July 10, 2018 Town Board Meeting - Additional Notes

Meeting Notes from Another Neighbor _____ (blank) means comment was inaudible.

The sewer committee changed the language in several areas of the proposed sewer law due in part to comments made at the public hearing held May 8, 2018.  Three town board members expected to have to hold another public hearing on the committee’s proposed changes, but Mr. Goslin stated his opinion that that was not necessary since there already was a public hearing. With that the three questioning board members accepted Mr. Goslins opinion. There is no plan to have another public hearing.  

--Board Discussion of Sewer Committee Report:   Goslin said, “we proposed this law prior to the referendum and then we held a public hearing that I’m sure you’ll all remember,  and whats happened is Kim put all of the comments and put them  in specific buckets and then presented them to the sewer committee a month ago for their recommendation, and then yesterday we met with the sewer committee and reviewed the same documentation that Kim has discussed tonite and so this comes to the board as a recommendation from the sewer committee and really requires board action,and to Kims point, we’ve kind of figured everything out except the penalty and we think that umm…the board is better equipped to provide the final input on that rather than the sewer committee and also we may, ya know, out town attorney may want to tweak a few things however out town attorney has been involved in most of the drafting of the response, so at this point the sewer committee is turning this over to the town board  for their action, there is no hurry on this, I think the target date we had was we wanted to try to get this passed by the end of the year, so we have time to discuss it and to  umm do that but at this point its in the boards hands.  I would suggest to give the board one month to look at it , we can put it on the agenda for the August meeting to either make revisions or we can accept it as recommended.”  Tim asked “Then we can have another public hearing?”  , Stewart said ‘it needs another public hearing”.  Goslin said, “no, you’ve  done your public hearing.”  Stewart asked, ‘so we don’t need to have another one?”, and Goslin said, “No…no.”   Szczypaniac said, “Ok, alright.”   Stewart suggested the September meeting and John Antoski agreed.

2      Mr. Goslin announced that there will be increased costs associated with the Ballston Lake Sewer Project that were not disclosed prior to that referendum, but tried to assure everyone that these increases would not increase the amount the town has to bond and would not increase the cost to the resident as stated in the map plan report. 

      

      Goslin:  “ I’d like to talk about the engineering piece, I have the document from yesterdays meeting, this was what our engineering subcommittee came up with which really is Kim and Dick Doyle and Jim D’Pasquele and these guys are all engineers working with Adirondack Engineers.  It’s 5.5 pages of comments on the engineering.  We’re sending the spec to agencies and the county.  It’s a process we go through before we go out to bid.  I’d like to inform the board that there are some obvocations (?) we’re going to be looking at for the sewer project itself ok?  When this was engineered four years ago there’s a significant process that went through from preliminary engineering to detailed engineering spec that we came up with, and there will be some changes that we’re going to make that involve increasing project costs and this increased project cost will increase the cost of the overall project will not increase the amount that the town has to bond and will not increase the cost to the resident as stated in the map plan report. And the reason why we can…,we have this ability to… this is because we have this 2.5 million dollar grant that was not part of the original proposal.  So I’m going to give you an example, there’s some improvements that the county requires for the pump station, so the original pump station did not have a specification for a backup generator.  We would like to add backup generator to the project and will be coming to the board for that.  Additionally there were spare parts that the county wants for that pump station.  There’s additional odor control equipment that will do a better job than was originally spec’d.  We will put those packages together before the board and work through those in the Fall and hopefully the board will approve those so we can add those enhancements to the project and meet the requirements in some cases with the county, so that’s where we’re going”.

      Goslin announced he wants resources in place by the end of the month to deal with the issue of taking control of residents properties in the Ballston Lake Sewer District by the use of eminent domain law.  The resources he wants are monetary from the town, to pay for hiring lawyers for this. 

