City of Auburn Planning Board
Tuesday, November 7, 2007 6:30 PM, MEMORIAL City Hall
Present: John Breanick, Alan Zentner, Anthony Bartolotta, Brian Halladay, Mark DiVietro, Sam Giangreco, Chair.
Staff: Stephen Selvek, Planner; Brian Hicks, Sr. Code Enforcement Officer; Andy Fusco, Corporation Counsel
The Chair called the meeting to order. The Pledge of Allegiance was recited and roll was called.
Agenda Item 1: Minutes of August 7, 2007 and October 2, 2007.
Chair asks for a motion to approve the minutes of August 7, 2007. Motion made by Mark DiVietro, seconded by Anthony Bartolotta. All members vote approval. Motion carried.
Chair asks for a motion to approve the minutes of October 2, 2007. Motion made by John Breanick, seconded by Allen Zentner. All members vote approval. Motion carried.
Agenda Item 2: Public Hearing: For the purpose of gathering input regarding the City’s priorities for the Community Development Block Grant 2008-2009 Action Plan. Jennifer Haines,~Director Office of Planning and Economic Development.
Jennifer Haines – the CDBG program, the City of Auburn has accessed funds for over 30 years. At first as a small cities program where we had to compete for funds and now as an entitlement community where we receive funds automatically in a formulas basis each year. Every year we have to submit to our funder, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development an action plan on how we are going to spend the funds that they provide to us. What they do is they ask us to shape our action plan around public input. So right now we’re in the middle of our public input process, we’ve hosted four public meetings around the City and you have notes from those meetings in your packets. So we’ve been out and about talking to people and the fun thing this year is that we’ve had better
participation from the public than we’ve had from the past and I think that is the function of is that there are some neighborhood groups that are starting to get organized and be more engaged in what they want to do in their particular neighborhood. We were out there, we heard them, you’ll notice in the notes we heard some comments applicable to other City departments as well and we’ve forwarded those to the City Manager for his distribution to the other departments and answered the questions applicable to the CDBG program. We’re doing a public hearing tonight and we have a couple people that will be speaking in a moment. You have our budget also in your packet and priorities that had been set in 2005 as part of our 5-year strategy. So the budget shows you how we’ve broken up the budget into four major program areas. CDBG funds can be used in 3 different ways in the way that HUD has broken down into national objectives. The first way
is benefit to low and moderate-income households and that’s where 70% of our funds each year have to be spent so most of the things you see in our budget are related to that particular item. We have income guidelines set by HUD every year based on family size and we can provide funds in 2 ways to the low and moderate-income families and they are by direct benefit which many of our programs are that way; our home repair program where we provide low income home owners with loans, all our human services activities that you see on there benefit the customers that our agencies are serving, all have to be of low or moderate-income. Our business loans that we do, the businesses that create the jobs they have to be available to low and moderate-income people so that’s direct benefit. We also can do area benefit activities which is our sidewalk programs. This map here on the bottom, the blue areas are the areas of the City that are considered by 2000 census date as low to
moderate-income meaning that 51% or more of the people who live in these block groups are of low to moderate-income. So what that means is that is we have a park or sidewalks within that area we can do those on an area benefit basis meaning we can go down Wall St. or Van Anden St., this year is where we are, and we can do sidewalks on a comprehensive basis instead of asking every person on that street to document their income to us. We can do that based on 2000 census data. Direct benefit, area benefit, there’s a couple different ways that we can assist low/moderate-income households. There’s two other ways to use CDBG funds. One is elimination of slums and blighting influences. We have our demolition program that you see in the budget there and that’s basically how we do that. The house at 120 Owasco St. that was just demolished a couple days ago was demolished with CDBG funds. We have a couple more, hopefully soon, that are owned by the City, that had been
privately owned, that we had an order from the court to demolish. So typically we are demolishing City owned properties that need to be demolished. The third way is urgent need which doesn’t mean ‘I urgently needs funds’, what it means is for natural disaster. Hurricane Katrina clean up and some of the rebuilding down in New Orleans is being done with CDBG funds. So there’s the ways you can use the funds. The other thing in your packet is what I referred to before and that’s the list of priorities set a couple years ago by the public and we’re supposed to shape our program around those priorities. Steve and I were talking about this the other day and if you look at the first priority there, homeless services, you would think our budget would reflect a great amount of funding for that versus some of the other things in there. One of the things that’s interesting is you’ll see you’ll see a lot of human
services activities in our priorities but this program is what they call bricks and mortar program, they like to build stuff with it, so they actually cap the amount of money we can use for human services activities. So what we try to do for those particular activities is we let out an RFP every year and have people compete for 165,000 dollars worth of funding. So people competing in those areas, the higher priority get higher priority from our review committee. So that’s how we kind of try to balance that even though we don’t have as much funding available for the human services activities. If any of you have questions on specific programs in the budget I’d be happy to answer them. If you’re interested in explanation of the programs I can go thru that now. Some of you have heard this spiel year after year after year and some of you haven’t so if you’re interested I can talk a little bit more about it. I want to be able to
interact with the Board after we close the public hearing if that’s ok but if you want to go ahead and open the public hearing we have a couple people here who would like to speak. Then I can answer questions or provide more explanation to the Board.
