We’ve spent a lot of time and money to make this happen, and the Build Now New York grant was a stretch to get and we got it, and we’re committed that any funds that we get through the retail operation is to put it into infrastructure in the back. So, I mean, that’s the thing that’s the thing that drives the project. MR. CATALANO-Is that what you mean when you say that the retail is the engine that will drive? MR. MACRI-Absolutely. I mean, obviously it’s a monetary thing, and if we had somebody from the industrial park, obviously it would work in the opposite direction, but we have interest in the front parcel and that’s the direction it’s going to work. MR. CATALANO-Is it the type of thing that you could still develop it as a planned development, with the retail and the industrial as an overall plan, and even though there could be different phases. Can it be integrated through an approval process? MR. MACRI-That’s a concept. MR. SWEENEY-The Quaker Ridge Boulevard would go straight through the retail back into the office park, and the concept is to develop it as a, you know, probably in phases, but as one project, yes. MR. CATALANO-I just wanted to mention, that could alleviate a lot of the concerns with respect to, you know, having the retail there and then the industrial never coming to be, or having the retail dominate over other uses. During the planned development process both the Planning Board and the Town Board would have input on the ratios of the various, you know, square footage. DR. HOFFMAN-We’d have to re-write the PUD section, then. MR. CATALANO-Well, you don’t have that ability right now under your current zoning or under your proposed zoning. MR. MACRI-I think you have a great model for it in the residential, and as I said, transposing that into a Part B Planned Commercial district is something that could address this. MR. CATALANO-See, the whole mixed use concept of mixed use zones, the concept was based on the Planned Development type concept but not being proposed as a single project. I mean, those types of components, we do it to allow for mixed uses. We just did it, put those in separate zones, and because we put them in separate zones, there was no need to have a commercial/industrial planned development floating zone, so to speak. 48 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. HUNSINGER-Any final questions? MR. BRANDT-Personally I don’t have any problem with the same concept for Carey Park or other major pieces of property that are just sitting there unused. It’s time we get with reality and if it’s mixed use zoning, it’s mixed use zoning, instead of sitting with little compartments that we all have an idea of and nothing works. Let’s change the idea and make it work. MR. WILD-I totally agree. I believe that we should do something to facilitate these larger tracks being able to do whatever the marketplace is asking us to do, and if it’s a mixture of Residential and Light Industrial, or Professional, whatever we want to call it, Professional Industrial, you know, I believe that that’s something we should put in. Because obviously Light Industrial, I agree with Mike, it hasn’t happened. We’ve had these parks here and there’s really nothing that’s of substance that’s really. MR. STROUGH-I’m not going to disagree with you, but there is some incongruity in one what you’re saying. On one side I’m hearing Mike and Mike say that we’ve got to get ready for Luther Forest, and we’re in the first sphere of influence and all the ramifications, and if Luther Forest takes off, how long do you think it’s going to take Carey Park to fill in? I’ll bet you in no time at all it’s filled in. So that’s a non-issue. Now as far as mixing residential in with Light Industrial, I think you want to be careful there. You kind of want to, you sell your soul to the devil on that one. So I’d be careful there, and this plan here, I think it’s a very workable plan in my opinion, but I’m speaking as a Town Board member there and we’ve already gone through this, and I want to stay quiet and let you people speak to this and I want to listen, and I’ll play that role, okay. DR. HOFFMAN-I was just driving up along County Line Road and I hadn’t been there in quite a while. There are businesses there. It’s not like it’s deserted, and, you know, I see things could change any time in the economy, Federal policy changes, the dollar value goes up or down, China decides to sell their bonds. Manufacturing could take off any time, and, you know, we do need to be careful that we don’t lose all our potential industrial property, you know, if and when it takes off. That’s not to say this is a bad thing, but we do, you know, having some land reserved for Light Industrial or Heavy Industrial, whatever, is not a bad thing. MR. WILD-I tend to agree that we should try to save some land, but we have an opportunity here with a project that maybe it’s that PUD concept, the planned commercial district that really limits how big the (lost word) can be, what percentage of retail and industrial needs to be part of that, and it creates the opportunity to respond to what the marketplace is saying we could do. MR. STROUGH-Well, could we, at