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2008.02.13(Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 QUEENSBURY PLANNING BOARD MEETING SPECIAL MEETING FEBRUARY 13, 2008 INDEX WORKSHOP SESSION DISCUSSION 1. THESE ARE NOT OFFICIALLY ADOPTED MINUTES AND ARE SUBJECT TO BOARD AND STAFF REVISIONS. REVISIONS WILL APPEAR ON THE FOLLOWING MONTHS MINUTES (IF ANY) AND WILL STATE SUCH APPROVAL OF SAID MINUTES. 0 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 QUEENSBURY PLANNING BOARD MEETING SPECIAL MEETING FEBRUARY 13, 2008 7:00 P.M. MEMBERS PRESENT CHRIS HUNSINGER, CHAIRMAN GRETCHEN STEFFAN, SECRETARY THOMAS SEGULJIC STEPHEN TRAVER THOMAS FORD TANYA BRUNO DONALD SIPP DONALD KREBS, ALTERNATE PAUL SCHONEWOLF, ALTERNATE SENIOR PLANNER-STUART BAKER GIS ADMINISTRATOR-GEORGE HILTON TOWN COUNSEL-MILLER, MANNIX, SCHACHNER, & HAFNER-MARK SCHACHNER MR. HUNSINGER-Goals and review of function, I think probably just about any general question that people want to cover we can include in that, but if there was a specific issue or item that members wanted to cover, I guess now would be the time to bring it up. Okay. If Gretchen doesn’t show up, we won’t be able to do the group dynamics process because that was something that she was going to lead. I did get an e-mail from her saying she wasn’t sure if she could make it this evening, asking, actually she was kind of asking if we were going to cancel it. It was about ten of five when I got the e-mail and I wrote back and said, well, you know, I’m leaving to go home from Albany, you know, I don’t know how bad it is up there, but, it’s kind of late to cancel the meeting at this point. So I’m sure that’s why she’s not here. So I had asked people to take a look at the By-laws. Were there any questions that members have, comments, discussion items? MR. TRAVER-I noticed, Chris, I know it’s going to be part of our discussion later in here, it’s discussed, because I had not looked at this recently, and I read it again today, and I did notice, on the issue of reviewing applications, that that’s discussed in here pretty specifically, which I didn’t recall before, but. MR. FORD-That’s something I want to discuss. MR. HUNSINGER-Well, we can certainly talk about it now. MR. TRAVER-That’s Section 7C, Section Seven is Application Review, and Subsection C is Complete Application, and that paragraph talks about the review process and who does it. I thought it was interesting, too, that, you know, we approve our own By-laws, which seems, that’s handy, you know, that’s great, but my experience has been with, you know, non-profits and so on, that there’s usually another body involved, and obviously this is my first Planning Board experience but, I mean, certainly we would recommend changes and so on, but that there would be an outside organization that would somehow approve or. MR. HUNSINGER-Well, I mean, we’re not required to have this document, and it was something, well, as you can see it was put together in 2001, so it’s really, it’s almost like an internal guide. MR. TRAVER-A tool. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes. MR. SCHACHNER-It really is only a guide. They don’t have the force of law either. MR. TRAVER-Yes. MR. SCHACHNER-There is no outside body. They’re not required by law and they don’t have the force of law. They’re just guidelines, basically. In this context, the Planning Board By-laws is nothing more than really your internal guideline. 1 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 MR. HUNSINGER-Sort of a general discussion that we were having, Mark, before you arrived was we all received the FOIL request, you know, about e-mails and correspondence and stuff. MR. SCHACHNER-No, I don’t know. MR. HUNSINGER-You haven’t seen it? MR. SCHACHNER-No. MR. HUNSINGER-Okay, from Mr. Lapper. MR. TRAVER-I actually have a copy of it, I think, here, if you want to look at it. MR. HUNSINGER-And the question that came up, you know, was, well, you know, any e-mail correspondence is, you know, my personal e-mail, I’m not saying I said this, but is my personal e-mail, you know, and is it subject to the FOIL request, and I said I thought it was. MR. SCHACHNER-It depends on what you mean by personal. It makes no difference what e-mail address is utilized. Some communications in here in this broad description, general description, might be subject to the Freedom of Information Law. A bunch would probably, could be withheld on the basis of being what’s called, inter or in this case intra, well, both, interagency or intraagency communications. There’s a Freedom of Information Law. I hadn’t seen this before, but you don’t ever want to leave home without your Freedom of Information Law. So I can tell you the exact language. There’s an exemption, under the Freedom of Information Law, that reads something like inter or intra agency materials, and then it says which are not, which means that things after the which are not are things that are not exempt. Those are largely, it says something like statistical and factual tabulations of data. It’s usually numbers type stuff, and so most of the things being asked for here would likely be, could be withheld on the basis of them being intra or, both intra and interagency materials. However, whether something is subject to disclosure under FOIL or not has nothing whatsoever to do with which e-mail address is utilized. As you know, I think you know, I am of the strong belief, as is the New York State Committee on Open Government, that personal e-mails should not be released to the public because you’re entitled to have your life, basically, but, nonetheless, if somebody sends you something, like for example, a comment from the public, which I think this is, you know, members of the public, any communications to or from, either direction, members of the public that are sent to you about a Planning Board matter, no matter how they’re sent, although it’s not appropriate for members of the public to send them to you on your private, personal e-mails, or at your personal residence, as Tom just said happened to him, they’re still subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Law. If they come by carrier pigeon, Federal Express, overnight delivery, or any which way, they’re subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Law. MR. SIPP-How about telephone? MR. SCHACHNER-Well, telephone, the Freedom of Information Law deals with documents. A telephone conversation is not a document. That raises a separate issue, which is if, people should not be calling you, but if they do, that’s something that should be disclosed at the next meeting and disclosed to Staff prior to the next meeting, I got a call from so and so. You should do your very best to duck such telephone calls. In other words, without being rude, it’s actually very, very important for open government to not take a phone call from Mary Smith who’s calling about the Joe Blow application. Very, very important. MR. TRAVER-What about communications that are not specific to this application? MR. SCHACHNER-When you say this application, this particular request I believe references relative to the above mentioned project. So this FOIL request has to do with this project. MR. TRAVER-To Schermerhorn. MR. SCHACHNER-One of the exemptions is interagency or intra agency materials, as I said, so those are exempt. So that would be stuff among you, or from you to the Town Board, and when I say you too, it’s either direction, between you and the Town Board, 2 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 you and the ZBA, you and Staff, all that stuff is exempt. Stuff to the public not exempt and definitely subject to disclosure, no question about it, and that seems to be all the categories here. The things that are not exempt, even if they are intra or interagency, are statistical or factual evaluations or data, I remember that one pretty well, instructions to Staff that affect the public, and I’m not sure, I wouldn’t say there are any here, and final agency or policy determinations. That certainly makes sense, a final decision would be subject to FOIL. So I’m not sure, I mean, Darleen is very, very familiar with these provisions. She confers with us on a regular basis, and what has to happen, I don’t know, has Darleen processed this yet and asked you all for information, or no? MR. TRAVER-Well, yes, she sent us an e-mail. MR. HUNSINGER-She sent us an e-mail. MR. TRAVER-She sent us an e-mail basically stating that. MR. SCHACHNER-Right. So what you’re going to have to do is make sure that any communications from or to any of you and members of the public are disclosed. That’s vital, and that’s no matter how you receive them. MR. HUNSINGER-Okay. MR. FORD-To or from us. MR. HUNSINGER-Either direction, to members of the public. MR. FORD-To members of the public. MR. SCHACHNER-To or from members of the public, not among yourselves, and actually this question created an awkward situation that I wish, I wasn’t forewarned, not was I thinking as quickly as I would have liked, but, well, it doesn’t matter, it’s a public meeting. Never mind, no problem. I think a gentleman’s here from the public, right? You’re a member of the public? Okay. MR. HUNSINGER-So, just for example, the Part III draft that was distributed, that would not be something that would be subject to FOIL? MR. SCHACHNER-Subject to FOIL, correct. MR. HUNSINGER-So any, well, we were talking about this a little bit before, in terms of we had a similar request on the Golden Corral project, and I had mentioned to Darleen at the time that any e-mail I had included Staff. So if it was FOIL able, if it needed to be on the record, it already was. MR. SCHACHNER-Because it was a part of Staff’s records. MR. HUNSINGER-Right, exactly. MR. SCHACHNER-Good. MR. SIPP-How should I report this phone call, then? MR. SCHACHNER-You should report the phone call, is it about a particular project? Is it about a particular application? MR. SIPP-Yes, well, yes, and no, it was. MR. SCHACHNER-Well, a part of it’s yes. So I would make some note of it. Nothing detailed. Make some note of it and get it to Staff. So get it to Staff so the next time, either at the next Planning Board meeting or the next Planning Board meeting at which whatever application it’s about is considered, Staff has that information to report, that in addition to the things that were submitted through proper channels, there was a telephone call, and again, you shouldn’t receive these phone calls. I mean, you’re not supposed to these phone calls, and when somebody calls and says, hi, I’m Joe Smith, I’m calling about the X, Y Z project, your answer should be as politely as possible, I’m sorry, Mr. Smith, if you want to show up at a Planning Board meeting, feel free. If you want to send something to the Planning Board at Town Hall, feel free, but please don’t call me at home or at work or at anywhere else. I’m not supposed to discuss the project outside a public meeting 3 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 MR. SIPP-Well, I had a phone call back a while from one of the people on Gurney Lane, and I told her I could not discuss this matter. MR. SCHACHNER-Did it work. MR. SIPP-Well, she said all I wanted was for you to make it known in your neighborhood that this meeting was going to take place. MR. SCHACHNER-Not an appropriate communication. MR. SIPP-Now the one that was recent, which was two or three days ago, was a person I knew, we lived across the street from when we lived in Glens Falls, and she called to discuss Schermerhorn and other. MR. SCHACHNER-Right, and you should refrain from those discussions, and say, Ms. Smith, feel free to come to the Planning Board meeting and state whatever you want to state. MRS. BRUNO-It’s funny, a lot of people actually have the knowledge that they’re not supposed to be approaching you. I’ve had people approach me in the past, grocery store or whatever, well, I know that you’re probably not able, you know, and they precede their, you’re right, I’m not able to. MR. SCHACHNER-Well, it’s very important to cut people off as politely as possible, and not engage in those discussions, because when you engaged in those discussions, the public, the applicant, your fellow Board members, and anyone else has no knowledge of what’s transpiring. MR. SCHONEWOLF-What if somebody from the press asks a member of this Board a question? MR. SCHACHNER-My advice at all times is that no one should make any comments to the press about any pending matter, for sure. Our general advice is it’s usually best to have press contacts be funneled through Chairperson or Staff, and not have individual members commenting, even after an application be decided, but never should anyone make a comment on an application before an application is decided. MR. TRAVER-That’s in the By-Laws. MR. SCHACHNER-Well, whether it’s there or not. MR. KREBS-It’s just commonsense. MR. HUNSINGER-Okay. Thank you, Mark. Any other questions on FOIL or public comments? All right. Steve had a question on Page 15, Part 7C of our By-Laws. MR. TRAVER-Well, it really wasn’t so much a question as it was an observation. I noted one of the things in your e-mail that we were going to talk about, and I’m getting ahead of Staff functions, but, or maybe not, but I know that one of the things that you wanted to talk about was kind of the whole process of how the applications are taken care of and I know that we’ve had some discussions with regards to efforts to make the meetings more efficient. MR. HUNSINGER-Right. MR. TRAVER-That we’ve had some applications on the agenda that have ended up having some discussion when they were incomplete, and therefore we weren’t able to act on them and end up getting tabled and we’d have to hear them again, and that type of thing, and we had talked about, on at least one other occasion I can remember in another workshop we talked about, well, how can we, and we used to have a Board member who would go in and spend hours with Staff going over the applications and checking them to see that they were complete, and since one of our homework assignments was to go over the By-Laws and in preparation for the meeting, I just noted in there that there was a, you know, there was a reference to that process which talks, in here, if I can find it, 7 C. MR. FORD-All applications submitted will be checked against the plan review checklist and application review checklist by Community Development Department Planning Staff. 4 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 MR. TRAVER-By Planning Staff, and as I recall, and Staff can talk about this more, but I think that there was a concern that they might be taking some action that really was only appropriate for the Planning Board to do. MR. BAKER-Well, our concern is that we can look at the, you know, see that they’ve submitted all the information required in the application checklist or all the information that was required from a prior tabling resolution. We, as Staff, can’t make the judgment call as to whether that sufficiently meets the Planning Board’s expectation. That’s your call. So you may get an application that we’ve deemed complete and say, what they provided is ludicrous. That’s great. That is the realm of the Planning Board. That’s not the realm of Staff to make that judgment. MR. SCHACHNER-And I think the By-laws reflect that by use of the word preliminarily. Basically, the way I understand this is it’s a two step process if you will, but there’s an initial clearing by Staff to make sure that it’s preliminary complete, which I interpret, and I think Staff has done it this way very successfully, sufficiently complete to at least get on your agenda. Because obviously Staff receives lots and lots of submissions that are nowhere near complete enough. It’s a big waste of time and effort for you to put them on your agenda just to have the entire Board say, no, we don’t have the Site Plan, we don’t have the survey, we don’t have the this, we don’t have the that, while other people are being bumped off of agendas who perhaps have better, by which I mean more complete, better level of information level applications. So I think the way this is worded is appropriate, and the way it’s been implemented by Staff, correct me if I’m wrong, Staff but I’m pretty sure I’m not, is that you all do basically a preliminary completeness review, to make sure that it’s sufficiently complete to get on your agenda and not be a waste of your time and the applicant’s time and the public’s time. That’s not a formal deeming, what Stu’s saying, and he’s absolutely right, is that’s not a formal deeming of an application complete that cuts off the Board’s ability to request additional information, and in fact the Board often does request additional information and the Staff preliminary completeness determination is really only for the purpose of getting on an agenda, and it doesn’t start any legal review clocks, for example. There are review clocks that are started, at such time as you declare an application complete, open a public hearing, close a public hearing and the like. Staff’s initial determination of completeness it has nothing to do with any of that. MR. BAKER-And we make it very clear when we’re doing our pre-app meetings with the applicants that, just because we say the application is complete enough to get on the agenda does not prohibit you, as the Board, from asking for additional information. MR. SIPP-Like last month we got an application from the people on (lost words) off of Bay Road, and there was a hand drawn map, a hand drawn representation of the pond, no contours, and in fact on one map there was no even North. MR. TRAVER-Well, I think that’s another issue that Staff has raised, that sometimes you have applicants who’ll ask for waivers, you know, and then what are they supposed to do? MR. BAKER-If they ask for the waiver, we pass it along. Because they’ve addressed that item by asking for a waiver from it. MR. TRAVER-So that’s kind of a check off and then. MR. SCHACHNER-You all realize that Staff can’t grant waivers. MR. TRAVER-Right. MR. SIPP-Yes, but I think we’ve had ones especially with no contours on them, particularly around the lake, that it’s very difficult. MR. TRAVER-Or inadequate contours. MR. SIPP-Inadequate, yes. MR. TRAVER-Twenty foot versus two foot. MR. SIPP-So that this slows everything down. 5 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 MR. SEGULJIC-Yes, and I guess the one thing that would be helpful for me is just, because I think there’s some inconsistencies, we have inconsistency when we grant waivers, I think. If you guys and Staff could just, you know a list of waivers that are being requested, and I think you do a good job of that most of the time. I think, as a Board sometimes we forget that, I think especially like with landscaping. I think it comes up most of the time, just so we know we’re all on the same page. MR. BAKER-Yes. We usually try to make a point of that on our Staff Notes, of listing explicitly, here are waivers they’ve requested. A lot of times you practically have to search through the application to see what waivers are listed. Some will state it right in a cover letter. Others will make notations, you know, in the margins on the application sheet, but if responded, we will (lost words). MR. SEGULJIC-Yes, if you could just tell us in the notes that they’re requesting these waivers. MR. FORD-Okay. If this process is being followed, and you’re assuring us that it is, then why should it be necessary for a Planning Board member to go in and spend additional time reviewing material prior to coming to the Board? MR. SEGULJIC-Because they don’t see the gray areas that we get to look at, to see what we would like to see. Like, for example, someone submits a map without contours on it. They have the option to request where you can say, I don’t think so, we need the contours. MR. TRAVER-Even though that was typically done by one Board member. So they were kind of, kind of speaking for, just knowing, I guess, what the practice is of the Board, they would say, we’re going to need contours. MR. SEGULJIC-Yes, it’s not perfect, but we try and make it more efficient. I mean, we instituted the policy of one person would go in once per month, right? MR. HUNSINGER-Right, and you’re next. MR. SEGULJIC-I’m next. MR. HUNSINGER-But it’s for the March agenda. MR. SEGULJIC-I mean, am I correct that we can go in there, and we’re not speaking for the Board. We have a sense of what the Board is looking for, because I get the sense that the Board would like to see lighting plans, some lighting information. MR. SCHACHNER-I think that’s particularly well put, though, the way Tom just said that, and I think it’s very important at such meetings, to make sure that everyone understands that you’re not speaking for the Board, that, just the way you put it, I thought that was very good, that it’s your sense that the Board is going to likely want to see such and such, so we’d like, you know, we’re going to request that. MR. HUNSINGER-In fact, there’s a project coming before us in February that the Board may find to be actually incomplete, but, when I sat down with Staff and went through the review, you know, Staff had said, well, you know, it passes the sort of threshold test, but we’re pretty sure you guys are going to, you know, that when it gets to the Board you’re going to ask for more information, and we talked about it for a few minutes, whether or not, you know, I felt we should still include it on the agenda and I said, well, you know, and it really fits exactly what we’re just discussing now. It leaves a lot to be desired, but. MR. BAKER-And as each of you come in to take your turn doing the completeness review with Staff, you’ll find us playing the role of the sort of Devil’s advocate as you look at this and say, this is ridiculous, and we’ll say, and we’ll be the ones that have the joyful task of saying, but it meets the minimum threshold of, you said provide X. They provided X. You may not like X, but that’s an X. MR. FORD-Are we saying what determines X? MR. BAKER-Sometimes you do and sometimes you don’t. MR. FORD-If we do, then maybe we need to change the definition of X. MR. TRAVER-Well, it depends on whether it’s been heard before. 