Sam Giangreco – at this time I’ll open the public hearing. Any members of the public wishing to be heard please come up to the microphone, state your name and address
Barbara Bowen, Grover St., administrator for the Human Services Coalition – here to express support for the current plan and how I think the new plan is shaping up for the CDBG program specifically talk about the human services piece of it. The Human Services Coalition itself does receive funding and we have for ten years, a long time. And I just wanted to tell you what our involvement it. The piece we are most interested in and we try to cooperate with other agencies and with the Planning Office, information sharing and you probably all have seen this around town (shows brochure). If you haven’t I’m the person to come to to get a copy. Everything you want to know about services. More recently this little piece came out which is a collaboration with our homeless effort and the coalition. Have you all
seen this? And other ways we’ve tried to come up with information, make it available to the public, but also so the agencies use this and they therefore are more efficient in their referrals. The other piece we are charged with doing and it’s often difficult is coordinating and looking at consolidation of services. Actually looking at duplication. This is something Jenny and I have talked about a lot and the Coalition is in the process of doing the strategic plan and one of the things, looking at the by-laws, we’ve talked about every year what we want to do is begin focusing more on needs assessment. Collecting all the data out there, generating data, compiling it and let’s figure out where we are efficient and I’m talking mainly human services – human and health services. Where the gaps are, where we’re efficient so that when we think about filling needs or providing funding funders, government and even agencies know better where to put
the effort. So we hope to step up our activity on that piece. The other thing we work on is collaboration. And we have a wonderfully collaborative relationship with that office. And we try to encourage all players to collaborate and you all probably try to encourage people you know and agencies you work with to collaborate and that’s one of the things we continue to do and put effort in. So I just wanted to say support of the plan and particularly the value the Planning Office brings to our community, both as a homeowner, resident, those interactions and as a Human Services agency representative.
Tracy Murphy, Syracuse, Executive Director of Options for Independence in Auburn – here to express support for the plan and the hard work that Jenny and her staff have done. We have fortunately been the recipients of funding for access modifications for homes which we feel is extremely important in the community. We have a much older housing stock here in Auburn than we’d really like to have that leads us to situations where homes do need modification especially if our elderly or disabled population wants to age in place and remain in their homes so we have a program that provides ramps and other modifications. We also are very much in favor of the funding for the homeless programs. On an almost daily basis, especially now that we see the cold weather, we’re seeing more and more people who have a need
for homeless services. So we thank you, we thank Jenny and her staff for the work they’ve done and we support the plan and the priorities.
Sam Giangreco – asks Jenny about shelter opening at Holy Family. Does that have anything to do with this?
Jennifer Haines – some. We have interacted with the volunteers from Holy Family. They started this effort back in June, we had a task force meeting Monday and they came and updated us on where they are with their project. They have a very visionary priest there, he had started a shelter like this is the Rochester area where he had been before. He saw a need here and decided he wanted to get something started. An emergency shelter is something we’ve struggled with as the Homeless Task Force has tried to obtain funding in different ways and have run against the wall a lot of different times. So we’re really excited about them doing it. We’re trying to make sure they’re aware of the resources the agencies and the community provide. There are 3 different agencies right now that have funding
from the federal government for different kinds of homeless services whether it’s leasing programs for permanent housing or case management. We want to make sure they’re hooked up with who they need to be. The way they’re going to do it, and they’re not open yet, they were hoping to be open by now but they are going to be meeting tomorrow night to get the last of the kinks out. They’re going to be providing up to nineteen beds, kind of like a cot, you come in at 8:00 p.m. and you have to be out by 8 a.m. It’s just for men to start, right there in the gym at Holy Family. They’ve worked it out with CYO and all that to make sure they’re not conflicting with other things the parish supports. We’re excited; we’ve been talking with them and Brian has been great working with them on Code issues that need to happen in the church to accommodate it. They’ve interacted with agencies and the City at different levels. They just
need to get open and figure out what’s going on. Hopefully they’ve approached several different funders and we expect they’ll be applying to CDBG this year for assistance as well.