this point in time, see a PUD proposal that would be commercial oriented? DR. HOFFMAN-What do you mean? MR. BAKER-Proposed Code language for planned commercial development? MR. CATALANO-The language for? Sure. MR. STROUGH-And then the Committee could look at that and the applicants could look at that, and we could see if this fits. MR. CATALANO-I would suggest, if you don’t mind, that we, you had mentioned about you know perhaps give them an example of what you had in mind. MR. MACRI-I’d be happy to submit something for those folks to look at and pass on to you. MR. BRANDT-The thing about, once you zone it, you know, hypothetically we’ll give them exactly what they want. The Zoning Board, or the Planning Board, is going to review it, they have to when you come site plan specific, and so then an Environmental Impact Statement is going to have to be made, traffic’s going to have to be analyzed. You’re going to look at hazardous material and whether, you know, whatever it is is going to be analyzed. That’s certainly adequately provided for in the law. So, to me, it’s a matter of us allowing a mixed use that includes commercial and, you know, all these uses they want to go and see what it does in the marketplace, because in the end, that’s what’s wrong. We’re not in the marketplace. You come through the Midwest and you 49 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) see growth everywhere. You come to New York State, and my God it’s desolate, and that’s over regulation. It’s overtaxing. That’s what’s wrong, and we have to break that. MR. CATALANO-There are a variety of techniques, but generally speaking when you’re talking about a planned development, you know, it’s a floating zone, and an application for the planned development is like a rezoning application, and, you know, the zone is not changed until, the property is not rezoned until the approval process is complete, and a project like this you’re talking about, you know, (lost words). MR. BRANDT-But we’re rezoning right now. Why have them rezone what we’re doing right now? Why don’t we zone it? MR. CATALANO-That was going to be my question. I mean, the issue is, the ability to do this, not only for this project but for other similar types of projects, I would recommend that you don’t go around and allow that everywhere in the Town, to specify where the infrastructure and so forth would make sense, just as demonstrated here. You could designate, you could limit the areas of where those zones would be, or you could actually specify that this particular zone, this Light Industrial zone, is where, you know, these types of planned developments are encouraged. MR. WILD-Well, I like the idea with the infrastructure limitations and it really defines where it can go because the infrastructure exists here today. MR. HOMSY-And the other thing that I think you mentioned, that you’d have to make sure you got, and as you mentioned as well, is make sure that you get the ratios and stick to them, because I know the Town has had some trouble in some of the residential areas of getting some of the mix they had wanted, because the market had driven residential, residential, residential, and so when the market might turn over to commercial, there’s no land left. So you just have to be cognizant of those kinds of things, too. MR. CATALANO-But generally speaking the Town Board approves the sort of a broad stroke of the rezoning and the regulations can give as much authority to the Planning Board or keep it with the Town Board as each community desires. Some regulations are very, the Planning Board just gets really the site plan stuff, and the Town Board works on all the rezoning and stuff, and the ratios and the general master plan for the entire development. The Planning Board gets the construction and the phasing and things like that, but there’s a variety of ways. Some let the Planning Boards do it entirely and then it goes back to the Planning Board for a final approvals. MR. HOMSY-You mean the Town Board. MR. CATALANO-The Town Board for final approvals, yes. MR. HUNSINGER-We haven’t heard anything from Chuck or Don. Do you guys have thoughts on this? MR. MC NULTY-I think the Planned Unit Development concept may be the way to go, it strikes me. Because that gives you the flexibility, depending on how we structure the limitations for it, of coping with this kind of a problem again somewhere else, without having to go back and just rezone it, and, I don’t know, it strikes me as being the better approach. MR. BRANDT-You’re going to have site plan review. We’re rezoning right now. Why not zone it? MR. MC NULTY-Because then the next time this comes along you’ve got to rezone another parcel. If you do it by the Planned Unit Development thing, you’ve done it once and it can apply to whatever parcels you designate, whether it’s ones that have the infrastructure or area, whatever. You’re right. We could solve this particular problem right now, probably by just saying okay the lower parcel next to Quaker Road we’ll rezone that commercial and let them have the other one as Light Industrial, but it doesn’t solve the problem elsewhere in the community, which may come up three