The Review Goes On

At the Planning Board meeting earlier this week, Charles Gottlieb, the attorney best known in Hudson for representing the Galvan Foundation but who is now representing Lou Pierro in his effort to get site plan approval for the apartment building he is proposing for Fairview Avenue between Parkwood and Oakwood boulevards, noted that the project has been before the Planning Board for fifteen months now. In July, after the review had been going on for a year, a subcommittee of the Planning Board, made up of Susan Foster, Ben Forman, and Gini Casasco, presented a report about the project, which made the following recommendations:

• Reduce the number of apartments from 30 to 15 and make 5 of them three-bedroom units
• Make the 26 offstreet parking spaces assigned spaces--15 for tenants, 6 for workers in the commercial space, and 5 for visitors
• Add sidewalks and crosswalks to Oakwood, Parkwood, Paddock Place, and Glenwood and add a sidewalk on Fairview Avenue from the proposed building to Aldi's at Fairview and Healy Boulevard in Greenport
• Five more apartments, bringing the total to 20, would be acceptable if the last five were designated "affordable," which was defined as affordable to households with incomes of 80 percent of the area median income (AMI).

At Tuesday's Planning Board meeting, Gottlieb presented a revised proposal, with the hope of getting some guidance and positive response from the Planning Board. The new proposal involves:

• 26 residential units--9 one-bedroom (approximately 595 square feet) and 17 two-bedroom (approximately 900 square feet)
• 7 individual office spaces (each approximately 140 square feet)
• 27 parking spaces to be assigned to the residential units (2 ADA compliant) on the project site
• 9 additional parking spaces in a "remote lot" located at 23 Oakwood Boulevard--7 for the workers in the individual office spaces and 2 for visitors

Although a parking lot located a block away satisfied the Planning Board's concerns about parking associated with the two buildings proposed by the Galvan Foundation for North Seventh Street, this plan seems not to be having the same effect. Randall Martin predicted that most people would not use the auxiliary parking spaces. Theresa Joyner worried about the traffic impacts of cars exiting the parking lot. During the public comment period, Theresa and Brian Nicholson, who live on Oakwood Boulevard, expressed concern about the number of homes that would be affected because they border the lot to be used for parking, about the condition of the sidewalk between the building site and the auxiliary lot, and about cars speeding in the vicinity of the proposed lot.  

In terms of the Planning Board's response to the latest proposal, the only clue was a statement made by Martin, saying they were "all positive and well thought-out changes." During the public hearing on Mill Street Lofts, which followed the portion of the meeting devoted to the Fairview Avenue project, a resident of Mill Street commended the Planning Board for their careful consideration of the Fairview Avenue project, adding that he wished they had given a fraction of that consideration to Mill Street.

What's interesting is that of the three people who made up the subcommittee to study the impacts of the Fairview project and make recommendations--Susan Foster, Ben Forman, and Gini Casasco--only Casasco was present at Tuesday's meeting. Foster resigned after the board's September meeting, when the board made a negative declaration on the Mill Street Lofts project. It is rumored that Forman, who hasn't been present at a Planning Board meeting since the special meeting on August 20, when he voted against making a negative declaration on the Mill Street project, has either resigned or is taking a leave of absence from the Planning Board. At Tuesday's meeting, attended by only four Planning Board members (Joyner, Martin, Casasco, and Gene Shetsky), Fourth Ward supervisor Linda Mussmann asked point-blank, "How many people are on the Planning Board now?" Joyner, who chairs the Planning Board, said there are "a couple of vacancies" and also said, "Some people are not here for other reasons."

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