John Breanick – what is the status of the curb program? Noticed especially on N. Division St. that numerous layers of black top has been put down and some of the curbs are non-existent now as well as some of them have deteriorated at it’s an old section of town. Are we working to do any curb repairs?
Jennifer Haines – what we try to do is work with the Engineering Department to see if they are actually redoing a road where we are going to be doing sidewalks. As you’ll see in our consolidated plan, the 5-year plan, we’re targeting our sidewalk dollars in places where we’ve done neighborhood plans. So you’ll see in different areas where we’ve targeted funding. Sometimes the road program is there and sometimes not, we try to coordinate, the one thing we want to make sure is that if we are doing curbs we’re not cutting into a road that isn’t being done by the City quickly or at that time as it reduces the lifetime of that particular road. We aren’t doing curbs as much as we are doing sidewalks. The focus of the program is typically in trying to make the neighborhoods
walkable so we’ve been concentrating more on sidewalks. Councilor Graney in particular is very interested in curbs so we have done some. We try to stretch the funds as far as we can and do as many sidewalks as we can. Curbs are definitely something that needs to happen. With the limited funds we have they have not been as much a priority as the sidewalks.
John Breanick – would it be feasible instead of putting in granite curbs to put the concrete curbs in which may be significantly cheaper?
Jennifer Haines – some of that is policy from the Engineering Department, we try to go along with what they are doing City wide. Our Engineer, at this point and I agree with him, granite curbing is going to last longer in the long run, it’s easier to reset.
Steve Selvek – just to follow up on that actually, granite curbing has for some time out priced concrete curbing by 2 to 3 dollars per linear foot. And the most recent bid the City has received concrete curbing has been more expensive than granite curbing for one reason or the other. So you’re looking at 36$/linear foot for concrete and 34$/linear foot for granite. There’s not the actual cost savings there that is often times perceived.
John Breanick – on E. Genesee St. there is a variation is the kind of curbing put in. Some granite then the older curbing.
Steve Selvek – the work being done along there is partially State funded and partially Federal funded and therefore is required to go through the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO). They require often that the old sandstone curbs be maintained and kept. So you’re going to find in certain places either a complete turn towards sandstone curbs like along South St. Due to cost considerations along Genesee St. they’re allowing them to replace broken curb with granite but then to maintain the existing sandstone for whatever preservation reasoning or background that they have.
John Breanick – what’s happened to the curbing that’s been taking out? What have the done about disposing the curbing that was still good? Does the contractor keep it? Does the City stockpile it someplace?
Steve Selvek – they’ve had different policies in the past to address that. I know at times the City has stockpiled curbing at DPW typically to be used in park setting or something of that nature where they are trying to separate two areas. The issue that often comes of what you’re saying where there is old curbing there, the old curbing looks in half way decent condition, the problem becomes, from a contractor’s perspective, they’re going to charge just as much to reset the old curbing as they are to install new curbing. So quite often what is happening they take the old curbing out, stockpile it and then proceed forward with installation of the new curbing.
John Breanick – we are retaining it then?
Steve Selvek – I believe that much of it has been retained. I’m not sure in this specific instance along Genesee St. what the agreement is but I know in the past road work they have retained a significant portion of the curbing.
Jennifer Haines – there has also been some discussion around surplus items the City has in inventory and one of the things the Manager is looking at now is how to sell that. There was some discussion of putting the curbing on E-Bay, different stuff like that, to try to get some revenue back into the City.
John Breanick – addressing Tracy Murphy – every year we seem to have a bit of overage on the ramp program, what’s the status of that as of this year?
Jennifer Haines – there had been some staff transition over the past few years. Right now they have caught up and have lots of projects ready. They are actually going into their 2007 funds and are chomping at the bit because they need to spend it. Anything that might’ve happened in the past around unspent funds is caught up and ready to go.