years from now. MR. HUNSINGER-Well, maybe we do both. MR. KREBS-That was my thought. Why don’t we just do both? 50 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. BRANDT-What if you do a mixed use zoning for this type of thing, what they’re asking for, and look at applications one at a time as site plan review, and allow it in a very broad area? DR. HOFFMAN-I kind of vote for the Planned Unit Development approach. I think, you know, we haven’t finalized the zoning. So obviously we’re talking hypothetically, but they’re asking for something different than what the plan calls for, than what the consensus development will come to, and it may be justified based on the specifics of this project. So if we feel that the specifics of this project merit making that type of an exception, then it’s fine to do that, but it would be best to do it in the context of a strictly defined project where the details are laid out very carefully and the Town Board does a specific zoning legislation related to the Planned Unit Development, rather than just willy nilly changing the zoning, and, you know, then they get to put up their big box store and who knows what happens to the rest. I know that’s not your intent, but we would be basically facilitating that. MR. MACRI-What you put on paper and you present to everybody and they all approve it and say it’s wonderful and great and go ahead and do it, isn’t what gets built, because again, you’re dealing with market forces. You’re dealing with changes. What we’re talking about here is large commercial industrial users who may have a different idea of how they want (lost words). DR. HOFFMAN-I think there could be some flexibility built into a PUD. MR. MACRI-What if I end up with just with just two users, but there’s 10,000 employees (lost words). DR. HOFFMAN-It may be based on a certain amount of space. MR. MACRI-I can put in a new Planned Unit Development concept that says there’s going to be 30 buildings, and it winds up being 10. MR. KREBS-I don’t think we’re looking at the restriction of how many buildings. I think we’re looking at, what are you going to use that land for. The thing about a PUD is that you can designate, yes, you can use that front portion as commercial, and by the way, the rest of it is going to be reserved, not in any specific manner, but for Light Industrial. MR. HOMSY-So you’re in favor of that as well. MR. MACRI-What if I have a user that comes along next week and says if I’m going to put my people back here, I need a hotel over there, and now, you know, now I’ve lost that retail space that I planned to put my restaurants. So where do I put them? I have to put them up here. Now I have to go back and get rezoned. MR. BRANDT-This mixed use zoning makes so much sense, because you still have site plan review. You can look at it and say, no, I don’t like it, it’s not right. The community’s up in arms about it. This is wrong, that’s wrong. You still have a strangle hold, but what you’re doing is you’re eliminating the guy having to go through a rezoning. Re-zonings are terribly expensive. They take a lot of time. Go look at what’s going on at Luther Forest. They just let the contract out for the sewage disposal plant. You think they did that because they’re thinking someone might be coming along? They know exactly who’s coming along. They know how much sewage its going to handle and they’re building it. So we should get our zoning in a position so when someone comes along and says, we want to use those chips, but we want to learn how to use them, so we want to set up an office here where we bring our guys to use them, and by the way, they’re going to be flying, you know, the one thing about the chip industry is the United States Government says it has to be based in the United States. You can’t take these primary chip builders and move them to IndoChina or any other place. They have to be here. So that’s the one industry we’ve got a grip on, and we ought to make use of it. We ought to be flexible and design a zone that works. I’m not saying lose control. Environmental Impact Statements and the final plan is where you really have your controls. So keep that, but zone it so it can be mixed use. MR. WILD-Comment and thoughts about market forecast and saving for manufacturing. The whole idea for this zone is commercial or light industrial. It’s not, from what I’ve heard from the Town Board in the past, it’s not residential tax base. It’s something other. It’s tax base. MR. HUNSINGER-That’s right. 