      

     Goslin stated , “before we get off the sewer thing I wanted to mention a couple of other things related to sewer, Kim had mention eminent domain and the easement situation, the project required that we get 213 easements , umm, a large group of people have been working on those, from Kim to volunteers on the committee to our legal folks, and we’ve done a pretty good job getting that down to a reasonable number but now its time after 6-8 months of talking to residents its time to step that up a bit, we know there are some easements that are going to require eminent domain so we are looking for legal resources from the town to do that and we’re also looking to get a letter out to the remaining people to basically say that you’re heading in that direction, in a nice way, and that should come from our legal team as well as our sewer team as well, so I want to discuss how do we do that, I know we have an executive session scheduled so I want to make that a part of executive session to determine what resources or contracts we use to ummm to deal with eminent domain.”  Tim said, “  let me just comment on that, I really didn’t think we’d need to go into executive session this evening, maybe this will help you Bill.  I know we have some interest by some attorneys for us to hire them to help us with this endeavor. What I want to do is get together with Kelly to interview these folks and get them here and help with that.”  Goslin said, “yeah, what I’m looking for is a commitment to be able to have the resources in place to handle eminent domain by the end of the month.”  Antoski asked about the 9.  Kim said “the nine we know will need it.”  Antoski asked ‘what about the ones that theres been no..they don’t reply to anything?”   Kim said, ‘we have the right house, the right address, the person lives there, they’re not home, I’m waiting for people to follow up with me, we just can’t seem to reach them.”  Goslin said, “we have the nine and then there’s the 39 we’re still working on, we expect the 39 to probably drop in half, there’s still a bit of work there, but the 9 ..ya know..they don’t like something…we’re not giving you an easement because we love water, too……if you’re really interested, there’s a story behind each one, we have big tall stories, we have dock association stories, yeah, its out there, so ummm, we’re going to try to reduce the 39. 

      Stewart (who is the town board liason to the Parks and Recreation Committee) announced that there are two quotes for demolition as well as two quotes for the re-construction of Firemans Grove. She did not state the names of the contractors who provided the quotes.  Were they associated with her husbands construction company? Also, the town finance lady (Jeanette) stated that there are no funds allotted to pay for this.

Stewart said “Brian got two quotes on demolition of Firemans Grove, two

quotes for construction of a new pavilion, and one quote for repair and that is not the best option.  Decisions are needed.”  Jeanette said she will come to the next Park and Recs Committee meeting on Wed. at 7pm and they can discuss money and where it will come from.  Brian’s two demolition quotes are $9500 and $14,000, and that includes the town recycling metal.  The two re-building quotes are $39,500 and $30,000.  There are no contracts for rentals this summer other than a September chicken BBQ. Szczepaniak said to do the work in downtime and put this on for the agenda meeting for a resolution.

Goslin stated that the sewer committee is not willing to change it’s time from the 3pm weekday timeslot because it’s convenient for the people on the committee, despite requests from the public to change the time to one that is not during workday hours.

Antoski addressed the Carpenters Acres proposed sewer project: “I did receive a question from someone in the community regarding the sewer committee and the times didn’t fit, if there were any ways to change that, but the person from Carpenters Acres, I think they were concerned that there were things moving forward with Carpenters Acre, which I said I wouldn’t assume that the committee was working on that and even if they were, it __________hearing, but that was just a concern from someone, I want to make sure I was correct in the fact that the committee is not, the committee comes up with ____, there’s no movement….”.  Then Goslin responded, “ I would say that most everything discussed at the committee level comes before the board here, and the, we certainly…if there were a large number of people that wanted to change the time we would consider it but it seems to work good because we have a lot of professionals and we also have a lot of people who donate their time and that three o’clock hour  seems like a nice time, we would be open to suggestions but right now we are comfortable where we are.”

Goslin and Szczypanik stated they want the board to be prepared to vote on the zoning changes at the upcoming agenda meeting.  Goslin stated he wants what he will call THE 2019 ZONING INITIATIVE to start right away.  He wants all items that are controversial and need further investigation to go into a ‘bucket’, and have the board ready to vote on the remainder at the next agenda meeting.  Items that were deemded controversial are TDR. PUD, and commercial building sizes.