John Breanick – I think it’s a very worthwhile project and know it’s been used a lot. In situations where residents pass away or move what is the status of the ramps that are left there? Does Options become the retainer of the ramp or the City, does it get removed?
Jennifer Haines – the point of us providing the ramp or whatever accessibility is needed is to benefit that person at that time who applied for the program. Of course we hope there is longevity there. But your right, I’m sure there are cases where the person moves or passes away but I don’t know if that’s an issue that’s been taken up or talked about.
Tracy Murphy – we have encountered this recently. We are working with one feasibility to remove and reuse the modification. We are looking at that before starting the project. Needs outweigh funding at this time. We are leveraging funds as well as we can.
John Breanick – most ramps are made of wood, have any other materials been considered that could easily be taken up and moved as a unit to another site?
Tracy Murphy – with aluminum, and one thing we have to consider is safety, a lot of times aluminum can become very slippery with the weather we have here. A lot of temporary ramps we have are of aluminum or other material but a permanent ramp right now, the best constructed material we’ve found and that others are using in the State is still wood.
John Breanick – What’s the expected life span of a pressure treated wooden ramp?
Tracy Murphy – we have ramps right now that have lasted up to 15 years. It depends of course on the quality of the wood but we are looking at the best possible within our budgets so we do work closely with the contractors and we use the competitive bidding process and we use contractors from our area so they have a solid investment in the community.
John Breanick – at one time at Willard Chapel they were stockpiling items from houses being demolished that had useable items in them. Are they still doing this, any of the organizations?
Jennifer Haines – you mean the Preservation Committee?
John Breanick – yes, I think that would be a good use as opposed to just…especially fixtures and things like that. Sometimes to find some of the fixtures needed in the older houses is very difficult.
Jennifer Haines – I’ll have to ask, I’m not sure.
Steven Selvek – I think in particular the houses that have been torn down more recently, there is such a deteriorated condition, in addition to the health and safety factors, the materials aren’t necessarily easily reusable. At least that’s how it’s been the past few years. I agree fully that if there is the opportunity to look at reusing materials vs. just demolishing and dumping it’s a good opportunity.
John Breanick – it reduces the use of the landfill and puts back some productive used of people restoring some very eloquent houses in this community.
Chair closed the Public Hearing. Thanks Jenny, Barb and Tracy for coming out. Also thanks Brian Hicks and Andy Fusco.
Other matters
In new matters Staff has one additional item to address concerning the upcoming SEQR review for 252R North St.
Steve Selvek – 252R North St., commonly know as the Pearce Tract, in August of this year 2 plus 4 Development and Homsite came before the Board to seek a ruling to whether or not their proposed plan was Standard Development or Planned Development. The Board’s determination was that it was a Standard Development. As such what they are seeking, instead of Planned Development, is to do a subdivision of 31 lots of which 30 of the lots will be single-family, semi-detached homes and then the last lot will be a community building for that site. Single-family, semi-detached is a permitted use within the R1 district. It is duplex style construction with two separate deeded properties that share a common wall between the two. Common in other parts of the world, not so common here within the States. Stepping back
from there, the subdivision itself, as you’re aware, will require review under SEQR, and just to go through and high light a couple points in regard to that review, it’s often been the practice of this Board in general to do the SEQR review towards the end of the process just before the Board makes a decision in the site plan, subdivision, etc. Upon discussion with not only our Corporation Counsel but also a number of trainings I’ve been to as well as some outside Counsel it’s been brought to my attention that the SEQR process is meant to be done right at the beginning. The SEQR review is supposed to be based on the short EAF or full EAF that is required for Type I action. Generally what we want to do is move that SEQR process to the beginning as that process is supposed to high light for the Board, the applicant and other involved agencies what the upcoming issues may be. Whether it’s storm water drainage, impact on community character, traffic,
etc. Often what we’ve done from a Staff perspective is looked at those issues, “solved” or “mitigated” those issues to the best of our ability and then took a look at SEQR and noted that we’d taken care of all those issues. Really, SEQR should be done before then to outline those issues. One of the things I want to do is to make sure, from the perspective of looking at SEQR, is to get the process started as early as possible. That is why I’m coming tonight with the request that the Board act as Lead Agency for the upcoming subdivision review of 252R North St. Generally I would wait until we had an application in hand to ask you to do this however, going back to this past July subdivision fees were revised and as such the applications need to be revised which I am in the process of doing. As such what I’m asking the Board to do is declare themselves Lead Agency and this does a couple things. #1 it starts the process. #2 it will allow
me to disclose any incoming information to the involved agencies. In this case we would be looking at the ZBA as an involved agency as the plans shown in August would require an area variance for the lot width and also an involved agency would be the Cayuga County Health Department. CCHD, based on NYS health laws, has the right and jurisdiction to review any subdivision of 5 or more lots which are less than an acre in size within a 3-year time period. Any questions or explanations needed I’ll be happy to field those before going on.