51 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. WILD-Vic and his team have the ability to build tax base now, and I think that’s important to do, and we need to respond to the marketplace. To reserve something for what might happen in the future, because we want manufacturing, I don’t believe makes the best sense. I believe if we have something that’s non-residential that’s adding to the tax base, that’s adding value to our community, I think we should jump on it and make it easy for our developers to do. That’s what we’ve talked about in the plan. At the same time, I wouldn’t worry about retail myself, personally, out there. It’s far away from everything else. There’s nothing else out there. So if there’s someone that’s concepting putting retail in there, on the basis that it’s going to be the engine, so to speak, of some other high tech industry, they might know better than we, in terms of what the market is and how this place might grow. I mean, they’re the ones taking the financial risk to do that, and you can bet that they have some. MR. MC NULTY-I guess I’m getting confused. It sounds to me like you guys are arguing that we should rezone this to let them do whatever the hell they want. MR. BRANDT-No. MR. MC NULTY-Okay. Then Planned Unit Development says they specify what they’re going to do. MR. BRANDT-Planned Unit Development means rezoning. It means they’ve got to come through a whole process to rezone. That was a Planned Unit Development 16 years ago or more and nothing’s happened. I owned one of those two. If market forces aren’t with you, you’ve got nothing. So then you’ve got to go back through it again. Create a zone that allows mixed use, with site plan review, that when they have a user and they have a plan, they have to come to the Planning Board for their approval. At that point, you’ve got to do a full Environmental Impact Statement. You do it once for the user, not for something that might happen. MR. MACRI-Obviously, if this was a municipality, they could do it, too, but we’re not a municipality, and we’re willing to spend money to build it to make this property attractive to private users, and what we’re saying is we want to make it as attractive as possible. There’s nobody else that has this concept. This is a large tract of land. It’s continuous. MR. CATALANO-Your specific request of the Board, Town Board today is what? MR. HUNSINGER-Yes, that’s what I was going to ask. MR. CATALANO-That we rezone the front 40 acres commercial? MR. MACRI-I think we have to have the flexibility if this becomes a mixed use development, obviously we would prefer to put the commercial along Quaker Road because it would have the access, but if for some reason the user flips that, we could do that. MR. STROUGH-How many total acres are we talking about? I forgot. You told me but? MR. MACRI-133 total acres, the whole parcel we are proposing 40 some odd acres of mixed commercial service facilities. MR. STROUGH-All right. So 40% would be mixed commercial, 60% would be light industrial and that’s kind of, I mean, it’s not written in stone, but the kind of concept written into a PUD. You’ve got to stay within your percentages but you can move things around and shift things around to meet your customer’s needs and market needs. MR. MACRI-That’s why I’m saying don’t pigeon hole us just back here. Let the market. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes, I think, if I could kind of summarize the discussion and hopefully maybe we can wrap it up. What I’m hearing, I think, from the whole Committee, is that people are willing to be flexible, and now it’s just a question of, well, do we do it through like a PUD type vehicle or a mixed use zone vehicle, and I guess maybe we can leave it at that this evening and look at some draft language to deal with it either way, perhaps. Does that make sense? MR. CATALANO-Yes. I also think you take another look at the Comprehensive Plan, the draft that the Committee has approved to this point and see what would work best in the overall policy statements. 52 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. BAKER-Well, that’s a point I’d like to comment on. The skill of the commercial development that’s being proposed by Mr. Macri is a substantial departure from the vision of the Quaker Road East neighborhood that’s in the current draft of the Comprehensive Plan, and this Committee needs to understand and the Town Board needs to understand that as well. So the Comprehensive Plan, that section of the Comprehensive Plan would probably have to be substantially changed, in order to accommodate either a PUD type concept or a mixed use type concept, as Mr. Macri’s proposed. I just want to be sure everybody’s clear on that. MR. STROUGH-But I know, at the same time, Stu, the Comprehensive, the proposed Comprehensive Land Use Plan also, in general terms, is kind of looking at the south, I’ll call it southeast to be more accurate, maybe it’s called South Queensbury, is also looking to re-develop South Queensbury, allow multiple story buildings because it has the infrastructure there, and it refers to the infrastructure. I think, the way I saw and read the community input stuff, that this was part of the South Queensbury area that was being referred to that was looking for re-development. MR. BAKER-Well, my concern would be primarily that if we’re going to change the zoning there substantially from the current proposal that it be consistent with the Comprehensive Plan. If it’s not consistent with the language in the Comprehensive Plan, it could be subject to a successful Article 78. That’s my bottom line concern. DR. HOFFMAN-And I personally would have no problem changing the Comprehensive Plan because I don’t think the Quake Road East works the way it’s designed in the Comprehensive Plan anyway. MR. HOMSY-You should know it’s up