6 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 MR. BAKER-And a lot depends on the specific wording of, if it’s an application that’s coming back for a second or umpteenth time, a lot depends on the wording that this Board provides in the tabling resolution. If a resolution is vague, generally speaking, Staff is going to, I guess make a determination to the benefit of the applicant. If it’s at all unclear, and it may have seemed perfectly clear to you as a Board what you were saying at that point in the evening when you’re making the resolution, but, three weeks down the road, when all we have is the minutes and the resolution, and the submittal, the new submittal from the applicant, it becomes a different scenario. MR. HUNSINGER-And that came up fairly recently. MR. BAKER-Yes, it did. I mean, we’ve got an application that’s on in February where the Board resolution, tabling resolution, said for the applicant to address neighbor concerns. The neighbors had expressed, and I listed them out for my own purposes, had listed on about a dozen concerns. Some of those were addressed in the submittal but certainly not all, but you didn’t say in the resolution these specific concerns. MR. SCHACHNER-Yes, that’s pretty nebulous. MR. HUNSINGER-But then to go one step further, I got an e-mail from Craig, or was it from you, Stu? MR. BAKER-From me. MR. HUNSINGER-From one of the neighbors who came in and then said, wrote a letter to the Town saying, well, this application isn’t complete, I don’t think the Planning Board should hear it. MR. BAKER-Yes, she was asking the Board to pull it from the agenda, and I told her, the Board won’t pull it from the agenda. It’s on the agenda, they need to act on it. They may say, what’s been provided is insufficient, but once it’s on the agenda, unless there’s a very good reason, it doesn’t get pulled. MR. HUNSINGER-And of course this was a project where we tabled it to a very specific date and said, you know, you need to submit X, Y, and Z. Well, they submitted X, Y, and maybe Z I think. MR. TRAVER-Right, according to who’s interpretation. MR. HUNSINGER-Right, but since we tabled the public hearing to a specific date and everything else, well, they’re going to be back on the agenda. MR. TRAVER-Well, I’ve learned, too, and of course this is still a learning experience for me, but I’ve learned a little issue, resolutions, because we had an application before us where we were discussing with the applicant, I had some, and some others, had some specific concerns and made what I thought was a request for some specific information, but it wasn’t in the resolution. So when it wasn’t provided, you know, I was dumbfounded. I was saying, but it’s in the, I went back and there it is in the minutes, you know, that, yes, we’ll provide that for you, Mr. Traver, but it wasn’t in the resolution. So that’s, I’m going to sharpen my pencil when it comes to the. MR. FORD-Yes, we need to tighten that up, and I see two different things that need to be tightened up here. I really would like to see some of this preliminary work on the checklist tightened up. MR. HILTON-I think that my experience with the resolutions, it’s absolutely vital to clearly spell out what you’re looking for. That way there it’s almost black and white, what you’re getting and what you asked for. MR. FORD-Agreed. The ball’s in our court on that, there’s no question about that, but some of the things I really sense that there are some applications that come before us, and have over the last year or so, that got to us in far too preliminary a fashion. That’s my interpretation. MR. HILTON-I guess I see a difference with, let’s say a new application, one that’s in the beginning of being processed. MR. FORD-And those are basically what I’m talking about. 7 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 MR. HILTON-Yes. MR. FORD-If one comes back to us and it’s incomplete and they haven’t complied, then we (lost words). MR. HILTON-But, I mean, for instance, if I’m understanding what you’re saying, you know, let’s take, for instance, my favorite example of landscaping. This Board could tighten up the requirements for a landscaping plan and say that absolutely you have to have, I don’t know, a minimum of ten trees on the street or whatever, and that’s our requirement. Well, there’s still the waiver request, and so if you’re going to fall back to that, they can come in and put one tree on the plan and say I’m requesting a waiver from the other nine trees, and we’re going to put them before you, and then it’s up to you as a whole to take a look at that and, you know, apply the criteria. So I guess what I’m saying is unfortunately, you know, with something that’s been heard and you have a tabling resolution, and it’s going to be clearer, I guess, whether or not they’ve satisfied what you’re looking for, but with a new application, I think you’re still going to get those applications that you look at and say, that just doesn’t look complete. That’s just the nature of the waivers. MR. TRAVER-Well, you’re really talking about unresolved, not incomplete. In other words, that issue’s been addressed, but it can’t be resolved any further until it comes before us. MR. BAKER-That’s correct, because it’s the Board that has the authority to say we want to stick to the ten trees. The applicant has the right to say, I want a waiver from nine of those ten trees. All we can do is forward it to you and say, here’s the waiver request. MRS. BRUNO-I have a question. I know, from my own experience, how it was handled years ago with Craig when we applied for a variance, but, you know, especially with the decreased number of people that you’re working with down in the office, how far, or how much do you guys, how far are you able to get into it with an applicant at the pre- application meeting when the person, you know, is kind of saying this and that? Are you able to say, well, this is what’s required, but I think that the Board will probably, you know you might be able to offer more information? MR. BAKER-Absolutely. I mean, if it’s the type of project where we know the Board has been adamant about, well, we’ll go back to the street trees, for example, we will tell the applicant that, and they still have the right to request the waiver, but, you know, if we’re aware that the Board has a preference for, you know, not waiving that requirement, it’s only responsible and fair to the applicant for us to point that out, and we do. MR. SIPP-On the website James Cameron series, is that the New York State? MR. BAKER-James Coon. MR. SIPP-Coon. There is a Site Plan Review document, 31 pages, I looked at it this afternoon, and in the back of that, in the appendices, there are three difference checklists, one for a Site Plan for a single item, one for a subdivision, and one for apartment and condo. Three different checklists. It looked fairly simple. In other words, they say, they start simple. One says north arrow and contour lines, boundaries, deed, goes down through, and then each one, some of it repeats itself in each category, but I thought it was a very interesting list. I downloaded it and then the printer didn’t work too well. MR. HUNSINGER-Is that something you could e-mail to people? MR. BAKER-I can e-mail them. MR. SIPP-The whole thing is 31 pages. MR. BAKER-Yes. MR. SCHACHNER-Remember, those are all generic, and our own Subdivision Regulations, Site Plan Review, and all the rest of it have the detail right in them what’s supposed to be. MR. SIPP-It gives examples in there of different towns regulation, and how you can fit them in to the checklist. 8 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 MR. KREBS-I thought Don brought up a good point relative to when you get close to a body of water, you know, when you do a topographical map, you can’t go every 20 feet, 25 feet. It doesn’t make any sense. Could we just establish a rule of the Planning Board that when you’re within 75 feet of the body of water you have to have a more definable topographical map? MR. TRAVER-Well, one of the things that I was wondering, in going through this process of having one of us go in and do the review with Staff, I wonder if we could keep a little notebook or something in there, so that we could gradually accumulate kind of the gotcha things or the things that we picked up on or maybe just make a note of something we might want to recommend, so that at the end, we can have one of Don’s sort of a rough checklist that whoever’s doing it can go in and say, you know, can compare, in addition to the checklist that’s referenced in here, for the individual Planning Board member to go in and say, you know, here are the things that we want to keep an eye out for. MR. SIPP-I think this one came off of some State publication some time in 2004, which gives you Site Plan Review criteria, and then it goes into more depth as you go along. MR. FORD-Pick up on what Don and Steve had referenced. MR. HUNSINGER-If I could just sort of, Tom, we’re getting off topic. I mean, this is good discussion, but I don’t know if we want to try to stick to the agenda. MR. SEGULJIC-Which would be By-Laws, I assume. MR. HUNSINGER-Well, we’re on By-Laws right now. Yes, we kind of got off the By-Law discussion. I’ll leave it up to the Board. MRS. BRUNO-Isn’t By-Laws, we basically said they’re guidelines and that’s what we’re working on right now are guidelines for the Board to? MR. FORD-I would just make this final point. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes, go ahead. MR. FORD-And if you want to move on, okay. Referencing, or what Don and Steve have referenced, I think the next step to go beyond that would be, if there’s some consistency there, then we take some action, and take some steps, so that we don’t keep encountering exactly the same thing. If there’s some way of tightening this application review process, then I think we ought to be taking those steps. MR. TRAVER-It would be helpful for the applicant, too, because, you know, they’re paying for an attorney or possibly an engineer to come and spend the evening waiting to appear, and if we can tighten that up and it means a postponement or something, then, you know, they’ll probably, and there aren’t that many professionals in the community that are representing the applicant. So it would become advantageous for them to kind of pick up on. MR. SEGULJIC-Right, but the problem comes in when you have the guy coming in who doesn’t have a lot of money and he’s trying to do something. That’s where it becomes a problem. MR. TRAVER-That whole circular argument, we got into that one application where they wanted to, they had a 20 year old stormwater drain system that we didn’t know where it was, and, yes it’s been there and I’ve got 12 things, but we need to see where it is, no, but I know where it is, and it went on for, you know. MR. HUNSINGER-Two meetings. MR. TRAVER-Yes. MR. HUNSINGER-Okay. Any other questions or comments on the By-Laws? MRS. STEFFAN-I think it’s important that there’s some role delineation. We did get into tabling resolutions a little bit, and, you know, I’ve been Secretary of the Planning Board for about a year, and I’m an avid note taker, and so I think we’ve kind of evolved into the place that I’m making a lot of the resolutions. It wasn’t always that way. A lot of the 9 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 other Planning Board members would regularly make resolutions, and I think that that would be a good idea. Something, certainly, to consider going forward. When I’m making resolutions, it’s difficult for me, because I feel like I’m wearing a couple of hats, because I am taking copious notes, which is part of my normal process, weighing and considering information, but the other part, I’m trying to participate and weigh and consider information and be a participating member. So sometimes I feel a little handicapped in that regard. So it would be very helpful if we’re trying to make our resolutions better and more productive and instructive for the Staff, if there’s an issue that we feel strongly about on an application, maybe each one of us should be making notes, so that when we do get to the tabling resolution, regardless of who’s making it, I mean, because the Staff is providing the outline for, you know, the boilerplate that needs to be included, but I think each one of us should be making notes, so that if there are things we want to include, conditions, that we need to be specific on what they are, because, other than that, I’m, you know, I’m trying to take the broad direction that this happening during conversation and put it into, you know, some kind of a condition, and then we finally wrap up an application, and we are spending a lot of time on every application, then we’re probably not being as specific as we could be. MR. SEGULJIC-I just have one other quick question. This is to Staff. When we do resolutions, and landscaping, for example, is it adequate to say that we will, we’re tabling this application for a plan that includes landscaping in accordance with 1, whatever, whatever, whatever? MR. BAKER-In one of the Sections of the Code that you’re citing, it explicitly mandates, and isn’t permissive. If there’s a may listed in there, that means it’s an optional thing, and the discretion as to whether it’s required or not rests with the Board. If it says shall, that’s very easy for Staff to say, we can’t put this on the agenda. MR. SEGULJIC-So it’s better for us to do our interpretation of the Code, where, for example, the Code might say one tree for every 250 square feet, then we could say, and one tree for every 250 square feet along road frontage. MR. TRAVER-It should be in the resolution. MR. BAKER-It should be included in the resolution. MR. SEGULJIC-One tree per whatever parking lot space. So have our interpretation of that Code eliminate the mays and shalls and clarify. MR. BAKER-Yes. It’s not necessarily an interpretation. The Code, especially Site Plan Review, gives the authority for you to be subjective on certain elements such as landscaping with each application. So it’s not as much an interpretation of the Code as much as it is your preference for this particular project. MR. SEGULJIC-Should we, you know, for a while there we were getting down to the level of specifying a particular tree. The problem I always had was, you know, trees are evergreens and deciduous, that’s all I know. I mean, can we say a, is it okay if we say a fruit tree? MR. SIPP-We have. MR. BAKER-You have done that. That’s fine. MR. SEGULJIC-Is that clear enough? MR. BAKER-That’s clear enough, yes. We can certainly look at the plan. MR. SEGULJIC-So we don’t have to get down to a level of the particular species. MR. BAKER-The problem becomes where you say in the resolution, we want a fruit tree at the northwest corner, and they submit a plan with a crabapple tree, and at the next meeting you throw up your hands and say, we hate crabapple. Here we are, you know, the applicants are giving us dirty looks because we said, yes, it’s a fruit tree. MR. SEGULJIC-I wouldn’t know the difference. MR. TRAVER-Subjectivity at some point. 10 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 MR. BAKER-So in that instance, if there’s a particular tree, if you want it to be a pear tree or whatever, and not crabapple, state so. MR. SCHACHNER-Although remember you also have to tread a little carefully. I’m not sure you have the legal authority to say pear tree versus apple tree. I mean, a fruit tree flowering, deciduous, something like that, that’s reasonable. MR. SIPP-Yes. Even discouraging certain types. MR. SCHACHNER-Right, and that’s fine. You can encourage and discourage. There is no limitation to your encouragement and discouragement. There probably is a legal limitation to the actual species. MR. SEGULJIC-Okay. MR. SCHONEWOLF-Is it the Planning Board’s authority or is it just the Code? Because I’ve seen this happen before. Landscaping’s always a big problem, if you get down to it, and especially let’s say if something’s going to get approved right now, okay, and the guy says I’ll do the landscaping in the Spring, and he never does it. I don’t know whether it’s our authority, but I’ve seen some towns make him put an escrow account, $5,000, $10,000, $30,000, depending on the size of the project. He has to put that money in escrow. He doesn’t get it back until. MR. HUNSINGER-Site Plan’s done. MR. SCHONEWOLF-Right, the Site Plan’s done and the Staff approves it. MR. TRAVER-You’d have to have probably some fairly good reason to do that. Wouldn’t that be considered undue hardship to do that, unless we had some? MR. SCHACHNER-And the authority of the Code, I don’t remember whether you have the authority or not, but remember for most, one of the other leverage points with that sort of thing is, correct me if I’m wrong, Staff, but most of not all uses will ultimately require some sort of Certificate of Occupancy or the like, and you definitely have the authority to just say no Certificate of Occupancy shall be issued until and unless. MR. KREBS-That’s what it usually rides on. You don’t get the CO until you. MR. SCHACHNER-Right. That’s what I’m saying. That’s the other leverage point you have. MR. HUNSINGER-Okay. Anything else in the By-Laws before we move on? MR. FORD-I was ill and out for a couple of the meetings. Did we follow B under Officers Organization, Page Two? MR. HUNSINGER-Yes. MR. FORD-One of the things I wanted to mention is it was good to review this today, Chris, and that is something that you might want to consider, relative to responsibility of the officers, C, that’s 2 C, appointing of committees and a chairperson thereof. This might be something for us to consider as we come up against some issues that we would like have some in-depth investigation on, and reporting back to the Board. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes, and, you know, the times that we have done that in the past, you know, that I’m aware of, were, you know, maybe there was a specific study going on, for example, a Meadowbrook Road drainage study that was recently done, you know, something like that, you know, the Board might benefit from a committee, but the big thing that’s happened during my tenure was the Planning Ordinance Review Committee. That’s where the, you know, the Chairman, and that’s how I got to be on it, because the Chairman said, gee, Chris, you haven’t been on a subcommittee since you’ve been on the Planning Board. MRS. STEFFAN-I think the Sign Ordinance is something that we’ve talked about for a long time and, you know, it’s not, you know, it’s an issue that, there is a Sign Ordinance, but sign height and the kinds of signs have been issues that keep coming up and so that may be, you know, a topic for a subcommittee. 