Rewrite of Town Zoning Underway and Under the Radar

On May 29th at the back end of the Town Board Agenda Meeting the town board had what appeared to be a public hearing and discussion regarding changes to zoning.

Notably active in the discussion was a Mr. Rossi (Frank Rossi Building). Mr. Rossi is urging the town board to allow 90,000 square feet building. Currently, 20,000 square feet is proposed.  It's worth noting the new CVS building size is 13,255 square feet.

At the meeting Mr. Goslin shared part of a private conversation with Mr. Rossi. Here's a partial transcript: Mr. Goslin: “The change from 90,000 to 20,000 is a radical change, and I’m talking about the north section. I did sit down with Mr. Rossi and he said …Ya know if you want to set that to 20,000 I’ll build apartments on my property all day long because I wont be able to build any commercial buildings or any retail buildings or anything else, and that really struck home with me that we need to understand that there has to be a place in town where we build businesses and going from 90,000 to 20,000 is extremely restrictive and your enforcement of PUD’s and if some people had there way we just wouldn’t build anything bigger than that, so I guess the question the board has to decide is whether you’re going to allow anymore commercial building in town or not because these restrictions here will pretty much shut it down and that’s kind of where you are , and if you want apartments… set your building at 20,000 and you’ll have apartments all up and down rt. 50 and 67 like they’re building right now, so this is a pivotal issue and the board is going to need to understand, you have to make a decision.”
Changes to zoning were originally started and a draft completed with Public Hearing by the Professional Planner, Nan Stolzenburg, in Nov. 2017. The process is now in the hands of the Town's resident planner in the Building Department Sophia Marruso.  As of this writing, no public post of this discussion was found on the town's website but we requested the notes from the meeting and they are posted here: Zoning Work Session 2 Materials

Town Supervisor Szczepaniak Commented in the June 6th TB meeting the zoning discussion will continue at the next Town Board Agenda Meeting June 26th at 6:30PM http://www.townofballstonny.org/calendar.html

Additional transcript and notes from the May 29th meeting can be found on this site.
A link to the Town Board Minutes from the May 29th meeting:
http://www.townofballstonny.org/documents/AGENDAMEETINGMAY292018.pdf