·      ZONING: 

Szczpaniak said he had a lot of input and said “it seems like the concensus out there is, and rightly so, in that Kingsley Rd. area, keep it down to between 10-15,000 sq. ft, think about it, Kingsley Rd too, there’s really not much room there really for any more inventory to come in there, but it will be good to keep that number at a low level, that was very clear, so my recommendation with those others that remain that the board has to make decisions on is we have to wrap this up at our agenda meeting this month and all of the decisions made so we can move forward so we can implement both the _____ process _________, is everybody good with that?”

·      Goslin said “there was no PUD involved with Dolomite.”   “I don’t know anyone in this room that would be in favor of large additional multiunit apartment complexes within the town of Ballston, I’m amazed at what I see being built currently and I believe that we have to be careful with zoning because if we zone out commercial space, the only alternative we have is apartments so I’m suggesting we come up with a line item in the zoning package that makes a rather significant restriction on multi-unit buildings in the town of Ballston. And I think that’s a real issue, I don’t care if we’re talking about TDR or whatever, we don’t need 100 and 200 and 300 and 400 unit complexes, even under the current zoning we’re building 50, 60, 70 unit developments. I would suggest a multi-unit building of 4-6 units max. with a restriction put on a site of 24 units or 30 units or something like that. I just dont see the benefit, based on the feedback that I see, of having additional large multi-unit buildings.”

·      Tim responded, “Now talking about that, the northern end of our town up by Janet V Corners and McDonalds, now we’re talking to a grocery store chain that is very interested, I think you’re exactly right, I think there’s a time and a place for that commercial development, obviously not in the quaint area of our hamlet, I think the north end, there’s definitely opportunity there.”, 

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·      Goslin said that , “I think what we should do next meeting,  is determine what we can solve next meeting or what will have to go into another bucket or what I will call the 2019 Zoning Initiative that we can start right away.  So I would suggest that any of these items that we cant resolve, we remove them from the zoning changes, you appoint a committee immediately that begins working on next set, and that might be one area that we look at, and we look at preserving  the current zoning in the northern area at the current levels and we have a group sit down and look at all the sections on 50 and solve the TDR/PUD issue and look at _____, and I think these are the issues that get resolved as a separate piece he want the 2019 Zoning, we can start right away.Things we can’t resolve will go into another bucket for later.  Like the TDR and PUD issues need to be resolved as a separate piece. I challenge Councilman Curtiss who is not here this evening that TDR allows you a 600 unit Little Farm multi unit development, and we wouldn’t have any choice in that one.  If TDR is passed in its current form, its 10 units per acre and it doesn’t come before the board, its done.  PUD you can discuss it, you can have a public hearing, and then some of the other things is ______. You are looking at 10 units per acre, and Garrett Rd, is 10 units per acre.  So I really think that those issues are not going to be solved with the exchange of public comment I think we’re going to have to hire a professional again, I think we need to look at each section, determine what the needs are, and have a professional recommendation, so that we can meet all the needs in that area, including the street lights. I love the street lights in front of CVS, I think they did those optionally and we’re trying to get Stewarts to do that, and they’ve agreed to do ________, we shouldn’t be begging them, it should be part of it, it should look the same.

·      Tim responded “I would ask this board, the email that Sophia put out from the meeting we had before with the remaining items when she was very descriptive, is to review that in detail so we can come to the agenda meeting and make decisions on that, and we may have to put that in the bucket for future review and to lets get everything else …”

·      Gosling continued, “we can’t hold up _____”.

The town board is totally uninformed on the legalities of town procedure (as dictated by the NY State Comptrollers Office) on how to go about researching and planning for the installment of sewer in an area of town.  Three of the four board members had several questions about how to avoid paying for an expensive referendum ($75,000) on sewer for the proposed Carpenters Acres area of town.  Mr. Goslin expressed his opinion on how to do this, but he was totally incorrect, yet the other board members didn’t know he was incorrect.  The correct processes available to towns is on the NY State Comptrollers website. The town attorney said she would look into it.  However, it was startling to see the town board members working on planning to possibly dictate that there will be a sewer in Carpenters Acres which would then require the residents there to hire an attorney to draw up the proper petition required, then they’d have to walk the area and get the petition signed, then present it to the town board who would then be mandated to hold a referendum.  Not a great way to get re-elected!