11 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 MR. FORD-That’s what I’m referring to, something like that. Not another PORC Committee. MR. SIPP-I think also on these lake projects, there’s a need to study them through a subcommittee or a committee to bring to the full Board their recommendation, rather than try to hash it out. MR. SCHACHNER-If you’re talk about actual projects, you’re going to run into some difficulty with that, because what I heard you to be talking about with these committees was things like, generic things that apply, but were not project specific. I’m going to say, as counsel, we strongly, strongly recommend against committee review of specific applications. That’s inappropriate. MR. TRAVER-What about categories? MR. SCHACHNER-Yes, that’s fine. Anything generic is fine. Like you want to have a committee that is going to say. MR. TRAVER-CEA, applications within the CEA? MR. SCHACHNER-Specific applications? Strong recommendation, not appropriate. Anything generic. What I thought you meant was, using your example, appoint a committee to say, to develop guidelines, for example, for the additional information we want for projects that are located within CEA’s, totally appropriate, generic, not application specific, but if what you meant was, have a committee that reviews all the applications that are submitted that are in CEA’s, not appropriate. MR. TRAVER-Even if it’s not, they wouldn’t be reviewing it instead of the full Board. MR. SCHACHNER-Not appropriate. MR. TRAVER-Not appropriate. MR. SCHACHNER-No, for the same reason, because that means Planning Board members are reviewing an application together, outside of the presence of the public, the applicant, people who care, other members, etc., etc. MRS. STEFFAN-I just have a handout that I wanted to share with everybody. When I went to the Planning Federation Conference, two weeks ago now, Mark put on a presentation. MR. SCHACHNER-Not the Planning Federation Conference, the Saratoga County Planning and Zoning Conference. MRS. STEFFAN-I’m sorry, yes. I stand corrected, but I went to a presentation put on by Mark, which I thought was very good, about the ethical considerations and proper planning and zoning decision making, and I’m sorry that I have notes on this, but I know I enjoyed the seminar and I did take some notes, but I thought I should share it because it’s important. Sometimes we either forget or need to be reminded or need to understand in the first place, you know, some of our roles and responsibilities as Planning Board members, and I certainly thought that this outline was very helpful in providing standards of comportment in our day to day activities and some reminders and things that we need to know. MR. SCHACHNER-I can say that I did not know Gretchen was going to be distributing those. MRS. STEFFAN-I did enjoy the seminar very much. I thought it was very instructive, and I thought it could be instructive for other Planning Board members. Mark just talked about not targeting a special project when we’re talking about, you know, changing guidelines. Several times in conversation during our Planning Board deliberations we will bring up the name of a specific project, compare a current applicant to. That’s the kind of thing that, in my mind, is inappropriate, and we should talk about, you know, a recent project, but not necessarily name names of projects we liked, didn’t like. MR. SCHACHNER-For what it’s worth, I don’t have any problem, as long as it’s an application that’s already been decided, I respectfully disagree with that concern. In other words, if you want to say, and I have heard Board members do this repeatedly, and I think it’s not at all inappropriate, well, you know, when we previously considered the 12 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 blank application, we asked them to do such and such and such and such, and it worked out beautifully, and it’s not going to be a meaningful comment unless you say what application we’re talking about. So, for example, as long as it’s an application that’s been decided, I don’t have any problem with that at all. I think you can say, and I’ve heard the Board members say this from time to time, when we previously reviewed the Wal-Mart application, we asked for the following information, and we imposed the following conditions, and here’s an applicant, I don’t have any problem with that. MRS. STEFFAN-Well, good, thank you for the correction, because there have been, there is a project on the lake specifically that has not been decided, that’s name comes up from time to time in the public hearing, and so that’s a really good example. We should be not using current applications that have not been decided. MR. SCHACHNER-I do think that’s right. MRS. STEFFAN-So that’s a good standard, I think, to set, but I hope you’ll find this helpful. I found it very helpful. MR. TRAVER-Thank you very much. MR. HUNSINGER-Thanks, Gretchen. I had already informed everyone, is there anything else under the By-Laws? Before you had got here, Gretchen, I had already informed the Board that you were going to lead us in a group dynamics process. So if you weren’t here, we weren’t going to do it, but since you are here. MRS. STEFFAN-Okay. I’ll walk you through this and I’ll try to do it quickly. The group dynamics process, I asked Chris, we talked a little bit about putting this on the agenda, because I think that it’s an important process. Any time a group gets together, two or more people, they go through this process, it’s an inevitable human process, and the four step process (lost words). In an ideal situation, in an ideal world, every organization will form around a purpose, and ideally a clearly communicated purpose. Actually I’ll come back to what happens when an organization doesn’t have a clearly defined purpose. We’ve just had a brief discussion about By-Laws, and so, you know, some of the reason why the Planning Board exists is focused right here on purpose. If an organization doesn’t have a clearly defined purpose, they could actually go off in different directions and not end up accomplishing the thing they started out to in the first place, but I’ll come back to that. The second part of the group dynamics process is called the storming process, and a lot of people believe, or relate that to brainstorming, but that’s not what happens at all. Storming, quote positioning, it’s often defined in the chicken barnyard as pecking order, where people fit in, how they interact with one another. In a group process setting, with human beings often, you know, it is a pecking order, but who speaks first, who doesn’t speak at all, who speaks loudest, who speaks most often, who sits next to the boss, who wouldn’t be caught dead sitting next to the boss, all those kinds of things are classic positioning behaviors that we see in any organization. The next part of the group dynamics process is the norming phase, and as an organizational development consultant, I spend a lot of my time helping organizations put some of these things in place, so that we can prevent people from spending too much time here. This is an inevitable human process. We go through this, and there will be storming every time you get groups of people together. However, one of the ways we can shorten the duration of the storming process is to make sure that we have roles appropriately defined. We just went through the By-Laws. It identifies role definitions for us there, some rules of engagement. Some of those are defined in our Policies and Procedures for the Planning Board, but also the government does some of that for us. There are regulations that actually govern some of the things that we do, how we discuss things at public hearings and things like that. Those are some of the examples of rules that we have in place. Responsibilities defined, lots of times that goes with goals. Our By-Laws also indentify some of our responsibilities as Planning Board members. One of the reasons why I thought it was very important to hand out the outline from Mark’s presentation is that, you know, there are some points of consideration for each Planning Board member in there about how we comport ourselves, you know, how we behave, how we are represented. A lot of us just see ourselves as just volunteers, you know, we’re serving on the Planning Board, and we’re just kids who want to do good things, except for we don’t realize that we are an executive of the Town, because we are speaking for, we are making decisions on behalf of the Town. We’re not elected officials. We are appointed, and we have different responsibilities that other people who do not have appointed roles like ourselves. The last part of the process is perform, and that’s where we actually accomplish work, you know, in our terms for the Planning Board, you know, what do we do? We make decisions on applications, you know, we put tabling motions in place, we let folks know what they have to do in order to complete a project, 13 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 to get approval, you know, to reach their own goal. I numbered these because in a perfect world, one equals four, and if the group is functioning properly, the reason why we get together and the work that we do eventually gets to what we set out to do, so we accomplish our goal, and that’s if, you know, an applicant goes through a process and actually gets their approval, and we’ve helped them through the process, we’ve all done good work and we’ve accomplished our goal, but often what happens is one doesn’t equal four, and a group gets stuck somewhere in this process. In my world, you know, in the human resource world, in the organizational development world, we actually look at this and turn it upside down, and if an organization is stuck or there’s some dysfunction going on, they’re not accomplishing work, they may be accomplishing some things, but they’re not accomplishing everything they set out to. We use this as a diagnostic, and so we go through, and is the organization accomplishing work? Well, some, but not all, they’re not being as productive as they could be. They’re not being successful or profitable, whatever it happens to be, so then we go, okay, well, do they have norms in place, is the org chart there, do they have job descriptions? Is the organization, are roles really clearly defined? And so if we have defined them, is that what they really mean, or is there some kind of substructure that’s at play? Do we have rules of engagement in place? And rules of engagement can be lots of different things. It can be, you know, a belief system, it can be values in your organization, but it can also be, you know, Roberts Rules of Order. I mean, that’s some of the standards that we use in the Planning Board. Rules of Engagement, you know, does Gretchen do all the motions? Well, you know, we could make that decision or we could decide as a group that we’re going to have different norms in place and we’ll rotate and actually we’re going to talk about some other things on the agenda that may help us put some other norms in place. An organization spends time here because we want people to know when they engage in a process, you know, when they’re doing their job, that they know exactly what the expectations are so that they can execute and feel good about the work that they’re doing, and I have to admit, one of the reasons why I wanted to share this process is that sometimes when we get done with the Planning Board meeting or a function or whatever, I don’t feel terribly good about what we’ve accomplished, and so, you know, that’s one of the reasons why I specifically wanted to talk a little bit about this process and why I think this meeting is so important because we can spend a little time here so that we can eliminate some of the frustration I know that I’m feeling, but I sense that some of the other folks are feeling in the organization. Okay. If we go through the norming process and we say, okay, well, the organization’s got roles, rules and responsibilities that are clearly defined. What’s wrong next? And so we go back up the chart and identify, you know, are folks stuck in the storming process? Are people getting along? Is there fighting? Is there sniping, backstabbing? MR. KREBS-The one interesting thing about this is that we have a larger group than our own group. We have the public there. One of my questions is, to make us more efficient, is can we limit the amount of time we spend in public comment? For example, on the Schermerhorn project, there have been people who have gotten up, meeting after meeting, basically said exactly the same thing, it’s already in the record, their position, but we let them speak again and again and say the same thing. Is there a way that we could limit that to one hour of public comment or, I mean, we’re going to be here until 12:30 at night, 1:30 at night. I don’t know, Mark, can we? MR. SCHACHNER-Absolutely. The legal answer is easy. The legal answer is the Board, and this is not specific to a Planning Board. It’s any Board that accepts public comments at public hearings. You have certain instances, many, where you’re required to conduct public hearings, and the law’s very clear, you’re allowed to impose what the law calls reasonable rules on your public hearings. Just by way of example, the Town Board had a public hearing on something of some controversy Monday night, and the Town Board actually had a signup sheet for that matter. The Town Board had in its mind that they wanted to spend approximately up to about an hour and a half hearing public comment on this particular matter. They felt that was appropriate given their agenda for other matters. About 25 or so people signed up. So they did the rough math and said let’s give people three minutes each, and it worked quite well. It worked quite smoothly. You absolutely have the right to limit, so long as your rules, and your current Chairman is terrific about this consistency thing, which is the only legal thing that I have to get hung up on, so long as whatever you decide you apply uniformly, no matter who it is that’s making the comments, you can limit, and you can limit by time. You can limit by number of times. In other words, you can say we’re only going to allow each person to speak one. That doesn’t have to be once per night either, by the way. In other words, you can say, you can’t say once over different matters. I mean, each public hearing has to be treated as something separately, as its own entity, but you can say we’re going to allow each person to speak no more than twice in the context of the public hearing for this 14 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 project. You can say we’re going to allow up to X amount of minutes. Any reasonable guidelines are legally allowed to be imposed. MRS. BRUNO-Those need to be clarified at the beginning of a project, though. MR. SCHACHNER-No, not necessarily. MR. TRAVER-Before the public hearing, though, right? MR. SCHACHNER-It’s best to do so, but sometimes you don’t know. For example, you can open a public hearing and have, you know, and have it turn out, without you knowing in advance, remember, you don’t really know in advance. You don’t have a way of knowing in advance for sure how many people are going to speak. Once in a while you get a packed crowd, but only five people want to speak, and you may think you know, but I can tell you you don’t know, no criticism intended, you don’t have a way of knowing for sure. You can certainly make educated guesses, and they’re more often right than not, but you don’t really know for sure what everyone’s there for. Sometimes we’re fooled by that. I’ve certainly been to meetings where not only myself but other, at least a majority of the Planning Board said, everyone’s, the big crowd’s here for Application A, and it turned out, you know what, they were here for Application C. Not often, but it happens, so, no, the answer is, well, certainly it’s best, I mean, it’s easiest, certainly best understood by the public, to know in advance, and sometimes you will know in advance, but it’s not required to know in advance. If you get bogged down and all of a sudden you see that, you know what it’s midnight, and we’ve been at this for an hour, you can say, we’re only going to allow fifteen more minutes of public hearing on this, and you can do it however you want. The only thing that you can’t do, you cannot not allow someone to have at least one shot. That you cannot do. MR. TRAVER-So, using Don’s example, if we were to say, John Doe can speak twice on this application, and we have a signup sheet. He signs up and he stands up and he does his three minutes or five minutes, whatever the agenda allows, we retain that sheet, and then he comes in and he signs up again, and speaks again, raising the same issues, then it would not be necessary for us to allow his name to be on the sheet a third time? MR. SCHACHNER-Correct, if that’s your rule, nor do you have to have signup sheets, either. I mean, there doesn’t have to be that level of formality, either. That just happens to be one of the quote unquote reasonable, and it certainly is one, reasonable technique that the Town Board utilizes this Monday night. I was just using that as an example. If you want to decide that no one’s allowed to speak more than twice on any particular application or even on, or a particular application, that doesn’t mean you have to have a signup sheet. It’s easy enough to keep track. You’ll know if someone has spoken before. MRS. STEFFAN-This particular comment is a really good represent of what norms are. That is a norm, a signup sheet, three minutes, five minutes, and I know that that fluctuates from Town Board to Planning Board, and it really depends on the time. So that’s a norm that we could put in place, so that the public gets the opportunity to speak, which I think is absolutely vital, and then, you know, we put some parameters in place so that we’re not here forever. It’s the same thing we have had norms in place where we don’t accept information the night of a meeting. That’s gotten laxed, and that’s one of the issues I wanted to bring up, but those are norms, perfect examples. MR. SCHACHNER-I think it would be worth, Mark, maybe a comment on the requirements of public hearing for Planning Boards, because I think within our own group there’s different perceptions of the responsibilities that the Planning Board members have during a public hearing and after a public hearing. Because I often feel like, and it goes back to roles. After we hear a public hearing, we sort of take on this role of, well, our job here is to make sure that everybody in the room who commented on this application goes away happy. MR. SCHACHNER-And clearly not the case, legally. MR. HUNSINGER-I mean, legally, all we’re required to do is accept public comment, it’s really designed to help us in our deliberation. MR. SCHACHNER-Correct. MR. HUNSINGER-It’s not to answer a question that the public has. 15 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 MR. SCHACHNER-That’s very true, and I hadn’t really thought about that issue, but that’s absolutely correct, and in fact to the extent that you sometimes, you as a Board, I mean, sometimes say, you know, well, we’ll ask the applicant that, that’s fine if you’re asking the applicant that because you, as a Board, are interested in what the answer to the question is, but, and I’m not sure if this is what Chris is getting at or not, but you’re not really the advocate, or even a conduit, for the public to get questions answered, if they’re questions that you don’t, yourselves, have concerns about. MR. HUNSINGER-Right. MR. SCHACHNER-Really the purpose, I mean, the purpose, and if I’m straying off what you’re. MR. HUNSINGER-No, you’re hitting it right on. MR. SCHACHNER-Clearly no question under law. The purpose of the public hearing is for the public to add its comments and thoughts to you, for your deliberations. One of the difficult things, and Gretchen might have heard me say at the beginning of this particular talk, you know, I know a fair amount about these topics that I give what I call always technically correct legal advice, but I also try to say something, keep it practical and working in real life. One of the most difficult things about public hearing is that their purpose in law is for the public to make comments that add to the decision making process by giving additional information for you all to weigh as you consider applications. However, in real life, what do we hear, at least a third to a half of the time, by way of public comments, they’re not actually public comments, they’re questions, and that can be very frustrating and very difficult, because if they’re questions that you really don’t have, as Board members, or that you don’t care about, I don’t mean to sound callous, but they’re questions about things that you don’t have concerns about, then it’s actually a huge waste of time and it’s usually inefficient and it doesn’t promote good planning and zoning decision making and it’s not what the law contemplates, to insist that the applicant address the questions that the public has asked, if they’re questions that you don’t share the concern about. So I’m not sure if that’s what you’re talking about. MR. HUNSINGER-No, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. MR. SCHACHNER-So, and this happens, I mean, you know, I’m not going to use a real example. I’ll make up examples, but, you know, if you all, as a Board, you know, feel that there’s some, let’s say wetlands sensitivity in a particular project that is a single family residence, okay, and you’re concerned about wetland sensitivity, and some member of the public says, well, they’re going to have big parties at this house, and I happen to live on this street, and I think there’s going to be 50 new cars, you know, new car trips per hour because it’s a big partying family, and I think we need a traffic signal, ask them about their party habits, and blah, blah, blah. Unless you all share that concern, and it’s highly unlikely you would because I made up a fairly stupid example, which I pretty much always do. Sometimes on purpose, sometimes not, unless you all share that concern, it’s a waste, quite honestly, it’s a waste of time and