to the Town Board to change the Plan. This Committee is beyond changing the Plan. Just so you understand that. MR. HUNSINGER-We already passed it on. MR. HOMSY-Yes, and your recommendation can be to change it, but they’re the ones who have to do the actual changing. MR. HUNSINGER-Is everyone comfortable with looking at some draft language before we? MR. MC NULTY-Yes. Okay. Great. Thank you. Is there anyone else here from the public that would like to make comments for the Committee this evening? Is there any other business before the Committee this evening? MR. WILD-I think we mentioned that. The question about the updated zoning from our comments. When are we going to see the changes to these drafts? MR. HOMSY-Once we get through the whole process, then we’ll give you the whole book with all the new changes and we’ll start there. We haven’t even finished the first draft yet. MR. WILD-Okay, and a question for Stu. The last meeting we had a request to go to the Town Board about notification of the Town landowners about the change in the Comprehensive Plan, and the zoning. MR. BAKER-Yes. They haven’t discussed that point yet. MR. WILD-Did you get the letter to them? MR. BAKER-No, but I’ll be doing that as part of materials and preparing for their meeting on Monday. MR. WILD-Thank you. MR. STROUGH-Did everybody get a copy of this, by the way? MR. WILD-Yes. MR. BAKER-That was sent via e-mail. 53 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) MR. BRANDT-I have one comment and it has to do with my own business. When the Town talks about having an Ordinance that regulates if you clear one acre or a quarter acre or two acres or something, and when you’re running a ski area where you have hundreds of acres of ski trails and the forest is encroaching on it all the time, and once in a while you’ve got to take a bulldozer and push some of it back, or go in and hand cut it all out and remove it, or the State of New York can walk in and say your lifts have trees grown that are too large, close to it, you’ve got to clear out another 50 feet on a 4,000 foot chairlift or two, what does it serve, what purpose is served by having to come to the Town for permission to do that? And what I’m really getting at is a frustration that’s as old as this zoning in Town that it never provided for a ski area, and a ski area is very different than probably any other business. Come and look at my electric meter tonight, you know, come and look at my water meter spin. It’s a very unusual business and it is part of the Town and it needs to have the ability to not be in conflict with the zoning department all the time, because you do get enemies. Some people think you’re vastly wealthy, and they think that you shouldn’t be, and so when they see somebody cutting a tree, they call the Zoning Administrator and say, that SOB is, and then there’s a big investigation, and the Zoning Administrators like to enforce the law, and so if they can get you hooked on it, you’re in an argument, and I don’t like that. I’ve never liked it. I don’t think it’s fair. I don’t think it’s smart, and I think it ought to be looked at. Thank you. MR. HUNSINGER-Anything else? I will send an e-mail reminder for everyone to get comments on Article 7, 11, 12, and the PO discussion to Stu for distribution. Our next th scheduled meeting is January 18, and if there’s nothing else, we shall adjourn. DR. HOFFMAN-Do we have a projected date for completion of our work? MR. HUNSINGER-Today. I had asked him already. ththth MR. BRANDT-January 18 we’re going to stay until we’re done. It may be 18, 19, and th 20. DR. HOFFMAN-I know it’s a massive amount of work. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes, maybe before we adjourn, what other sections of the chapter are you? MR. HOMSY-After this, after we go through this, the Committee will have seen the whole Code. MR. HUNSINGER-That’s what I thought. MR. HOMSY-With the exception of the Definitions, which we saved for the end. When we get the compiled entire Code, that will be part of it. Right? MR. CATALANO-We’re going to take all the comments that we do by each individual Article, we’re coordinating them and putting together the whole law. Then, once that is done, we’ll get it to you, and that’s when you want probably a month to look it over. MR. HOMSY-Yes, we’d skip a meeting. Skip a month. MR. HUNSINGER-Right. MR. CATALANO-And to go through a final review and coordination and make sure everything is okay. MR. HUNSINGER-Sure. MR. CATALANO-And so that will be done as soon as the Committee’s finished with their work. MR. HOMSY-Yes. So I guess we’ll have to see how far we get at the next meeting through these, and then we can decide whether we want to meet the next month or want us to spend a few weeks all together or finishing putting it all together and then getting it to you so you then have the next to look at the whole thing. So that might be how we take care of it at that point. MR. HUNSINGER-Okay. Great. Okay. Thank you everybody. On motion meeting was adjourned. 54 (Queensbury Planning/Ordinance Review Committee 12/06/06) RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED, Chris Hunsinger, Chairman 55