Carpenters Acres proposed sewer project:

·      The map plan report (MPR) preliminary will be done in August.

·      Szczypaniak said “One comment I’d like to propose to the board, is what we learned in the public hearing of the Rt. 50 from the folks that came in from Carpenters Acres, there was some comments on that, again look at that project, it is a lot more costlier for the Carpenters Acres residents…so my recommendation to the board is why don’t we propose having a forum, maybe 2 or 3 sessions, try to get a majority of folks in a workshop, in the Community Room, talk to those folks, go thru the project costs again, it does cost quite a bit of money here to put a referendum together, its a lot of time and effort, I really feel that if theres enough support we’ll move forward with that, if not, we’re not going to move forward.”

·      Antoski said  “I’d like to take a look at that, what the actual costs are.  As in the public hearing, so long as there’s a series, just so long as the people have the information, there was a swell originally but now I’m getting the feel that theres a significant number that do not necessarily want it, so we have to get that data.”

·      Tim said, “it’s a smaller number there, too, so…”

·      Stewart said, “what do you think we can do to better guage feedback from residents?”

·      Goslin replied, “ I think you need to really consider changing it to the referendum to the…whats the term…the petition process where you..umm..theres two ways to pass this…one way is the referendum where everyone comes to vote….the other is to have a petition that is legally binding upon  the town board and that’s a petition of the members to do that, that way we avoid the cost of the umm, the cost of the vote.”

·      Stewart replied, “you still have to have a referendum though because if we establish the district, and there’s a petition that wants a referendum, then we still have to hold the referendum.:

·      Goslin replied, “No no no no, theres a type of petition that you can sign that will require the board to take action.”

·      Stewart replied “lets get more information on that.”

·      Antoski replied, “isn’t that permissive referendum?”

·      Town Attorney replied, “I was of the understanding that 50% of the residents would petition the town board but at that point it would be put out to a referendum rather than the town board initiating it.”

·      Goslin replied, “I think they can also petition that they want the sewer district, and then we’d have to act on their behalf, but anyway, the next step is to get the MPR back, I think there would be some kind of public forum, two to three sessions for 80 people might be excessive, I’m thinking maybe one or two.”

  The town board is working to not allow farms to build single-family dwellings on their farmland for farm-worker housing.  The town board wants farms to sub-divide their farm if they want single-family farmworker housing.  Farmers are very much opposed to this because, according to Nancy Colakowski, “If there were a subdivision, some of the boundaries would impair the full use of the property for our intended operation of the farm.  If you have a subdivision of our 60 acre horse farm, you may end up putting important barns, or riding rings or part of a cross-country course on the sub-division. So going back to what Ag and Markets is looking for…are you unreasonably restricting the operation of the farm?  The second home is imperative because it is a horse farm and you can’t leave the property with horses on it for very long because emergencies are constantly coming up, such as you have to transport an individual or a horse to a hospital, or there is an equipment failure, or someone is sick and you have to provide relief for that person. Someone has to be there 24/7.  So one family can’t do it themselves.”

Privilege of the Floor:

 Joe Colakowski, Devils Lane:  “I’d like to check on the final stages of zoning changes that Nans ____with regard to multi-generational with farmer housing , what we’re getting from Sophia is that that’s not her interpretation.”  Tim said, “yeah so she went back to Nan on that, do you know the results of that Brian?”.  Brian said, “I don’t know where that….”. Tim said, “We’re going to check more on that in a couple of weeks at our agenda meeting.  I also have been further checking with that with Sophia and correct me if I’m wrong but what I was told is that there is a mechanism in place now, right?, that lets you do that.”  Joe replied, “the mechanism now is that you can sub-divide.”  Tim said, “it’s not like you can’t do that, but I just wanted to make sure you were aware that you can do that.”  Joe said, “right, ag and markets from the state discourages dividing farms up into little parcels, I mean the purpose of preserving farmland is to keep the farm intact.  Sub-division may work in some cases, but you kind of defeat the purpose of farms first community.”  Goslin asked, “Does ag and markets have an opinion on farmers housing?”.  Joe replied, “yes, they support it.”  Goslin asked, “and they support single family dwellings?”  Joe said yes and that he will forward the last email he received from Nan.  Mr. Antoski asked, “so essentially …if you are the owner of the farm, then you’d have two homes there with family members in both?”  Joe replied, “correct”.  Antoski said, “so essentially, you then have to..if you wanted to sell the entire parcel, you’d have difficulty, right?
 Joe replied, “  if it got to the point where we ever decided to sell, it would either be another farm family or we’d have to sell two separate homes, but that would be our problem at that point.  Ag and market addresses the taxation on the second structure, if it were trailers ..which we discussed at the agenda meeting…that would not be taxable,  but this stuff would certainly be taxable.  I can pull up the stuff for you.

 Nancy Colakowski, Devils Lane:  “We got to talking about ag and markets, I have a document here from them that speaks to local governments, ‘when exercising power to enact and administer comprehensive plans, laws, rules and regulations, shall exercise this power in such manner as they realize the policy and goals set forth in the Article, and shall not unreasonably rescript or regulate farm operations within the agricultural district in contra_____  for the purposes of this Article unless it can be shown that public health and safety is threatened.”  So, I had prepared statements for tonite. I really feel the need to know that Sophia is on the same page as us.  Our answer to Ag and Markets would be ‘the one use per lot regulation is arbitrary, unreasonable, restrictive and adversely effects our ability to manage the farm operation.’  If there were a subdivision, some of the boundaries would impair the full use of the property for our intended operation of the farm.  If you have a subdivision of our 60 acre horse farm, you may end up putting important barns, or riding rings or part of a cross-country course on the sub-division. So going back to what Ag and Markets is looking for…are you unreasonably restricting the operation of the farm?  The second home is imperative because it is a horse farm and you can’t leave the property with horses on it for very long because emergencies are constantly coming up, such as you have to transport an individual or a horse to a hospital, or there is an equipment failure, or someone is sick and you have to provide relief for that person. Someone has to be there 24/7.  So one family can’t do it themselves.  Going back to Ag and Markets, they have four tests they look at :  (1) is the farm located in an agricultural district?  (2)  does the regulated activity encompass farm operations?  (3) does the local ordinance unreasonably restrict or regulate?  (4) is the public health and safety threatened? “

 Mr. Draina:  The speed limit on Outlet Rd. in the Rec. Area is 45, its too fast for that road.  Theres a blind area at the curve of the road.  Whatlen said it is out of his hands and to ask the board to petition the county.  There are only 15 houses on the road.  Stewart asked if the county will do it, and said “we will have to petition the county.”  Also, regarding hiring a maintenance person, it’s a good idea but questions:  what is the cost including retirement, and what qualifications will the person need?  Make sure the person is capable of doing the jobs.  Also,” it is my understanding that Nan recommended the square footages for those commercial spaces  not just by pulling numbers out of the air but she did studies and looked at the area of our town, our comprehensive plan, and those square footage sizes were based on things that kept our town rural, and were not maximum allowable sizes based on just the area that was available, and that keeping the smaller square footages in those areas would keep the town of the sq. ft. of commercial buildings and did studies based on keeping the town rural.”  Mr. Goslin asked, “do you have any comment on the farmworker thing as far as the farmland protection group goes?”.  Mr. Draina replied, “I support it, I don’t think theres anything wrong with it. They would be the first in our town, we’ve had a bunch of first, PUDs that were firsts…and some were unsuccessful but I think this would be a good test area, that is in the ag district, its on Devils Lane, a quiet road that gets minimal traffic, we’d need to see how it works out, I don’t see any adverse effects other than like they said, if they were to sell or to transfer their property in the future, the ownership would be on them to figure out how that property would be divided at that point in time.  The structure would be taxable and that would be better for the town, verses a tempory structure, so I don’t see any adverse effects.”