effort for you, for the public, and for all of the other applicants sitting waiting their turn patiently to get their application heard, for you to then say, well, you know, applicant, Ms. Smith asked about your partying habits. We’d like you to address Ms. Smith’s question. If you don’t share the concern, I would suggest not doing that. MR. TRAVER-One of the things, for me, the public comment always seemed to be a way that we could get information about the character of the impact that we wouldn’t normally be aware of. MR. SCHACHNER-That’s an example of why there is the requirement of public comment, or public hearings, rather, because that’s a perfect sort of summation of why public hearings are required for most important planning, zoning and land use decisions because you can read something in an application, you can hear an applicant’s presentation, but unless you happen to know the neighborhood in question, there could be some impact that you’re not aware of. That’s exactly why these things call for public hearings, but I think the point Chris was making, or at least that I’m making, whether it was Chris or not, is that often when you hear public comments, they’re not public comments. They’re public questions, and often they’re, reasonably often, not all the time by any means, but often they are questions about things that really, either are not germane to the application or are not germane to your concerns about the application. The public person may feel very strongly and very sincerely that they care about their question, but I guess what I’m saying is it’s not really legally your role to be the advocate 16 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 for the public person in getting their question answered, if you don’t think the question is something that needs to be answered for your decision making. MR. HUNSINGER-I think the concept I want to get across is, again, I often see the Board either individually or collectively trying to take on the role of some sort of an arbitrary, you know, and a lot of times we’ll try to mediate, you know, I think a great example is, and I don’t think you were at the meeting, Mark, The Great Escape fence, where the neighbor of The Great Escape showed up and said, well, you know, if they put up this new fence that’s higher, it’s going to block my sign, and, you know, at first blush you say, well, this is information that, you know, we didn’t think of, either individually or collectively, and it’s good to know, and so, you know, we tabled the application and we asked the applicant to take into consideration the neighbor’s concerns, and then we all went out and looked at it again, and then came back. The Board felt, by virtue of its vote that evening, that what the applicant proposed to mitigate these concerns was reasonable, but of course the applicant was adamant that it wasn’t reasonable, and we kind of got stuck in the middle almost, I’m sorry, the neighbor. So, you know, we, as a Board, kind of took on this role of mediating, you know, between neighbors whether. MR. SCHACHNER-You can’t win. You can’t do that. MR. HUNSINGER-Exactly. MR. SCHACHNER-I don’t mean you can’t legally do that. What I mean is it won’t work. MR. HUNSINGER-Right, and I think that we often slip into that role because of the comments. I think it’s just human nature, based on what the neighbors might say. MR. TRAVER-You typically will say, when the applicant comes back to the table, you’ll say, well, do you have any comments that you would like to make in response to. MR. HUNSINGER-Right, and maybe we shouldn’t do that, you know, maybe we should only, you know. MR. TRAVER-One of the things that I find instructive about that, though, is that that tells you what the applicant recognizes as possible real issues. The things that they don’t comment on they generally see as nonsensical. MR. SCHACHNER-I think that’s a good practice, because (lost words) the applicant doesn’t respond to each and every thing, but it’s a new perspective. It gives the applicant’s view. Yes, I tend to agree. MR. TRAVER-If they repeat it, that tells me, maybe this is a real deal, or if they don’t repeat it. MRS. STEFFAN-I think that that’s what, in my opinion, that’s what public comment provides it’s just perspective, and so there are lots of times when there are many issues that come up that go unrecognized, not unrecognized, but the Planning Board doesn’t follow up on. If it’s an issue that really seems relevant and germane, then we usually have a line of questioning that follows that. MR. TRAVER-Right. MR. SCHACHNER-Yes, just don’t get hung up on needing to answer each and every thing that an applicant, I’m sorry, that a commenter asks about if you don’t feel it’s germane or important for your concern. That’s all I was saying. MR. TRAVER-And in a way, I can recall, for generically situations getting back to Don’s point, where we have attempted to try to explain or get the applicant to explain a concern that a member of the public might have, and ask the same question every time, even though, you know, we might be close to doing something that we might perceive or what I guess a normal person would perceive to be a reasonable accommodation, and yet the person will stand up and say, make the same complaint over and over again. MR. SCHACHNER-That’s what I meant when I said you can’t win. MR. TRAVER-Yes. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes. 17 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 MRS. STEFFAN-Well, it is a difficult position to be in, because, and, well, in sociology and psychology, if you have a very difficult decision, and you know when the room’s filled with people, that’s when you’re going to have a difficult decision to make. One of the best things that you can do is provide an opportunity to share information, and that’s why public comment is important. Because if people can’t feel like they have a say in a very difficult decision, then they’ll likely feel that the decision’s being inflicted on them, and so there’ll be a lot of controversy and outcry, and so I think in the past we have tried to, instinctively, tried to allow an opportunity for more public comment to help folks transition from that, you know, hell no, to, okay, let’s gather some more information so that we can change our minds and weigh and consider and then move forward in either direction. MR. TRAVER-And I wonder, you know, to the extent that we’re talking about all this, and it’s very instructive and very useful for us to be thinking about these things in sort of specific ways and how they help the meeting and how they apply to us, I wonder if it might be helpful to the public. I mean, is it, does it make sense to maybe have a handout, for example, that people could get, maybe on a PDF file on a website that says, you know, what is public comment, you know, what does the Planning Board use it. I mean, in very generic terms, but just generally, you know, what can you expect if you have a public comment? How is the Planning Board likely to act on it, and, you know, that kind of thing, so that they come in with reasonable, hopefully expectations of how they’re going to be received and what they’re likely to say and maybe that there might be a time limit, you know, that kind of thing. MRS. STEFFAN-I know it’s more work, but that certainly sounds reasonable. I mean, often when we’re getting public comment that’s adamantly opposed to something, there are often folks who don’t understand the process. I mean, before you got on the Planning Board, did you understand the process? No. Most folks who come in and have a very firm opinion on something don’t know that there’s a Zoning Code that exists and what it means. There’s a Comp Plan. They don’t understand any of that stuff. MR. TRAVER-Yes, or even the whole application process. MRS. STEFFAN-What is a public hearing, and how do I conduct myself appropriately, you know, Chris, in the last couple of months has had to use the word civility a couple of times and had to rain people in. So, again, that’s a standard of comportment that you assume everybody gets, but. MR. FORD-That could be a single page handout. MR. TRAVER-Expectations. What can I expect? What does the Planning Board expect of me, as someone wanting to make public comment, and in turn, what can I expect from the Planning Board? MR. SCHACHNER-You know, an example of a great thing that could be on something like that is I think many, many, I know, not I think, many, many, many members of the public who make comment, think that it’s really a question/answer session, where they get to question the applicant directly, and that’s, you know, I have never heard that suggestion before, but off the top of my head, I think it’s a great suggestion. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes. I think so, too. MR. SCHACHNER-One of the things that could be on that sheet is, you know, your opportunity to make a public comment is not your opportunity to, is not a question/answer, however it’s worded. MR. TRAVER-You could say, why does the Planning Board want, why do we have a public hearing, this is why? MR. SCHACHNER-Give people realistic expectations of what will and won’t happen. MR. HUNSINGER-Right. I often think that, you know, the public feels that if they get enough people to fill the room, that are against the project, that it’s an exercise in democracy, but it’s not an exercise in democracy. MR. SCHACHNER-Yes, and that’s something that the law, and cases are very, very clear about, it’s not a popularity contest. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes. 18 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 MR. KREBS-Sometimes they print those instructions, I’ve seen this twice now, where they, and they print it, and it’s on the back of the agenda. So when people pick up the agenda, it’s there. Someone gets sick of it after a while, but it tells them how to conduct themselves in a public hearing. MR. HUNSINGER-Think of a couple of meetings where, you know, someone has made a public comment says, and everyone who’s in favor, you know, who agrees will me will stand up or, you know, clap, and I always try to stop them. MRS. BRUNO-I think that’s a different thing than what Steve was talking about. I think that the behavior, I think of sports, you know, and what they give out to the parents at the beginning of the year, sign this, you’re not going to be shouting obscenities, you know, on the sidelines. I think that’s different than kind of giving an outline of what the Board does, and you see that even in the editorials, after you hear from, you know, you see things written by the public, public who wasn’t at a Planning Board meeting and really doesn’t know the procedure, and they’re making all these, you know, it’s always been kind of my belief that if you’re questioning something, try to get involved in it so that you know, you’re properly educated on the procedures and everything. MR. TRAVER-I mean, we have a Town Document section on the website. I mean, even if we could just do some PDF’s on what happens when an application, why do people put applications in to the Planning Department, you know, what is that all about. MR. HUNSINGER-Well, you know, there are some handouts, and I don’t know how many people have been downstairs, but the Town, the Staff has put together some really useful handouts that says, you know. MR. BAKER-Well, there were a series of white papers that were put together after the last major Zoning Code amendment in 2002. MR. HUNSINGER-I’m trying to think of some of the examples, you know, what do I need to put a shed in, a fence in, shed, garages. They’re really very good. MR. KREBS-What I like about Steve’s idea is you give that out as part of the agenda, and, on there you say, please do not duplicate information. If someone else has already presented this information, it isn’t, we’re not counting. MR. TRAVER-Yes, you’re being unfair to your neighbors who want to speak. MR. KREBS-We’re not counting how many people are saying the same thing. So if it’s already been said, your point is made. MR. TRAVER-Yes, and you’re potentially denying someone the opportunity to make their voice heard. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes, put it right at the bottom of the agenda, rules of the public hearing. MRS. STEFFAN-Well, again, what that does is it brings us right back to the norms, and what we’re doing is we’re putting norms or rules of engagement in place so that people can act appropriately. There is, normal human behavior is that folks want to do a good job. They want to do the right thing, and most folks want to be educated. They want to know how to, I want to use the word behave well, but I don’t think that that’s actually true, but folks want to do the right thing, and so if we can provide some structure, I think that that can be very helpful in channeling energy in the right direction. MR. TRAVER-Yes, it can be comforting, too, because some people become, I mean, we’ve seen people get very emotional and very fearful and in a sense that you alluded to before, that they’re not part of the process and it’s being imposed upon them, and if they have this, even if it is immediately before the meeting, it’s something straightforward that they can look at and feel as though there’s some structure there, that it’s not a random thing, that there really is, their concerns are being taken into account. MRS. STEFFAN-And again, those structures that we put in place here in the norming process can help us get through this much more quickly. If we go back, and I was talking a little earlier about this being a diagnostic tool. If we find out that, you know, we’re not accomplishing everything we want to, we’ve got some structures in place that seem to be appropriate. We’re not spending too much time here. The problem usually ends up right here, and I can tell you in my consulting practice over 90% of the time the problem is 19 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 right here, and that’s a syndrome, and we’ve nicknamed it multi-headed animal syndrome, because what happens if a group has more than one purpose, then it’s no longer a common purpose, and the example that we use is the multi-headed animal syndrome. If you think about a dog or a horse or whatever, they have one head that’s centrally located. The eyes are looking in one direction. Well, what happens if fluffy has that head, but then also has a head attached here with the eyes looking in another direction? What happens, that the people in the organization are actually pulling it apart because they’re trying to take the organization in different places. MR. TRAVER-It’s like a mission statement. MRS. STEFFAN-Absolutely, and that’s the context we usually put it into. If an organization has a vision or a mission statement, but they’re not living it or people have not internalized it. MR. TRAVER-Or they don’t know what it is. MRS. STEFFAN-And that these things, the roles, rules and responsibilities we’ve defined do not support the purpose, then we can become very dysfunctional and spend way too much time here. The reason I went through this process and why I thought it was important for our organizational meeting is that, you know, we have been through a great deal of change, and the title of this is a group dynamics process, and the very interesting thing, it does happen every time you get two or more people together, that any time you add or extract a member from a group, you will go through this process all over again, and so the situation we’re in right now, you know, we’ve been through a lot of changes over the last couple of years. I’ve been on the Planning Board for four years. We have two new alternates right now, and before that, I mean, Steve was an alternate, Tanya was an alternate, Don was an alternate, Tom was an alternate, and so over the last four years all that’s happened. Every time we add a person or change the order, that Chris is the Chairman this year, Bob was the Chairman last year, the year before that we had a couple of Chairmans, and so we went through this tumultuous process, and so what that does is it messes with this systematic process which can be very functional, and when we add or subtract members, it can become a very dysfunctional process. The most important thing we can do is to make sure that everybody is on the same page and we have a clearly communicated common purpose, why we are here, and some of the things I’ve heard over time, we are appointed. We are not elected officials. There have been times over the last couple of years I’ve been on the Planning Board, Planning Board members have had a position that, you know, I represent the people, you know, and they’ve said that in a Planning Board, what is our purpose, to weigh and consider the merits of an application, and some of this information is right in our By-Laws, and it defines our purpose for us, and also identifies some of our norms. As we continue our conversation tonight, we’re going to identify some more these norms which will help, hopefully, help us spend less time here and spend most of our time accomplishing what we set out to do. I think that it will increase satisfaction, and I can only speak for myself, but, you know, I haven’t felt terribly satisfied recently, recently the past couple of years, but I keep at it. MR. SIPP-What should be published on the back of the agenda is the set of rules or purpose for the public hearing, and maybe attach something like Mark has in his Number 2a, General Principals, officials should be objective, unbiased, not particularly the same wording, but we’re judging it on the merits, regardless of the applicant or the opponent, or decisions are made on the basis of information presented and reviewed at the public hearing, to tell the public this is the way we’re making our decision. MRS. STEFFAN-I actually think that this could be a good opportunity, because I think Tom brought up the committee assignments. I mean, this is a perfect one. It just came up, and so, you know, a small committee just to come and put together that data sheet would be a really good thing. So that we can provide some instruction, because what are we trying to accomplish with this organizational meeting? We’re trying to put some structures in place so that we can be at a more efficient operation. All of us spend a lot of time volunteering our services. MR. SIPP-This is a general statement, and I hate general statements, but I don’t think you can get much more specific without getting into a long rambling dissertation. MRS. STEFFAN-But sometimes folks need plain language, and so, you know, that. MR. TRAVER-Yes, and we can have at the bottom of the back of the application, we can say, you know, there’s information on the Town website at, you know, Queensbury.net, 20 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 where you can get the whole, find out as much detail as, virtually as much detail as you want about, you know, general principals and application procedures and all that kind of thing, but here’s what you need to worry about tonight, because, you know, the people want to make public comment. MR. FORD-I think it should be non-specific, more generic. I think this could be a handout any time that there’s a public hearing. You’ve got the agenda here, and you’ve got the guidelines for public participation here. You’ve got two copies. MRS. STEFFAN-That’s not a bad thing, and, you know, we often have a lot of students that are in the audience and that it would be a good thing for them to be able to take away. MR. BAKER-Yes, I often wonder, when the students sit there and watch the public hearings, and I often wonder what they take away from them. MRS. STEFFAN-Well, you’ll be very interested to know I just hired a girl recently at a client company, and she was a political science major, and that’s one of the questions I asked in the interview, what made you pick political science as a major, and she said, well, I had a government class at Queensbury High School, and I had to spend a lot of time at local town meetings and she said I became very interested in that, so I selected the degree program. So, you never know the tale that folks can have. It was kind of interesting to see it full circle. MR. SIPP-You’d be surprised, by sending kids to public meetings and so forth, what they come back with, a lot more than you think. MRS. STEFFAN-Well, everybody hears things a little bit differently. Every person, you know, every Planning Board member or every Staff member, all the public that come to a meeting always take something different away, and that’s the nature of how our brains work, and so by having some structures in place, we can actually help form sort of the opinions that folks have of the government process when they leave, by making sure that we have a clearly defined purpose that all of us are on the same page, that the Board’s, I know we’re the Planning Board and we’re meeting tonight, but, you know, all the volunteer boards are working well with the Staff so that we can accomplish our mission. MR. HUNSINGER-So do we have volunteers, or maybe a couple of people that would like to draft the guidelines for public participation? MRS. BRUNO-Gretchen, I’d like to thank you. That was excellent. MRS. STEFFAN-So, Tom, Don, and Steve? MR. TRAVER-Yes. MR. SEGULJIC-Sure. MRS. STEFFAN-Great. MR. KREBS-And I’m just going to make a suggestion. Why don’t we all put on a piece of paper what we think it should be and then exchange it, and then we can make comments about each other’s suggestion. MR. SIPP-Keep it simple. MR. TRAVER-Okay. MRS. BRUNO-If any of us think of something, though, we can give it to you guys, right? MR. TRAVER-Sure. MR. HUNSINGER-Absolutely. I mean, they’ll just prepare the draft, and bring it to the Board for discussion. MR. KREBS-And I started to say the first thing we need to do is define what the purpose of the meeting is, okay, and then we need to state what the value of public input is, okay, for the Board. I think you can go on and then say, you know, don’t waste your time, your friend’s time and our time repeating the same information. It’s already been put into the 21 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 record, and we will consider everything that is in the record before making a decision. That’s my thought process. MR. HUNSINGER-Well, I think to divert a minute, I think the advantage of having it written is that we’ll have it available at the back of the room and if the need ever arises, we’ll all have a copy, as individual members of the Planning Board, and if things get out of hand, we can always say, wait a second, let’s be reminded, here’s the guidelines for public participation, you know, and after we reinforce it, you know, a few meetings, people might get it. MRS. STEFFAN-Well, I guess I just want to say what I’m feeling is we just need to make sure that with this document we are weighing our needs and the needs of the public, and it’s not one or the other. There needs to be a balance, but I also think that this. MR. TRAVER-The committee will present it to the Chairman. MRS. STEFFAN-Right, but I think that meeting protocols, if I go back to norms, when the Chairman starts the meeting, I mean, to say, okay, welcome to the Planning Board meeting, and tonight some of our rules of engagement are there’s a handout in the back regarding public comment, and I would encourage everyone to have that, just whatever, shut your cell phones off, or whatever you need to say. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes, shut your cell phones off, that’s another one. MR. TRAVER-And before I forget, with everything that we’re talking about, and we started, and forgive me, because this is going back to an earlier item. I know that we’re rotating working with Staff and doing the application checklist. Have we already, and I didn’t write it down, when we’re each to do that, or is that something that can be sent to all of us by e-mail, because I know I would like to know well in advance when my day is. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes, well, I think it was going to be based on the appointment, which I think is on the list. I don’t have it with me. MR. SIPP-Yes, it’s on the list. MR. HUNSINGER-The Board member list. So wherever you come up on the list, and if you have a conflict that month, you know, you can trade. MR. FORD-Trade off. MRS. STEFFAN-I’ll look at that. I have the list, so I’ll just put it together, because Tom’s next, and then I think I’m after that, and if you have to switch off a month, then you’ll know in advance. MR. TRAVER-It would be very helpful to me, and even to know who the other people are. MR. KREBS-Since I have the list right here, if you want to know, Tom is first, Gretchen is next, Thomas Ford is next, Donald Sipp is next, Tanya’s next, and you’re next, Steve. MR. HUNSINGER-So you’re going to be like July or August. MR. TRAVER-It looks like July. So I’ll be July for August. MR. KREBS-Yes. MR. BAKER-Just so you’re all aware, one of the things Staff likes to do so we can keep the paper flow, the workflow moving and the paperwork straight, is we like to get the completeness review done within a week to a week and a half after the deadline, the th application deadline. The deadline is always on or around the 15 of the month. ndth MR. HUNSINGER-So it’s around the 22, 25, something like that. MR. SEGULJIC-And how do we work that? We call you and schedule a date, you call us and schedule a date? MR. BAKER-We have a schedule of the process downstairs, and I’ll actually make sure we get that distributed out to everybody. 22 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 MR. HUNSINGER-It was, I do have that with me. MR. HILTON-My suggestion would be to contact Craig, the Zoning Administrator. MR. SEGULJIC-Okay. So I should contact him? MR. HILTON-Say, hey, I’m ready, when can you get together. MR. SEGULJIC-Okay. MR. HUNSINGER-Final agenda meeting, roughly within that timeframe. MRS. BRUNO-When is it approximately you said. thst MR. HUNSINGER-Well, the earliest it is, looks like the 24, the latest is the 31. So, you know, that timeframe of each month. MR. SEGULJIC-So the final agenda meeting is an internal meeting for Staff? MR. HUNSINGER-Yes. MR. TRAVER-Yes, immediately following this process, I guess. MR. SEGULJIC-So when we go in, you’re going to have the 20 applications or whatever for that month, whatever it might be, we’re going to go through them and say this is fine, this is fine, woops, I don’t seen any lighting information. MR. BAKER-Well, Staff will have already reviewed them, and we’ll be able to see these are the ones that we think are fine. These are the ones that we think are incomplete and you’ll have a discussion about what’s (lost words) and we’ll even be able to point out the ones, we think these are complete for the agenda, but here’s what you’re not going to like about it. MRS. BRUNO-I think I know the answer to my own question, but if you have more than what we allocate to each meeting, that meet the criteria, does it go strictly by when they turn their information in? MR. BAKER-Yes. MRS. BRUNO-Okay. MR. BAKER-It’s date stamped, and actually on the deadline date we note the time it was received as well. So it’s all done by pecking order. MR. HUNSINGER-I think we all got this with our Board package, all got it this evening. It just lists all the projects in the pipeline, and it’s a proposed, if you will, based on when they were tabled to or when they were coming off, and basically that’s what you sit down and review with Staff. So, what you’re really doing is, on the ones that were tabled until that meeting, you’re reviewing, you know, did they submit the new information on time, is it sufficient, from the resolution. Then on a new project, of course, you know, that’s really where you look at, you know, is it complete, does it meet the eligibility criteria? And Staff has already done that, so you can just kind of go through them one at a time and take a quick look through them. It doesn’t really take, I don’t know, I was there a couple of hours, an hour and a half, I think. MR. FORD-But did you go through all of them? MR. HUNSINGER-Yes. MR. FORD-In other words, even those that Staff had indicated were incomplete? MR. HUNSINGER-Well, there was really only one that was, actually, I’m sorry, there were a couple that were questionable, and one of them, we tabled it to a specific date. So we need to put it on the agenda anyway, even if we just table it again. So that was an easy one, and then, I can’t remember what the issue was with the other one, but it was, became like a judgment, well, you know, they gave us a landscaping plan, it’s really not what you typically would request. I’m just using it as an example. So I said, yes, you know, we’ll put it in. We’ll probably table it and ask for more information, but the application is technically complete. They have a plan in the file, even though it’s, you 23 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 know, by most standards not up to par. So that’s kind of what you end up doing. I just asked the question what do you mean by bump, those are the ones, because we have agenda lists. MR. SCHONEWOLF-I just noticed in the public notice this morning there was only a few th of them on the 19, and I wondered what got knocked off. MR. HUNSINGER-Well, the ones that were tabled to a specific date don’t have to be re- advertised. So they don’t get re-advertised. So there were only four projects. MR. SCHONEWOLF-Okay. Where it says advertised, it means it’s advertised. There’s a d on it and it cut it off. Okay. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes, and then as Stu said, you know, they, they’re dated and stamped so as they come up the list that’s when we look at them. Gretchen, thank you for the group thing. That was good discussion. MR. SEGULJIC-Yes, thank you. MR. HUNSINGER-Next we had on the agenda to talk about Staff functions. I didn’t have anything particular in mind, Stu or George, other than I know in the past we have had some workshops where we had Staff come in and talk about, you know, what you do day to day, so the Board can better understand the role of what you guys do. MR. BAKER-We can talk briefly about that. At our current staffing level in the Department, we essentially have three people that work on the workflow process for all the applications. Craig Brown, who’s the Zoning Administrator, is essentially the, you could view him as the circus ringleader. He’s the one who tries to keep everything moving, keeps track of what’s going on where, what happens next, etc. If projects are deemed incomplete, the letter stating so usually comes directly from him. George and I, right now, are serving the role, as you know, of providing the (lost words) the Zoning Board may have placed on the approval which are relevant to the Planning Board’s work. Right now, Craig Brown, as Zoning Administrator, is doing the Staff support to the Zoning Board as well. So we have a little bit, not much, but a little bit of disconnect at times. MR. HUNSINGER-So when the Land Use Planner is hired, that would be the person who would come to the Planning Board meetings, prepare Staff Notes? MR. BAKER-That’s correct. That person would be attending all the Zoning Board and all the Planning Board meetings. MR. HUNSINGER-That would be the primary contact. MR. BAKER-And that would be the contact for applicants, and for Board members, although Craig will still retain his sort of supervisory and coordinating role. George, do you want to talk about what you do aside from the Planning Board responsibilities as well? MR. HILTON-I guess, by way of that, I can give you just kind of a little bit of a history. Two years ago, prior to two years ago I was kind of split between, I was completely within the Planning Department, Community Development Department, split between doing GIS work and planning review for the Planning Board, and not so much the Zoning Board, but the Planning Board. At the time, Susan Bardin being hired, I was essentially split between our IT Department, our Community Development Department, as a GIS Administrator. Ideally what I would be doing, once we get a Land Use Planner in place, is picking up on many of the projects that we have to do, trail mapping, infrastructure mapping for Sewer and Water Departments, Internet application development, a lot of things that go into GIS beyond what you see on maps. That’s what my role, what my job is, will be, but currently at the present time I am assisting with the Planning Board reviews. I’m happy to do it, but, given my past experience working with the Board, I guess it was a logical fit to kind of help meet some of the duties that existed after Susan’s departure. So that’s kind of what I’m supposed to do, if you will, and what I’m doing right now. That’s it in a nutshell. MR. BAKER-Aside from my role working with the Planning Board, I also, as Senior Planner, do a lot of large project coordination and oversight managing consulting contracts, including those related to our housing rehabilitation programs, related to larger projects such as the Comprehensive Land Use Plan update and Zoning Code revision effort, the Rush Pond trail design work that’s ongoing right now, and also, as Senior 24 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 Planner, I seem to have become a bit of a catchall for a lot of Town Board related projects that they want our Department involved in. I get a lot of calls from Dan’s office next door saying, you know, Stu, we need you to come to this meeting so you guys are aware of this and you can provide your input on this. So that’s a lot of what I’m doing as well. Previously, our Department, as most of you know, also had an Executive Director who was in charge of all the functions of the Community Development, which includes Planning, Zoning, Fire Marshal’s Office, Building and Codes, and Animal Control. Right now we do not have an Executive Director. The Town Board did put together an organizational structure model where essentially they are the Director of the Department, and Craig Brown, myself, and Dave Hatin, who’s our Director of Building and Codes are our sort of division heads. There has been some discussion by the Town Board about going back to an Executive Director model, but I don’t know that they’ve made a definite decision on that at this point. Back to the search for the Land Use Planner, the Town actually advertised two positions. They advertised Land Use Planner and Senior Planner. The idea being if there were solid candidates for Senior Planner, the Town Board was interested in perhaps trying to hire someone with Senior Planner qualifications that could do some of the Land Use Planner stuff, plus also do more Senior Planner, larger project stuff. As it turned out, we only received one application, that through the initial screening really looked eligible for Senior Planner. So, of the nine, well, we started out with 10 candidates we wanted to invite to interview. One has already taken another job, so we’re down to nine, eight of which would be for the Land Use Planner position, and one would be for Senior Planner position. MRS. BRUNO-These are advertised, I know they’re on the site, but where else? MR. BAKER-They were advertised on the site. They were advertised in the Albany Times Union, and in the Post Star and extensively through the Internet. E-mail distribution was to planning groups, numerous planning related websites and in fact the majority, we received 21 applications total, and well over 80% of those were as a result of the Internet advertising. MR. HUNSINGER-Wow. MRS. STEFFAN-There are a lot of Land Use Planner positions being advertised in the Capital District. There are Wilton ones, but there’s several down in the Albany area. So there’s a lot of competition. MR. BAKER-In fact, when we did the advertising, began the advertising, well over a month ago for these two positions, I actually was getting calls from consultants I know down in Albany saying, you know, we’re trying to fill positions here, Stu, too. Don’t be stealing our candidates. If we see some people that we’re not ultimately going to hire, I’ll refer them there, if they’ll give us the same consideration. MRS. STEFFAN-I think one of the things that I’m hearing is that the Staff is stretched thin. I mean, I think all of us on the Board for any length of time know that. It’s just kind of the transitions have been difficult, and we do have some processes and procedures ins place that don’t make their job easy, and relating to that, we talked a little bit earlier about tabling motions and things like that, and so one of the things that we need to do is a better job on those so that the Staff doesn’t have to do more work on their end. MR. SEGULJIC-I’d like to ask you a question about Main Street. MR. BAKER-Yes. MR. SEGULJIC-One of the issues on Main Street is always you have all the requirements for Main Street, especially for the landscaping, it’s kind of silly to have them put in the landscaping if the street’s going to get all ripped up. So I guess, where are we with Main Street, Number One, and what do you think we should do with regards to these requirements? MR. BAKER-In terms of where the project is, for those of you not familiar with it, Main Street is a project that involves the County widening and making other related improvements to the road itself, the Town making water and sewer improvements, the utility companies relocating utilities, perhaps underground, more than likely not underground. It’s a rather involved and detailed project, funded through various State, Federal, primarily State and Federal sources, but there’s local shares at both Town and County level as well. Very, very involved process. Previously, the project was being coordinated on the Town’s behalf by the Executive Director. This was two Executive Directors ago at this point. Right now there is not one person at the Town who really is 25 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 coordinating it all, although to his credit, Dan Stec has been doing sort of yeoman’s job trying to keep them moving forward. The schedule on the project right now is that if it’s going to have a, and we’re getting to the point where there’s some funding sources deadlines looming, so if is an appropriate way to phrase it, it’s going to happen in 2009. In terms of how this relates to the Planning Board’s review of projects there, Main Street is also a design district in our Zoning Code, and for that reason it’s going to be important to, One, keep an eye on where the project actually is in terms of when the County’s going to tear up the road and portions of properties will be taken for that purpose and sidewalks will be put in. It will be important to keep an eye on that. How does this relate to, you know, Planning Board review of landscaping requirements and other types of improvements that property owners may do as part of Site Plan Reviews, there’s going to need to be some flexibility, and certainly as projects come in within that corridor, we, as Staff, will try to make recommendations to you, such as, yes, we need to require a landscaping plan here that’s compatible with the Main Street design standards, but the current reality is, they’re not going to be able to get permanent landscaping in until 2010, so we can make that part of the review process and actually part of the conditions of approval. MR. SIPP-What are the odds, Stu? MR. BAKER-Right now I think the odds still look pretty good that it’s going to happen. The biggest thing that’s holding this up has been undergrounding of utilities. In particular I have one judge not making a timely decision. I think utilities are going to end up underground, is where it’s going to go at this point. MR. SIPP-The price keeps escalating. MR. BAKER-The price keeps escalating, you know, as prices do, and the various and assorted delays related to the utility work. MR. SIPP-Basically it’s the County’s call. MR. BAKER-No. It’s County and Town because utilities are actually going to be, it is County and Town, but the County is anxious to get the project underway, and is leaning on the Town to say here’s when the Town’s going to be ready to go, and it’s the Town that’s actually in active suits with utility companies over the whole issue of underground. It’s all rather involved. MR. HILTON-I just wanted to add a comment to the present situation. It’s different than it has been in the past, you know, with three people splitting the duties of review and comments and such with various Boards. So obviously with the Boards there’s going to be some confusion, who’s doing this, who’s doing that. Oftentimes I’ll show up for a meeting and there will be applications that maybe I didn’t review. Number One, like I said, that’s the reality of the situation right now. We’ll certainly try to do whatever we can to coordinate between us to make sure everyone’s up to date with the information before we go to a meeting, if we’re handling an application that maybe isn’t ours, but by way of communication, you know, unfortunately, if any member has a question, it’s probably safest to maybe send out an e-mail to all of us and say, who’s handling this. MR. BAKER-Yes, seriously, send a note to Craig, George, and I, and we’ll be. MR. HUNSINGER-That’s what I do. I try to copy all of you. MR. BAKER-We’ll be able to tell you, between George and I, are actually doing the Staff Notes on it. MR. HILTON-That’s probably the best thing for now. MRS. STEFFAN-One of the things, as we speak about Staff Notes, and it kind of goes with this in the next item on our agenda. The Staff Note, everybody has a different style for putting the Staff Notes together, and one of the things I’d like to suggest is a consistent style. So, for example, we talked about waivers a little earlier in the meeting, and usually that’s in the narrative somewhere. I’d like to see a Staff Note outline that identifies the things that we need to be looking at, so that they’re prominently broken out, and so, you know, I don’t know how we come up with the appropriate Staff Note, but I think it could be a work in process, so that, you know, we start to put a system in place and then see how it works for us. 26 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 MRS. BRUNO-One thing that I’ve found really helpful, and it comes and goes I’ve noticed in the Staff Notes is more of a history of the applications for the particular parcel that has come through so you can kind of see how things have developed over the years, just a reference, you know, AV 2006, 2004. MR. BAKER-Yes. MR. FORD-Chris, I just want to draw our attention to something, because as we listen to Staff and we realize we’re understaffed, there’s a real need to address this, and I think that we could play a very vital and active role. If we look at Planning Board 1A, it says to make recommendations to the Queensbury Town Board regarding matters which contribute to the planning and development of the Town of Queensbury as it deems desirable, and I think if we are not becoming actively involved in letting our perceptions and our recommendations be known, that we’re remiss in accepting responsibility for passing that on to the Town Board. MR. SIPP-Like we did the Takundewide situation. We made it known that we would like to see some stormwater. MR. FORD-And that took some time and the applicant paid the price for that, but it showed than we can impact that process, but what I’m looking at now particularly is from a personnel standpoint. Procedurally, I agree with you that that was a feel good moment when that happened. MR. SIPP-I think we should do more of it. When we see a problem that is not maybe the applicant’s fault, but affects the applicant, then I think we ought to ask for some help in correcting this. MRS. BRUNO-Which application was it that we had asked for a workshop with the Town Board? MR. SIPP-That one, Takundewide. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes, it was Takundewide. MR. BAKER-It was Takundewide. MRS. BRUNO-Was it? I was thinking it was another one. MR. KREBS-But they solved the problem. MR. FORD-And it became unnecessary. MRS. BRUNO-I think I was thinking of a previous one. MR. HUNSINGER-Another good example of where we did that is the Meadowbrook watershed. MR. SIPP-Have those studies been accepted by the Town? MR. BAKER-The Meadowbrook study by the Town Engineer, yes. When you say those studies, what other studies are you referring to? MR. SIPP-Well, wasn’t there one that dealt with? MR. BAKER-There’s one on Michaels Drive. MR. SIPP-Michaels? No, not that one, no. In that area, where the, across. MRS. STEFFAN-On Quaker Road across from the carwash. MR. BAKER-Yes. MRS. STEFFAN-There were several reports we got. We got a package with several reports. MR. BAKER-Yes, the Quaker Road culvert replacement, repair and replacement. MR. HUNSINGER-Right. 27 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 MR. BAKER-That is still in the design phase. I know Dan Ryan’s been making periodic update reports to the Town Board at their workshop meetings. He’s heading into final design and then it will be a matter of permitting and the Town Board has said they want to see that repaired and corrected this building season. MR. SIPP-In regard to that, this whole thing is of the litigation now? MR. BAKER-What whole thing? MR. SIPP-In front of the beer distributor and the tire people and the people on Homer, one of them. MR. SCHACHNER-Not involving the Town. MR. BAKER-I mean, there may be private litigation between the property owners. MR. SCHACHNER-Right, but not involving the Town. MR. SIPP-Not involving the Town. MR. SCHACHNER-Correct. MRS. STEFFAN-We got a letter in our packages last month that talked about a resident of Homer Avenue was suing someone. MR. SCHACHNER-Right, but not the Town of Queensbury. MRS. STEFFAN-Right, but it wasn’t the Town, but we did get a letter. MR. SCHACHNER-From whom was the letter, an applicant? MR. SIPP-No, from the one who’s suing, I don’t know who she’s suing. MR. SCHACHNER-As Stu says, there may be litigation, but not involving the Town. MR. SIPP-I just wondered, who else could she sue but the Town or the County? MR. SCHACHNER-I doubt it’s the County and it’s not the Town. MRS. STEFFAN-I certainly think that Tom’s suggestion is a good one. I mean, we’ve had lots of discussions over the last year and a half that, you know, that’s current for me about the Department organization, the short staffing, and how can we accomplish what we’re charged with when the Staff is stretched very thin, and it’s just. MR. TRAVER-Maybe we could draft some kind of letter. MRS. STEFFAN-And they need our support, actually. MR. FORD-Exactly, and it certainly would draw attention and say that we’re fulfilling one of our obligations. If we see a lack, then we should be bringing it to the Town Board’s attention, not just, okay, here’s a problem, but here’s a problem, and here’s our solution or our possible solution or recommendations. MR. TRAVER-Mitigations. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes, there you go. MR. HUNSINGER-Stu, George, anything else we want to bring up, talk about under Staff functions? MRS. STEFFAN-I think one, I guess, piece of information would be helpful. There’s always been some debate about Building and Codes and Dave Hatin’s department, and also about Bruce Frank and Code Enforcement, and I think that that’s important, because when we put conditions on an application or when we approve something, when we put conditions on, Bruce Frank is the guy who goes out in the field and makes sure that the site is developed according to the approval, and he plays a very important role. 28 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 MR. BAKER-Yes, that is very true, and we’ve been remiss in not discussing Bruce’s role. Bruce essentially does all of the field work on zoning enforcement, trying to ensure that any conditions of approvals from both the Zoning Board and the Planning Board are adhered to, and he’s another person who, if he were here this evening, I feel very confident in saying that he would be asking for as clear and as objective conditions in your approvals as possible, because if there’s any subjectivity to it, it makes his work very difficult. Craig, as the Zoning Administrator, has a role in zoning enforcement as well, but Bruce is basically his right hand man and works under Craig’s supervision and direction, in his responsibilities, and when Bruce is looking at an approval that has vaguely worded language, we generally know it in the office. Bruce, Craig, George and I all share the same office, and when Bruce isn’t happy with something, we tend to know it. MRS. STEFFAN-Well, and I think some of the comments we’ve made during review is that, I know I’ve made it, that’s not enforceable, and one that comes to mind is often on lake projects we’ll recommend, you know, no herbicides, or there’s another project that came to mind that was in a Critical Environmental area, and we wanted to stipulate no salt on the driveway, and we can do that, but it’s a feel good thing because it’s not enforceable. So it’s an exercise in futility. Why do we even go there? MR. SIPP-It may be, because EPA is doing a lot more work, particularly with phosphorus. They’ve done a heck of a job in Florida, in picking up and testing waters, particularly around their golf courses, that show phosphorus being leached into the waterways. MRS. STEFFAN-But again, unless we put some infrastructure in place, there’s no way that we can do that. MR. SIPP-I’ll agree with you there. MR. BAKER-The reality is our enforcement staff works Monday through Friday, 8:00 to 4:30. MR. SIPP-We know that. I mean, I can go out to the site and the guy says I don’t use any fertilizer and here’s this lush green grass growing. Now, nothing grows in lakeside soil as lush as that without having to add something. MR. SCHACHNER-Well, that may be, but that doesn’t make it an enforceable condition. MR. SIPP-No, but we can say. MR. SCHACHNER-But Gretchen’s right, that’s really a feel good condition, because that’s not legally, and that’s all she’s saying, and I think she’s right. MR. SIPP-Yes, I’ll agree with you there. MRS. BRUNO-But it may end up developing into something besides just a, you know, if we are watching the trends. MR. SIPP-If we can get people to be aware of this, maybe the next door neighbor will make an anonymous phone call and say he’s out there fertilizing again. MRS. STEFFAN-There’s nothing we can do in that situation. MR. SIPP-Well, if we say he will not use fertilizer and he agrees to it and then he does use fertilizer, I think he’s liable. MR. KREBS-For what? MRS. STEFFAN-We don’t have an enforcement mechanism, and that’s, in the Town to be able to police that. MR. BAKER-We can’t do effective enforcement based on hearsay. MR. SIPP-Well, I’ve heard several stories, there’s no sense going to the Town court because nothing happens there, and that they throw, and I think that’s. MR. TRAVER-Well, it seems like there still would be some value on having a record that it was discussed and that the landowner signed off it. 29 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 MR. SIPP-Yes. MR. TRAVER-Because some day there probably will be enforcement, and then to try to go back and say, well, now we’ve got to go back to these landowners and try to get them to signoff they’re not going to use fertilizers. So I would say, even if we can’t enforce it, why not put it in there? MR. SIPP-I agree. Definitely. MR. BAKER-As long as you understand that it’s something that requires voluntary compliance and it’s most effective role is that of education. MR. SCHACHNER-Let me just throw out another thought on that, based on our perspective. The reason not to do it is exactly something that Don mentioned, and that is that if you have the condition in there that says no fertilizing, one of the things that tends to happen is some neighbor does start calling and saying, hey, Joe Smith is fertilizing and I know the condition said no fertilizing, and it’s a good example, fertilizing, because as I understand it currently, you’re not going to send, you’re not going to have Bruce Frank drive out there and catch them in the act, and absent that, as I understand it currently, there are, Code Enforcement Staff does not have the physical/technical capability to do whatever testing would be required to prove that fertilizing is happening. Even if they did, you’d then have the scientific issue is, if there are properties adjoining side by side, can you prove that the fertilizer came from Property A versus Property B. So in our experience, and Dave Hatin has some background in this as well, you don’t really want to put in a lot of unenforceable conditions, because they create an unhealthy situation where you get the public trying to be citizen watch dogs and get very frustrated and very annoyed when the answer from Town Hall is, sorry, we can’t enforce that condition. It was just put in there because they agreed to it and we were trying to feel good. MR. SEGULJIC-Well, then maybe what would happen is the Town Board then would make that a regulation. MR. SCHACHNER-The point is, Town Board making it a regulation wouldn’t change the situation either, absent some ability to enforce the regulation. Town Board, for example, you know, we’ve had situations where Planning Boards impose conditions about no occupancy greater than X number of people in situations where, for example, there was a suspicion that somebody’s building a second home for the purpose of having lots and lots of down staters come up and visit every single weekend. Planning Board condition, no more than X number of people staying over on weekends, the sewage, you know, it’ll overload the sewer system, for example, the septic system. Lakefront property sensitive, the Critical Environmental Area, the whole bit, it doesn’t work as a practical matter because, A, there’s a lot of legal problems with telling people how many people they can and can’t invite over for social functions, and B, Bruce Frank cannot be on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, including the weekend, days at two in the morning, to go out and monitor a compliance with a Queensbury Planning Board, or any other town, Planning Board enforced condition about the maximum occupancy at a residence. That’s a different issue. That’s not to say that if the people get out of control and started throwing glass and breaking things, that the can’t call the Warren County Sheriff for a law enforcement issue, but that’s a separate issue. Again, this is not something that I’m saying the law prohibits imposition of unenforceable conditions, but what I’m telling you that is with lots and lots and lots of years of enforcement of Planning Board and ZBA conditions, I’m going to throw in the thought of, there is a downside. There’s a big, big downside to putting in conditions that you know are not enforceable conditions. MR. TRAVER-What about changing the language to not a condition but some kind of acknowledgment? MR. SCHACHNER-The encouragement and feel good stuff that Gretchen was talking about earlier, and that others have talked about, amen, fine. MR. BAKER-Yes, if you want to put language in the resolution that you encourage the property owner not to use fertilizer on his property. MR. SCHACHNER-Fine, perfectly fine. MR. FORD-How it’s stated is critical. 30 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 MR. SCHACHNER-And just make sure as you do that you recognize that is feel good language that you’re hoping (lost words), but it’s not enforceable stuff. That’s totally fine. MR. SIPP-(Lost words) where the neighbor, which is the brother of the applicant, has thrown him in. Realizing we can’t do anything, but we know it’s happening. You know he’s using fertilizers. MRS. STEFFAN-Well, there are things, I think we just need to, you know, moving forward, need to understand our boundaries and, as we put together motions, what we should put into place. We have had some discussion in the past about the difference between deed language, for example, when we’re dealing with subdivisions, and plat notations. There are things that can be put in a deed that aren’t enforceable either. If it’s on a plat, then if it’s enforceable, that’s where Bruce Frank comes into play, and so then it’s an enforceable item, and so we can regulate behavior standards and outcomes based on, you know, what we put in those notations. So I just think that that’s an important. MR. SIPP-The way it was explained to me is that the person who put the, made the restrictions is the one that has to enforce it. So if a developer sets up a development with certain restrictions, no sheds, no livestock, whatever the standard thing is, and then he finds that these things are happening, he can enforce those restrictions. MR. FORD-He can. MR. BAKER-He can, but an important additional point is the Town can’t. MR. SIPP-Well, no. MR. BAKER-Because we do get those phone calls. Hey, my neighbor has a clothesline up, and we’ve got covenants against that. MR. SIPP-The person who made the restrictions, is the way I understand it, can sue the person who’s broken those restrictions. MR. BAKER-That’s correct. MR. SCHACHNER-Well, let’s, I don’t think we should get bogged down. That’s only partially correct, and there are others that would have standing to sue also. I think the most important thing for you as a Planning Board is what Stu said, not a Planning Board issue, not a Town issue. MR. SIPP-I agree with that. MR. SCHACHNER-But you’re oversimplifying the law. What you’re oversimplifying the law. Whoever told you what they told you, I wouldn’t take that as gospel. MR. SIPP-It was right downstairs. MR. SCHACHNER-That’s fine. MR. SEGULJIC-With regards to, when we get into those open space issues, and land conservancy and all that, any suggestions on that? Insight as to how we can handle those? Because we’ve never really been able to do anything because it’s always. MR. BAKER-Well, I mean, the problem we run into is there are areas in subdivisions where you’d like to see a permanent covenant or a permanent protection of some type placed on it, but if the Land Conservancy doesn’t want it and the Town doesn’t want it, you’re left with, well, do we require a homeowners association and sometimes that isn’t practical. It’s a tough one. I don’t know if you’ve got any words of wisdom. MR. SCHACHNER-I’m not sure. What exactly are you asking, Tom? MR. SEGULJIC-A lot of times people come in with these larger subdivisions, and they agree to set aside some of the land, but we don’t have a mechanism for it. MR. SCHACHNER-Right. Well, it depends. For example, if it’s a cluster subdivision, there certainly is a mechanism for it. MR. SEGULJIC-That’s a homeowners association, I would assume. 31 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 MR. SCHACHNER-Well, not necessarily, but in a cluster subdivision situation, in fact, you have to have a mechanism for it or you should not be approving a cluster subdivision because the premise of a cluster subdivision is that the overall density is not exceeded, and the way that works is that in the cluster, and whatever area the subdivision lots are clustered, typically there’s more density than would otherwise be allowed, and the tradeoff is, but there’s a set aside, and there’s a set aside of open space, and it’s actually you absolutely have the legal authority, and in fact the legal mandate, in a situation like that, to impose conditions of approval to make sure that the set aside open space remains open space. If you don’t do that properly, then what can happen is somebody can come up with a cluster subdivision that has, I’m making this up, dense, you know, dense development down here that’s more dense than would normally be allowed on this part of the property, this all open, and then one year, five years, ten years, or 50 years later, somebody tries to then subdivide this part of the property and all of a sudden you have density that’s greater, on the overall scale, than would otherwise be allowed, not legally. MR. TRAVER-I think what he’s looking for, though, is the mechanism. MR. SEGULJIC-The mechanism. Should we say no further subdivision on that other land? MR. SCHACHNER-You could say no further subdivision. You could say, when you approve such a subdivision, it doesn’t have to be a cluster one. You approve a subdivision with designated open space, you have to say, you have to make that clear that this application is approved with this area as designated open space, that this is not to be further subdivided. That it’s not to be conveyed, other than with language in a deed that specifies this property is part of Town of Queensbury subdivision number whatever. This is the designated open space. It is not to be utilized for any purpose other than designated open space, etc., etc. Our advice is put it on the plat and also have it, it would be a mandatory deed restriction. MR. HILTON-In addition to that, I know we’re running into, I think this is what you’re referring to, situations where there’s not technically open space, but land that is worthy of being preserved, but is being held under private ownership. For instance, areas with steep slopes up on West Mountain. We had a subdivision recently with these long bowling alley lots that the back 50 acres of each lot or something were not going to be developed, but they were proposed to be under private ownership, and the dilemma is, okay, if we want to preserve that upland, preserve that scenic view shed, how do we do that, and so far what we’ve come to, or what I think the Board has come to, is no cut restrictions beyond a certain point, and again, I think the issue is how do you enforce that. MR. SCHACHNER-Our advice always is have stuff be in the approval motion, and to have a condition be that whatever it is, you know, whatever the condition is be on the plat so that nobody can say, it wasn’t in the Warren County Clerk’s Office when I went and checked the subdivision map, and require that it be in any deed conveying any portion of the property. MR. BAKER-And that the restriction be very specific. MR. SCHACHNER-Absolutely. MR. BAKER-Very specific. MR. SCHACHNER-That’s the it I’m referring to. Correct. The idea is that nobody should be able to reasonably say I didn’t know about it. MR. SEGULJIC-I guess two things, and help me out with this. There was one, I think it was Hayes and Hayes, where they said they would also name the Town as on the deed I guess? MR. TRAVER-Well, again, they were trying to hit on a mechanism. To satisfy us, they would (lost words). MR. SEGULJIC-And they would name the Town as on the deed, also? MR. SCHACHNER-Name the Town as what? I’m not following you. What I’m saying is I’m not understanding what Tom’s saying about name the Town as what? 32 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 MR. BAKER-Well, they were going to put a restrictive covenant preserving an area as open space, and they were going to name the Town as a party. MR. SCHACHNER-As a beneficiary of the covenant? MR. BAKER-As a party, a beneficiary, an enforcer of the covenant. MR. SCHACHNER-Right. That