John Breanick – agree it sounds like a good procedure but if I recall correctly there was not a great deal of support for this project. I know this may be a test case for us but I didn’t feel at that time it was a good project and I still feel that way unless there’s been some significant changes to it. We spinning our wheels to declare ourselves Lead Agency? If we tell then ‘no’ right off with SEQR does that mean they’ll go away or what?
Steve Selvek – what will happen, as part of the review process as you are aware, you get to look at the facts as presented and determine whether or not there is to be a significant impact or not. This Board has always, in my experience, declared negative declarations under SEQR, in part because we wait until the end, when everything has been remediated and taken care of, to look at SEQR. On the flip side is the positive declaration which takes a look at some of those impacts and one of the impacts expressed at the August meeting was the impact on community character and this being adjacent to a single-family residential area which are single-family detached homes, that this may or may not have an impact on that character. That’s where the SEQR allows the Board to take a look at those impacts from the
get-go whether it’s traffic, environmental, community character, impact on natural resources, etc. the SEQR process gathers all that information to determine yes or no there’s likeliness of being a significant impact. At that point, assuming that the Board thinks there will be an impact, if you declare a positive declaration under SEQR the next step for the applicant is to prepare a draft environmental impact statement which essentially starts to outline what the issues are and how those issues can be mitigated. So that kicks off another process. Providing a positive declaration does not end a review of a specific action, it just says, ‘here’s the next step, let’s look at doing a draft environmental impact statement’. That environmental impact statement then becomes a large public process where the
statement has to be prepared, advertised, public needs 30 days to comment on it. Once the comments are in they can address those comments then they have to prepare final environmental impact statement. It high lights the concerns the Board may have right from the start and has the applicant looking at those to start with instead of following up with them.
John Breanick – if I remember there was not only a neighborhood issue but also a drainage issue there which is one of the things that falls under as being significant impact to the area. Also that’s probably bedrock there being so close to the stone quarry. I can’t see enough positive stuff here. If we do become Lead Agency to fully inform those who left their names back at the beginning and fully apprise them of these changes so they don’t see it as a final site plan.
Steve Selvek – this is not an attempt to try to forego public input. This is actually an attempt to move the public input to the front of the line. That was the intent of SEQR right from the start that involved agencies, the public and everyone has a vested interest has their say right from the beginning and that it doesn’t get lost in the sauce as it were. Really, that’s what we’re trying to do here, open the SEQR process and proceed in a correct manner so the Board doesn’t have to worry about an Article 78 in the end from either side whether it be the applicant or the public opposed to this and that we can go through and start with declaring the Board as Lead Agency, circulating the information to the Zoning Board and the Health Dept. for their input at the same time the public hearing will
be required as part of the traditional review that we go through for subdivision. Public Hearing assuming that they can move forward they have things provided to me, I have comments back, the Public Hearing could occur as early as the December meeting and that is at the point where you’d be looking at SEQR declaration whether positive or negative and also considering preliminary subdivision approval. Now if you come back with positive declaration that foregoes the ability to move on to a preliminary subdivision approval until the concerns outlined in that positive declaration are dealt with. This is the best process going to try to go through and encourage public involvement and participation.
John Breanick – I believe Homsite does a great deal of positive things for members of this community but I don’t feel this area is the best use for it. It would be nice to encourage them to either develop another way or possibly in another area.
Steve Selvek – as part of this process generally if a positive declaration is declared, part of the draft environmental impact statement is looking at alternatives for development whether it be less units, different style, etc. The one option that is not valid is telling an applicant who has ownership of the land to look at doing that development somewhere else. It’s not a reasonable option to consider. However one of the options is doing nothing at all and they have to justify why doing what they want to do outweighs the cost benefit analysis of doing nothing at all. There are options they have to look at and consider as part of that draft environmental statement. That too will be a learning process.
John Breanick – besides contacting neighbors we do have a number of new members that have come on board since then maybe staff could get copies of the minutes sent to the new members.
Steven Selvek – the minutes in the packets now are of the August 7, 2007 meeting where this was discussed. Also, when I have new, revised plans from the applicant all the members of the Board will be made aware of that.
Brian Halladay – I took the class on SEQR and I believe the idea of doing SEQR first is to address everything he was just talking about so that the input from the public is addressed. We don’t really have a choice do we? We have to do it beforehand and then follow up.
Steve Selvek – correct, the original process was that it be done as the first step of the review of an action. The issue I’ve often found is in-house we were looking at those issues from a Planning Office perspective and saying we have to address these issues. It’s great when you have someone you’re working with, that’s an applicant who says ok and mitigate all those issues before they come to the foreground. This particular proposal is causing us to re-evaluate the way the City has proceeded with SEQR and the fact that it’s not really the best practice, the way we were going about it, and to bring it to the forefront to address issues people are concerned with and get those out there and ask the applicant their intentions for addressing any concerns noted.
John Breanick – procedurally though, when a person has been clearly denied on other occasions, is there a procedurally set time frame when they can bring it before the Board again? It seems like this has been brought up numerous times already.
Steve Selvek – in this case, the 1st time it came before the Board it was an introductory meeting of the project. Because there was no vote there was no public hearing but because the public had expressed interest from an early stage they wanted to be heard and the Chair at that time said it was fair to allow the public to be heard and allow them to be involved in the process. The 2nd time was to look at whether it was standard or planned development. It’s been a logical progression of steps and they’ve gone through each step they need and now they go to the next step which is to apply for subdivision for a Standard Development. I don’t know the procedure for an application that is outright denied, if the applicant can bring it back.
Andy Fusco – they can bring it back almost an infinite number of times so long as they make changes. To bring the same proposal back hoping a new Board will give a different outcome would be unlawful. What’s usually seen is a slight change of the original proposal.
Allen Zentner – as Lead Agency I believe there are some times frames that need to be met.
Andy Fusco – we may be a little premature with this declaration tonight. That isn’t a problem. Once we have declared ourselves Lead Agency and once we have the proposal, and in this case probably a long form EAF, one of the questions of the long EAF is for the applicant to identify the other involved agencies, and we know of at least two from Steve, and there may be others as well that we don’t know of yet. Once we have that application the secretary or Steve will notify the other involved agencies that on November 7, 2007 the Auburn Planning Board resolved to be Lead Agency in this particular matter. That is when the clock starts. The other agencies then have 30 days to respond whether they accept that or not. If contested DEC would make the decision, although that never happens by the way. Usually the
other involved agencies are happy that someone else will take it. The other time constraint is that once we get the application there is a 10-day turn around time to get it out. Voting on Lead Agency status tonight does not start the clock.
Allen Zentner – I was at the class last month also and we were cautioned that Board’s that meet once a month there could be a problem because of a 20 day time constraint and they would need to meet again before that time was up although I don’t remember exactly what it was for.
Andy Fusco – that would be news to me. I’ve also lectured on SEQR. The downside is doing something before the period runs. I would never see any reason to reconvene.
Steve Selvek – I’ll review the time frames
Andy Fusco – the downside risk and what inevitably happens is the applicant is, I see where the 20 days comes in, let’s say we take the full 10 days to get our resolution out to the other involved agencies, now they have 30 days to respond and we will have met again in that time so that would be 20 days after the 10. Well the 30 day period for the other agencies to respond will not yet have run so that may have been the caution, not to take the action at the 2nd meeting if that 30 day period has not run.
Steve Selvek – I do want to clarify the 20 calendar days. I’m looking at what that refers to specifically that the, in the case that there is a single agency involved as Lead Agency it states that once the agency has received the application it must determine the significance of the action within 20 days of receipt of the application or any additional information reasonably necessary to make that determination, whichever is later. Essentially, the application is made to the Planning Board, the Board does not receive the application until the night of the meeting, from that point forward you have 20 days to make a determination as to the significance of the project. The caveat here is that if you need additional information you get to wait until you receive that additional information and then you have 20 days
from that point. So when someone makes an application the Board should be considering SEQR at that first meeting unless additional information is needed for clarification.