makes sense. MR. BAKER-But that can only be done with the acceptance and approval of the Town Board. MR. SCHACHNER-Right, and there’s an upside and a downside to that also, which is sometimes the Town doesn’t want to be in the position of having to enforce that, and would rather that the private party enforce it. MR. BAKER-And the Town also can be subject to political changes, where a current Town Board may say, that’s a great idea and we will enforce that covenant. Two elections later, the developer comes to an entirely different Town Board and says, I’d like to get this restriction pulled, and there it goes. MR. SEGULJIC-Yes, because I mean we’re seeing now a lot of no further subdivisions are coming back asking for, what, for us to lift that. MR. BAKER-My advice on that is if you hold firm and say, no further subdivision, that problem won’t continue. MR. SCHACHNER-They have the right to ask. MR. BAKER-They have the right to ask. MR. SEGULJIC-But there’s no way we can eliminate that right to come back. MR. BAKER-You can’t eliminate that right. You can reduce the frequency of those requests by holding firm to a known position. MR. SEGULJIC-Okay. Getting back to the cluster, then, the open space in the cluster, who maintains that, then, if there’s not a homeowners association? MR. SCHACHNER-That depends, I mean, there’s different answers. Sometimes the original owner. Sometimes an HOA. Sometimes a non-incorporated group of homeowners. I mean, there’s a whole range of, sometimes the Queensbury Conservancy Land Conservancy, sometimes the Town of Queensbury, sometimes the Queensbury Recreation Department, sometimes the State of New York, sometimes the Nature Conservancy. I mean, it depends. MR. BAKER-But as you’re considering preserving open space, how it’s going to be maintained as open space is an important consideration. I mean, we had an example of open space in a subdivision that turned into a recreation area for four wheelers, and when the developer came in and said I’d like to put homes here, the neighbors said, hurray, because they don’t want the four wheelers there, and, yet, there goes the original condition of no further subdivision. MR. TRAVER-With the ATV’s being illegal anyway, isn’t that genuinely an enforcement issue? MR. BAKER-That’s a law enforcement issue. MR. TRAVER-Well, that’s what I mean. MR. SCHACHNER-What Stuart means is not a Town enforcement issue. MR. TRAVER-Yes, right. MR. HUNSINGER-Well, I promised everyone we’d be out at ten. The next item on the agenda is defining goals, and in the e-mail I sent out, I listed several of the thoughts, comments. A lot of the stuff I think we’ve covered, but certainly a lot of it we haven’t. 33 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 MR. TRAVER-I would like to see if we could make a goal of having a better control on the lateness of the hour. I know I’ve occasionally brought this up before, and I’ve heard some suggestions for some possible mechanisms to help us do that. One would be to establish a time allocation for each application that we review in any given meeting, so that it would be, we wouldn’t have one applicant spend a half an hour with us and then spend two hours with the next one. We could certainly use less than the allotted time, but if we reached an allotted time, then that application would be tabled or whatever, until another occasion. That would allow us to establish a set number of applications that we could review in a given evening, so that we would get out at whatever hour we set aside. My impression is, and again, I’m still relatively new on the Planning Board, but my impression is that we’re seeing an increasing number of applications in general, and I wonder if part of the problem might be relieved by at least establishing a date for a third meeting, which we may or may not need, and have that as kind of an escape valve, as opposed to meeting late into the night, and possibly some combination of those things could have an impact. MR. SEGULJIC-Well, I’ve never been in favor of third meetings. MR. TRAVER-Yes, and I’m not saying that I’m advocating that we meet three times a month. I’m just saying that I would rather meet three times than twice. MR. SEGULJIC-I think it’s just a matter of being concise, to the point, and when we start going in circles saying, that’s it, move on. MRS. STEFFAN-I think that the Site Plan Review and the Subdivision sheets, I actually put together a spread sheet and e-mailed it. I know some folks couldn’t open it. We can try again. I have the newest version of Micro Soft, and so some people can’t open it, but when I first got on the Planning Board, we used to use that criteria sheet, and that was our outline for reviewing every application, and, you know, we could put that as one of our meeting norms, to actually use that for every application. MR. SEGULJIC-If I could jump in here, I think that’s a good idea because it keeps us on track as to, you know, that issue is resolved. Okay. What are our concerns? Boom, boom, next, and then keep on moving along. MR. HUNSINGER-Do people want to use those? Because we’ve gone back and forth over the years. MR. TRAVER-I think that’s great, and you can always, if you have a newer version of Office or something, you can do a save as and save it in an older version, like 2003 or something that likely would be compatible to. MRS. STEFFAN-Because what I did, I took the criteria and I put it in a spread sheet. It’s something I used to use when we were utilizing that, and so when I went through, an application to review it at home, I would go through that checklist, so there’s places to write. So, you know, as I review each one of those items, I’ve got notes in my spreadsheet so that when the issue comes up, I’m ready to hit them in order. So, I’ll save that in other version and then re-send it to everyone. MR. SIPP-I think that’s a good idea. The problem is sometimes one question opens up a Pandora’s Box, that you haven’t seen happening before. MRS. STEFFAN-Right. MR. TRAVER-It’s time more than it is. MRS. STEFFAN-But we probably need to be, if our goal, again, our energy usually follows a goal, and so if one of our goals is to get out earlier, maybe what we should be doing is following a structure and, you know, so that we will get out at a certain time, and somebody can be the time keeper. I mean, often in meeting management what you do, you have an agenda, you have a time keeper, and you have a recorder. We don’t have to worry about the recorder piece, but maybe we need to be better at the time keeping piece. MR. TRAVER-Well, that’s what I’m wondering. Is it possible or appropriate to give an allotment to each? MR. SIPP-I doubt that. There’s some that you can do in a half hour, and some it takes two and a half hours. 34 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 MR. HUNSINGER-Well, yes, I agree, but I think it is appropriate where, you know, we’ve been debating a project for an hour, to then say, well, obviously we’re going to end up tabling this. Let’s list all of the items we’re going to table this for. So I think it’s. MR. TRAVER-Yes. I mean, I’m not saying that there aren’t applications that wouldn’t take two and a half hours. The question is, do we want to do the two and a half hours in addition to everything else, we’re doing in one night? MR. HUNSINGER-Right. Yes. MR. FORD-The fact that we’ve been spending hours on some application should not make us feel guilty if we can pull the stopper on the twenty minutes. MR. SIPP-Yes. I’ll agree with that. MR. SCHONEWOLF-I think, as an outsider, and I’ve only seen a few, eight or ten of your meetings, I think you are more permissive here in letting some of the people who represent the applicant go on and on and on with their presentations. A lot of Planning Boards don’t do that. For instance, the guy that was talking about the pond the other night probably took twice as much time as he needed to take. MR. TRAVER-And I would submit, and this is getting to the meeting management point that Gretchen was making. If we had, if we developed a practice and stuck to it of allotting a reasonable amount of time equally to each applicant, the applicant themselves would develop a practice to be more concise and so would we. We probably would tend to use the checklist and be more consistent with each applicant, and the applicant’s representatives would tend to plan ahead of time and say, okay, what are the points that I need to make here in making my presentation that I want to get in tonight. MRS. STEFFAN-Yes, and it’s, again, it becomes the norm, because if we’re allowing some, if we’re allowing the first person on the agenda to spend an hour and a half going through their project, and we get to item five, and, you know, that person’s going on and on, how can we cork them off and tell them that they can’t have anymore time when at the beginning of the meeting we allowed someone else to spend so much time? MR. TRAVER-Yes. I mean, why can’t we establish a norm that there is an allotment of time and stick to it? Not that we couldn’t make exceptions, but I think we’re almost doing it the other way around. MR. BAKER-And the reality is, at least from my perspective, is that there’s a witching hour that the Board hits at just about every evening, after which productive absolutely plummets. MR. FORD-I’m the first one to admit that. You’ve heard me say it many times. MR. HUNSINGER-Well, and people have heard me say, a former member would, every meeting, when it got to be ten o’clock, and we used to run the meetings a little differently, you know, the Chairman at the time would go down the line and ask, you know, do you have any questions and we’d come to her and she’d say, well, it’s after ten o’clock, I can’t do any work after ten o’clock, so, no, I don’t have any questions, and she would say that every meeting, every meeting. Once it got to be after ten o’clock, you know, that was when she would start to be a bit vocal about it’s time to wrap this up and go home. MR. TRAVER-Structure calls for us to wrap up by eleven. So I’m wondering if we. MR. HUNSINGER-Well, that was just a self. MR. TRAVER-Right. It doesn’t seem like an unreasonable goal. MRS. STEFFAN-And this week we got an e-mail from the Zoning Board, and right in the agenda, the first paragraph it said, you know, the public, eleven o’clock. MR. SCHACHNER-Right. ZBA agendas say right on them seven p.m. to eleven p.m., and there’s even a note next to it that says something like the meeting will end at eleven p.m. That was started by the ZBA, I want to say two or three years ago, I could be off by some amount of time, when the ZBA meetings were going past midnight on a somewhat regular basis. Now what I don’t know is how much they’ve stuck to stopping at eleven. I don’t know that. 35 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 MR. HUNSINGER-We used to have it on our agenda as well. Yes, it used to say at the top, you know, the Board reserves the right to adjourn at eleven p.m. or something like that, and we never did. We did it once. MR. FORD-How would it be if, on the agenda, we had the start time, and at 7:40, item two on the agenda? MR. SCHACHNER-No, I think the problem with that is that then there’s an expectation and you have trouble going shorter, and as soon as you go shorter, it sets everything off. Do you know what I mean? I’ve seen one Board only ever try that, and do whatever you want. This is not a legal issue at all. I’m just saying I did see one Board do that, and if the first one takes five minutes, or if the first one the applicant shows up and says, my engineer’s stuck in a snow storm, table this please, all the whole score card is off, and people have trouble with it. MR. FORD-Then whatever it takes, we need better agenda management. MR. TRAVER-But, Mark, what about, have you seen precedents where they have said, in some fashion, we’re going to allocate X amount of time per applicant at a maximum? MR. SCHACHNER-I don’t believe I have, but I think it’s an excellent idea, and there’s no legal issue with it whatsoever. MRS. STEFFAN-I think it comes down to something that we need to be careful of, and it was something that Gretchen mentioned, that we’re probably going to find that people feel unheard at some level if we’re not really careful about being consistent. It raises a little bit of a flag to me, in terms of what you were saying, Mark, that we can kind of change things as we go along, once we see how one application is heading. I think, I understand what you’re saying, and I think to some degree that’s true, but I think we also have to be careful that we’re not changing the rules as the game goes on. MR. SCHACHNER-Well, if you remember what I said was, I said it was ideally, and it was in response to the question Steve asked, do you make the ground rules before the public hearing starts, and I said ideally that’s the best way to do it, or you’re not always going to know. Legally, you’re allowed to, what I’m saying is legally you’re allowed to impose reasonable conditions upon a public hearing process, even after the hearing’s underway. You’re allowed to change gears, so to speak. You’re allowed to say, for example, we’re going to allow everybody 10 minutes per person, and then, you know what, now it’s midnight, we’re going to only allow people five minutes a person. You are allowed, although this may seem contrary to, you know, principals of law, and certain things you’re not allowed to change the rules after the game has begun. This is something you are allowed to change the rules of the game after the game has begun. I’d just advocate doing it carefully and consistently, that’s all. MR. HUNSINGER-I was never aware that you could limit the length of the total public hearing. MR. SCHACHNER-Yes. You can do whatever’s reasonable. There’s no, I mean, there’s no law that specifically says here are the things you’re allowed to do. The law is you’re allowed to do what’s reasonable, and every time there’s a Board challenge, which has not been that many, every single court decision on this topic says as long as everyone is, remember the one thing they did say is very strenuously, I hope it came out strenuously, is, you have to give everybody a shot. No matter how reasonable your condition is, for example, let’s say you say everyone’s allowed five minutes a shot, and you’re saying, and our deadline for our meeting is midnight, you cannot lawfully, if that takes up until midnight, and somebody who complied with the rules signed up or whatever, didn’t get their speak, you can’t say, okay, it’s midnight, everyone got their five minutes, Ms. Smith, I’m really sorry, yes, you signed up. You were entitled to your five minutes, but it’s been midnight. We’re not letting you speak. You can adjourn and come back some other day, but sooner or later you have to allow each person at least one bite at that apple. MR. TRAVER-To clarify my position, I’m not, when I say, hypothetically, let’s say it’s an hour, okay, I’m not saying that an application would have an hour total, after which we would. MR. SCHACHNER-Right. You don’t necessarily have to conclude. You’re just saying an hour that particular night. 36 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 MR. TRAVER-Maybe they would be Number One on the runway for the next meeting or something. MR. SCHACHNER-But I understood you weren’t saying that would be necessarily the total time of the application. MR. KREBS-But in a way, that’s unfair to an applicant who has some kind of timeframe that they have to accomplish something in. Okay. So if you’re talking about a guy that wants to build a building, and he has a commercial use for it and it’s in a commercial zone, and it’s an acceptable use, and you have, for one reason or another, lots of public comment about it, you can’t keep postponing that thing month, after month, after month because there are more public comment. MR. TRAVER-Well, that’s a good point. However, I think it’s common practice that if we anticipate a large project with a lot of public comment, that that project is treated differently, and we can have a special hearing or whatever. I’m not saying it has to be hard and fast or whatever, but as a guideline, if we could have a goal that, look, we’re going from seven to eleven, so let’s plug these things in to these slots, and circumstances may overcome our ability to stick to those rules, but at least if we make a good faith effort and everybody knows what we’re doing and why, I would think that a good percentage of the time we probably could stick to it. MR. HUNSINGER-And I also think that if we take an hour of public comment, I think we, as a Board, know that either before that hour of comment or certainly after that hour of comment, if the project is going to be end up being tabled, and so I think it would be okay for us to say, gee, you know, we’ve been taking public comment for over an hour. The Board is going to table this application anyway, you know, we’re going to conclude the public hearing for this evening and, you know, let’s move towards a tabling resolution, and give the public an opportunity to come back at the next meeting. MR. TRAVER-We could also, perhaps, too, especially now that we’re doing the more detailed reviews, maybe we could say, we have a project that (lost words) two time slots, one for the applicant and one for public comment. We would have one fewer item on the agenda that particular night. MRS. STEFFAN-See, I think that one of the things that’s happening, I’ve been on the Planning Board for four years, and we rarely have applications that have huge public hearing, and so I think that we’re focusing on those exceptions, but for the most part, I think we do pretty well with allowing people to feel fully heard and fairly treated. We get lots of comments from people, you know, not everybody like the outcomes of a Planning Board meeting. We all know that. We get comments about how well we treated people, you know, and that’s one thing, as a member of the community, I would like to maintain. I volunteer, I can only speak for myself, I can’t speak for you. I volunteer a lot of time for the Town, and I want people to come up and feel like, you know, they were heard and they were treated well. MR. TRAVER-And I think that one relatively easy to do that is to have these kinds of policies in place that people feel they know and understand the process, that it’s not, you know, we’re not going to spend two hours talking with one character and one hour talking to another character, that there’s a process and, you know, that they’re going to get the same shot as anybody. MR. FORD-I feel public participation is good, but that’s such a small issue in the totality of our meetings. We all have a responsibility to keep things moving, but I, for one, Chris, would not mind at all your stamping the gavel and saying, let’s focus on this or we’ve spent enough time, I feel, on this issue here, let’s move on to this. We’ve got three more to hear after this. Let’s focus our attention on this, and help us sharpen our focus. I, for one, as a Board member, would not feel badly towards you if you chose to do that. MR. SEGULJIC-And one suggestion might be, I believe what you call informal polls, for example, Tom is out talking about something, can Chris then say, well, how does everyone feel about that, and everyone says, Tom’s out there. So, Tom, that’s it, move on to the next. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes. MR. SCHACHNER-Just a hypothetical example, Tom. MR. FORD-I thought he was referring to himself. 