Andy Fusco – does that sound like what you all were talking about?
Allen Zentner and Brian Halladay agree.
Andy Fusco – that raises an issue that I’ve never considered. Generally what happens with single agency reviews is you don’t wait any time, it’s resolved that same night. What did she say is the remedy for the applicant if there is no action in 20 days?
Allen Zentner – she said there may be times the Board has to meet within those 20 days.
Andy Fusco – what I’m saying is there’s no such thing as a negative declaration by default. So if we don’t meet within the 20 days where’s the harm? By the time they sue us in an Article 78 to compel us to meet we will already have met anyhow. The one worry you have in SEQR is acting too quickly by taking action before the 30-day comment period has run. And that’s what I’ll caution you on.
Steve Selvek – I think that 20 days is there to protect the applicant from continually tabling a motion on SEQR as a way of extending the process. You have to make up your mind on whether or not there’s a significant impact. The caveat there is if there is not enough information the Board is encourage to ask for it so they can make an educated decision. That’s what it comes down to, once you have the information you need you’re expected to make a decision to keep the process going.
Andy Fusco – to answer an earlier question about possibly painting ourselves into a corner of having to approve something we don’t necessarily want to approve and the answer to that is no. Because you are declaring yourselves Lead Agency doesn’t predetermine your ultimate decision or the merits of the project. And because you may eventually neg dec the project doesn’t mean you are going to approve the project either. Alternatively you’ll never defeat a project with SEQR. The purpose of SEQR is not to make a project perfect, it is to identify what environmental issues can arise and then make the applicant do what is reasonable to try to mitigate it, not eliminate it but try to minimize the impact on the environment.
John Breanick – from a legal stand point though, we’ve had a lot of changes in the past year on this Board, if there’s a negative declaration by that body, then you have 2 or 3 different people and they are of a different mindset are we allowed to bring that up again?
Andy Fusco – I can see that possibility arising and I’ve not had a lot of experience with it as this Board may have. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
Steve Selvek – part of the reason for doing this is that quite often the SEQR process has been done in house by Staff and that is not appropriate. This is something that should be done by the Board who ultimately is making the decision. And to go through and bring to you some of our concerns from a Staff perspective but also to make sure the concerns or the support for the project is voiced by the Planning Board members and not so much by Staff.
John Breanick – as I recall the City was the only one exempted from having GML289. Are you saying that will not be valid anymore and you want it to go back to the County to say what we can and can’t do?
Steve Selvek – GML289 is a separate issue from SEQR. That’s specific to certain actions whether or not the County Planning Board has jurisdiction over those actions. The County Planning Board has waived the requirement that the City Planning Board submit back to the County Board so long as it employs a full time planner. This particular one that I’m talking about County involvement is through the Health Dept. This actually caught us by surprise when we did the previous subdivisions for Vitale and Hunter Brook in that the Board proceeded knowing itself as an involved agency but not realizing the Health Dept. does have jurisdiction by State health law over the subdivision and pretty much what happened on both of those is the applicants thought they were finished with the process and once they went to the
other side the County Health Dept. let them know they needed to be involved also. The Health Dept. declares major subdivisions as Type I action.
John Breanick – so County Planning has interplay with the Health Dept. on this?
Steve Selvek – no, it’s the Health Dept. only.
John Breanick – do they have planners on their staff that would know about this?
Steve Selvek – the Health Dept. is looking more specifically at issues of water supply, sewage, septic, etc. That is their jurisdiction of overseeing a subdivision. They won’t be looking lot sizes, etc. Because, under SEQR, they have the ability to approve or deny subdivision, the Lead Agency has to solicit their comments. Likely the comments or issues you will worry about aren’t the same ones they will worry about.
John Breanick – can we override them?
Andy Fusco – everyone involved has to say yes. If one says no the project is dead, no one can override anyone else.
Chair – asks for a motion to adopt the resolution declaring the Planning Board’s intent to act as Lead Agency under SEQR. So moved by Brian Hallady, seconded by Mark DiVietro. All members vote approval with John Breanick abstaining for more information. Motion carried.
Next meeting is Tuesday, December 04, 2007 at 6:30 p.m.
Motion for adjournment made by Anthony Bartolotta, seconded by Mark DiVietro. All members vote approval. Motion carried.
Recorded by Alicia McKeen
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