37 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 MR. SEGULJIC-The other thing is, I heard discussion about limiting the applicant’s time. To open the discussion like 10 minutes. MR. HUNSINGER-I think that’s a really good idea, and I was glad to hear those comments, because that’s something that I think we really do give the applicant a lot of leeway, and we’ll sit there through a half an hour presentation sometimes. MR. SEGULJIC-And hear people argue with themselves, like the guy with the hotel. MRS. BRUNO-That was one I was just going to bring up to. MR. KREBS-It’s the same guys. It’s the same engineering firms, and the same lawyers. MR. SIPP-Yes, I think that that’s true, because they try to beat you to death with their figures and their facts. MR. HUNSINGER-But you know the interesting thing is they’re the first ones to complain that we have late meetings, but it’s like, well, it’s everybody else’s fault that your meetings run late. It’s not our fault because we gave you a half an hour or forty-five minute presentation of our project when we could have done it in ten, you know. MR. SEGULJIC-I assume the real benefit is the question and answers. MR. BAKER-How long was the first presentation on the Vic Macri project? MR. HUNSINGER-I wasn’t there that night. MRS. STEFFAN-It was about, no, their presentation actually wasn’t very long, and I think we spent a little over an hour in totality on that, and that particular night, that’s a prime example, because I had to Chair, but we spent over two, I think it was two hours and twenty minutes on Takundewide, but we wrapped it up so that, it was my feeling, we were this close, and I made a conscious decision to keep going so that we could table it with specific conditions and we would, they would be able to come back at the next meeting when they were tabled to, and we could do an approval, everything happened, and so we’re ready to do that this month, but it was an investment. MR. FORD-I felt that was time well spent, after all of the meetings we had held up to that point. MRS. STEFFAN-Exactly. They were there so many times and there were so many issues we hadn’t resolved. MR. SIPP-There was a lot of public testimony that night. MRS. STEFFAN-That was actually a good example, Don, that, you know, the public, in that situation, I think they felt fully heard, fairly treated, and we got consensus, and we were all working in a positive direction towards a solution, and I think that’s part of our role, so, you know, that was time well spent. It was an investment for a return. MR. SEGULJIC-You had on here a new Comp Plan? That’s another question I have. Where’s the new Zoning Ordinance? MR. BAKER-The new Town Board has not yet had any workshop meetings to discuss the new Zoning Code. MR. HUNSINGER-Well, I put it down there because I know only recently members have been getting a copy of it. We haven’t really talked about it much. I just put it in there as an example of something that we might want to talk about. I mean, if there’s really nothing that needs to be said, we don’t need to spend any time on it. MR. SIPP-Why don’t we try to establish some kind of limits and see how it works. MR. SEGULJIC-Ten minutes for the applicant. MR. SIPP-Yes, well, whatever we give them. I think you’ve got to give them a little more than ten minutes. 38 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 MR. KREBS-Yes, you’ve got to give them more than 10, but you can cut the public to 3. I notice the Town Board doing that, and it works. MR. SEGULJIC-I’m not so concerned with public hearings, because that’s really a small portion of most of them. MR. TRAVER-Yes. What I would say is if we can have an absolute limit on the full amount of time at a given meeting that we’ll spend, after which it’s tabled, and then we can give some guidelines to the applicant, say, you might want a portion that time, if this is the first time you’re being heard, you might want to take. MR. SIPP-Yes, I think if you say we’re attempting to focus on this within a certain range of time, an hour, and then we will adjust it as time goes on and we see how this is going to work. MR. KREBS-Yes, it’s worth a try. MR. SIPP-I don’t think you can say you get one hour, you get one hour and you get one hour. That’s going to cause more friction. MR. TRAVER-I’m not talking about giving everybody an hour. I’m talking about having a maximum period of time. So if somebody is less than an hour, that’s fine. MR. HUNSINGER-Sure. MRS. STEFFAN-Right, it’s the maximum. MR. TRAVER-That doesn’t mean we immediately start hearing the next person. MR. FORD-And you can point to the clock and say, to be fair to everybody, we need to be out of here by a certain hour. We’re not going to be making our best decision at 12:30 at night. MRS. STEFFAN-And the other thing that happens, I think, and limiting the amount of time that we’re looking at applications, I mean, all you have to do is look up and down the Board row, and you can see people’s eyes glazing over while we’re on a project for too long, and so how are you giving it your utmost attention when you spend too much time on it? And so I think we also need to look at some of the cues we’ve got. MR. TRAVER-Yes, at some point, too much time or too late, we’re really doing the applicant a disservice because we just, you know, we’re not able to function as well. MRS. STEFFAN-I can’t handle the late meetings anymore. I have to admit. MR. HUNSINGER-I can’t, either. MR. TRAVER-And just speaking for myself, I know if we have a particular application, unless the issues are very sharply defined, if we spend like two hours or more talking about a particular application, towards the end of that time, I begin losing touch with where the pieces all connect together. So, much more hearing like a one hour block and then having another meeting, knowing going into it that I’m going to hear another block, would be much more effective, in terms of being able to take away from that. MRS. STEFFAN-Okay. So some of the things that we’ve talked about and decided on, regarding making our meetings more efficient, we actually started the evening talking a little bit about the completion review process to make the applications ready to be reviewed. So that’s the first thing, and then once we get into the agenda, we’re going to be focusing on better agenda control, better time keeping on each one of the items that’s presented, looking at review length, and if we can identify something’s going to be tabled, we move things forward instead of spending too much time deliberating, and that we can also limit the presentation time of the applicant. MR. TRAVER-Those are things that can be in our hypothetical handout, too, so people understand, again, the process. MR. HUNSINGER-And then the other thing we talked about is using the Site Plan Review and Subdivision review sheets. MR. SIPP-Can we get copies of that? 39 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 MR. HUNSINGER-I know I have copies. I know when we talked about it once before, Stu, I think you said that you had them as well. I don’t have them on a spreadsheet, though, like Gretchen has. MRS. STEFFAN-I’ve got attachments, and so I’ll save them in two different versions and just send them out. MR. BAKER-Yes, save them in an older version, if you send them to Staff, we can then (lost words) and two put it on a PDF form and circulate it around. MRS. STEFFAN-Also define timeframes for public comment. That’s the last one. MRS. BRUNO-Did we also include the possibility of looking into IT so that we can have our mailboxes through the Town, so that we can avoid these issues? MR. HUNSINGER-Like I said, I talked to the IT Staff and they said it’s a piece of cake. I talked to Ryan when I was in there. He said there was a form or something that each individual member would need to fill out. Can you follow up on that, Stu? MR. BAKER-Yes, I will follow up on that. MR. FORD-Great. Thank you. MRS. BRUNO-Yes, that would be excellent. MR. TRAVER-Yes, that’s probably a use agreement or something we have to sign. MR. HUNSINGER-Well, I think it’s just, you know, you need to get a password. MR. KREBS-You get a user number. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes. MR. FORD-Well, I just want to reiterate something, and I know you’re encapsulating here, but we all have a responsibility to move the meetings, and if they’re not moving, it isn’t always the responsibility, or the fault of the applicant, and if we, as individual Board members, are contributing to that elongation, then I think we should, personally, any of you, feel free to say, hey, Tom, I think we’ve covered that. Seriously. MR. TRAVER-Well, I think there are applications that are going to require hours to review, and I think all we’re talking about doing is compartmentalizing it. We’re not talking about limiting it. MR. FORD-Well, but that’s a way of compartmentalizing it. If we’re not focusing and if we’re going off in too many different directions, then somebody needs to perhaps rein us in. MRS. STEFFAN-Well, I don’t know if, there’s another thing, and I know we’re short on time, but there’s something that I think that the Zoning Board does, and I don’t know whether they assign it, but each one of the applications that comes up, there seems to be someone who leads. It’s not the Chairman. There’s one of the members that leads the discussion on a particular item. MRS. BRUNO-Did they discuss that at that last organizational meeting? That sounds familiar. MRS. STEFFAN-I don’t know, but I just noticed them doing that, and I’m not sure whether that’s something that we could do or should do or whether, you know, we have six items, we have a six item agenda limit, we have seven people on the Planning Board, and that would exclude Chris, but, you know, even if one person took the responsibility for, or was assigned, okay, you’re going to do the motion for that application, and so, you know, one person would spend more time or, you know, would get hyper-attention because you’re going to be responsible for putting forth the motion for that. Obviously, you’re not the only one who’s putting the conditions on the motion. You’re gathering information during the public hearing. MR. TRAVER-I think that we’ll find, you know, if we were to impose a limit, say hypothetically an hour on an application. I think that we would find that the professional 40 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 community would move things along. I think that they would, they’d come in with their agenda, designed to fit within that context, and they’d be saying to us, you know, do any of you have anymore questions on this? Because they would be very motivated to move along and move along to the next issue and move the process along, knowing that they’ve got this window of opportunity in front of us. So, you know, there are some things that we certainly can do, but I think if everybody, if the community was aware that we were going to develop this procedure, the community would respond to that, I think, particularly when there’s, you know, the professional community that’s bringing these applicants in, the applicant doesn’t necessarily know anything about the process, but the professionals certainly do, and if we were consistent and fair about it, and we said, you know, okay, you’re on tonight and you’ve got your hour max, well they’re not stupid. They’re going to be thinking about it ahead of time and they’re going to say, how do I want to divide that time up in my initial presentation, questions from the Board, and they’re going to probably start feeding us with, you know, you might want to ask about this, you know, Tom, I know you’ve got an issue with the landscaping, have you thought about that, you know, and they’re going to be initiating a lot of things to move it along, I suspect, to help themselves in the process. MR. BAKER-Just a clarification. The current agenda limit, as per the adopted By-Laws, is six, not seven. MR. HUNSINGER-Right. MRS. STEFFAN-There’s seven Planning Board members. So that would mean that the six of us could be split it up, and Chris would be excluded from doing that, because I thought that’s what. MR. FORD-But the actual agendas are exceeding the six limit, are they not? MR. SIPP-The last one, is there? MR. HUNSINGER-No, there’s just six. Because we’re not going to see Schermerhorn. MR. TRAVER-So now where we can work is that would put us consistently out at sometime after one in the morning. MRS. STEFFAN-I don’t think so. MR. BAKER-I did some quick math on this. If you wanted to set a goal of trying to be out by 10:30 every night, that would have to be an average, you’d want to average about 38 minutes per application. MR. HUNSINGER-Yes. MR. KREBS-And that’s doable. MRS. STEFFAN-It’s a good goal. You’ve got to have goals. MR. HUNSINGER-So that’s how we came up with the six item limit. It was considered 45 minutes a project. So it gets you out at 11. MR. TRAVER-And I really do think we’re underestimating the adaptation that the professional community would make to that structure if we were consistent and they really believed that we were going to do it. It’s going to take time make people believe, boy, they really mean it, you know. MR. SIPP-The applicant should be thinking, this lawyer’s just chinging away here. MRS. STEFFAN-And a lot of times they’re just sitting there and they’re hating it. MR. SIPP-Can we agree to give it a sample try for the next three meetings or so? MR. HUNSINGER-Absolutely. MRS. BRUNO-I think it really needs to have a front end, so to speak. MR. SIPP-And then formal, yes, no we’re going to continue, or to tweak it in some way. 41 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 MR. HUNSINGER-Well, I mean, we’ve come up with five or six items to help speed the meeting up. I think we try and it and, you know, two months from now, reassess it. As I started to say, I’ve already said three times, we will be done at 10 o’clock. So, what next steps do we want to follow up on? MR. TRAVER-Well, we have one subcommittee that’s going to be doing some work and will be reporting back, on the issue of the handouts. MRS. STEFFAN-We’ve got tools and techniques that we’re going to try to employ to improve our meeting (lost words). MR. TRAVER-And could you send to one of us, if not all three of us, because I notice you taking some notes, on what we’re proposing, the mitigation that we’re proposing, the mitigation that we’re proposing for the meetings, whether we’re going to limit the time or whatever, because we might want to incorporate that into a handout for the public, so that people understand what, you know, here’s what you can expect when you come to the Town of Queensbury Planning Board meeting. MRS. STEFFAN-Well, for right now, this is not going to happen, what you guys are going to, your outcome’s not going to be done in a month, probably, and we’ve got two meetings to try some of the things we’re doing, but we just need to see whether the things we’ve decided on tonight are going to work for us, and we’ll have two meetings to figure that out. MR. FORD-Well, I want to make sure that, as a member of that subcommittee, that I fully understand our challenge. I thought, initially, it was going to be to give guidelines for public participation. Now I hear that it has grown into something where it’s going to be an expose of the whole process for the meeting that night, and I don’t think that’s the focus of it at all. MR. TRAVER-Yes, that’s a good point. MR. HUNSINGER-No, I would just leave it to what we talked about, the guidelines. MRS. STEFFAN-I think we have a better understanding of how the Staff department works that supports us, and, you know, I, for one, think that the Staff is doing a really good job to support us, and I know that it’s a lot of work, and we really appreciate you, George and Stu, and please pass our regards on to the other folks, you know, Bruce, Craig. You do good work for us. I think there’s one thing that isn’t covered, and I think in the two or three minutes that are left, and I’m going to put Mark on the spot for a minute. I wondered if he might be able to talk about ethics and outside relationships briefly, just to put it into context, what’s appropriate, what’s not. Certainly over the course of the last year, you know, we’ve had situations where e-mail chains have gone back and forth and appeared at meetings where, you know, some of us were included, some of us were not. There have been discussions with outside agencies that some of us were not all part of, and the waters are a little bit muddied right now, and I wanted to know if you could give us some legal guidance and counsel on that. MR. SCHACHNER-I think you said ethics and outside relationships, but I’m thinking you mean ethics and outside communications. MRS. STEFFAN-Right. Well, in the document we have it says relationships, but, yes, communications. MR. SCHACHNER-I mean, here’s my, it’ll be less than thirty seconds, and well save the extra minute for questions and comments. The fundamental premise is that all Planning Board decisions should be made based on information that is gleaned at an open public meeting, and what that means is, and I’m going to just say the absolute, and then that’ll take up my thirty seconds, and it’s not workable in real life as an absolute, but the absolute, which should be the goal that you strive for, is no discussions nor exchange of information with anybody about an application out of, what I call out of school, meaning out of an open public meeting, not between yourselves, not between, you know, you and the applicant, not between you and the neighbors, not between you and some State agency representative, none, zero. I mean, that’s the goal. The reality is there’ll be some, and you should minimize it. Am I addressing what you want me to address, Gretchen? MRS. STEFFAN-Yes. 42 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 MR. SCHACHNER-Some people observe that pretty religiously. Some people have a hard time with it. It’s very hard when you’re not the initiator, when you’re the receptor, and that takes some backbone and it takes some moxy. MRS. BRUNO-How does that work if we’re sitting at the Board and we’re thinking that we need more input from DEC or? MR. SCHACHNER-Get the input, tell Staff. MR. BAKER-Direct Staff to get the input. MR. SCHACHNER-Tell Staff we want to request, what you should not do, flip it around a little bit, what you should not do, as a Board, decide we need more input from DEC and have some Board member go and call DEC the next day. Why? Because then nobody else is hearing what the DEC person has to say. Tell Staff we want to make inquiry of DEC. Have Staff call, or better yet write to DEC and get something in writing from DEC, which is then furnished to everybody at the same time at an open public meeting. MRS. STEFFAN-What happens, Mark, roles and responsibilities of Planning Board members? You get a call from a member of the community who wants to give you information or tell you something or ask you something? MR. SCHACHNER-It’s easy for me to say this, this is the easy answer, but I really stick with it as best you can, not to be rude, Mr. Smith, Ms. Jones, I’m sorry, I’m not supposed to discuss any aspect of any application out of a public meeting. By all means, submit your information, if you want to state your information verbally, come to our next meeting, or come to the public hearing on this topic, or this application, and speak your peace. If you want to send something in writing, please feel free to do so, but send it to Queensbury Town Hall, to Queensbury Planning Board at Queensbury Town Hall, and by the way, one thing I think I said earlier that I’m guessing is not being taken that seriously is I think you’re all taking pretty seriously the notion of these are inappropriate communications, but when you get it and you bring it, then, to the open public meeting, I think Don mentioned something about getting something, you said you got something in the mail, but Don mentioned he got a phone call. It’s really helpful, and I would suggest if Staff’s not uncomfortable with this, it’s really important to let the person who’s doing the inappropriate communicating know that it’s inappropriate. If all we do, upon receiving something at our home, is bring it in to Town Hall and make it part of the public record, that’s our legal responsibility, but we haven’t told the person who sent it, don’t do this in the future. So I don’t know if you want to do a stock form thing that just is automatically sent to anybody that does this to any of our Planning Board and ZBA members. Whatever you want to do, or do nothing, there’s no legal requirement, but the point is, it’s not something to be encouraged. It’s something to be discouraged. MRS. BRUNO-A stock form might be good, because then you don’t end up getting into the, you know, it keeps good fences. MR. SEGULJIC-One quick, hopefully it’s a quick question. What happens if, for example, I want to become more of an expert on how a traffic study is done, and it’s not an application. Can I call the DOT and talk to someone? MR. SCHACHNER-You said it’s not application specific? MR. SEGULJIC-Correct. MR. SCHACHNER-Amen. If you want to become more educated about a generic topic, go for it, take a course in it, you know. MR. SEGULJIC-You can’t bring up a specific application. MR. SCHACHNER-There’s no limitation whatsoever to your ability to do anything like that in a generic manner. It’s when it’s application specific that it’s a problem. MR. SEGULJIC-Okay. MRS. STEFFAN-And there’s one more little question, Mark, as far as speaking for the Planning Board, media or whatever, my understanding is Chris Hunsinger is the. MR. SCHACHNER-You weren’t here yet. We actually had that specific question, and that’s the answer. 43 (Queensbury Planning Board 02/13/08 MRS. STEFFAN-Okay. MR. HUNSINGER-We do have site visits at Saturday. We meet behind the Town Hall at nine o’clock. MR. SIPP-This is something I picked up off of Mr. Coon. MR. SCHACHNER-He is now deceased. So you’re not getting anything from Mr. Coon. MR. SIPP-Anyway, it’s a short, it has to do with the flow chart and the timeframes, and I’m short, two. MR. SCHACHNER-I can give you a better flow chart if you want one that makes more sense. It’s a SEQRA time chart, right? MR. SIPP-Yes. MR. TRAVER-Yes, there’s a SEQRA Cookbook that’s available on the web that’s really good. MR. SCHACHNER-The SEQRA handbook is way better than the SEQRA Cookbook. MR. HUNSINGER-Meeting’s adjourned. On motion meeting was adjourned. RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED, Chris Hunsinger, Chairman 44