Neil Bettez has been the New Paltz supervisor for eight years, which is long enough to understand just how long it takes to get anything done through government. That means that priorities and goals sometimes get carried forward from one year to the next. With several large projects now complete, Bettez is looking to address issues of where to put all the people. There are shortages in housing for residents, and there are still gaping holes in where to put town employees as they do their work. In addition to trying to make changes to address each of these issues, there are also town projects to keep abreast of growing environmental challenges that are closely tied to population growth.
Housing crisis
Efforts to address the local share of what has shaped up to be a national housing crisis are ongoing. In the coming year that should include overhauling the accessory dwelling unit law, which regulates how to add an apartment inside of a house. The current law was, in Bettez’s view, designed to prevent this from happening at all, but times have changed. Accessory apartments increase housing density, which lowers the per-capita cost of most infrastructure. Parking needs may increase, but zoning changes could lead to it being easier to live without depending on personal motorized vehicles at all. The new law will only be usable by owners occupying the building, to prevent it from becoming an avenue for investors to profit. Bettez hopes that the final version won’t require bureaucratic hurdles such as planning board approval.
Accessory apartments have other benefits beyond making it easier to make living without a car easier thanks to increased population density. Retooling the law could make it easier for homeowners to age in place, either by using an apartment to help bring in income, or by allowing families to keep elderly relatives close without unduly encroaching on their independence by shunting them to an age-segregated facility or community. When these apartments are not occupied by relatives, it results in a personal connection between tenant and landlord, and perhaps fewer issues resolved through legal papers rather than conversations. “It won’t solve the housing problem” on its own, Bettez admitted, but it seems to be a start.
The east side of town
Town officials continue to apply for grants to address some of these thorny issues. One of these would be to hook to residents of sewer district 6 into the village system across the Thruway. Outside of grants, sewer district expenses are picked up by sewer district users, and since the motel was demolished and the diner shuttered, upgrading this old plant is looking even less economically feasible because there is a requirement in place that disinfection be added to the system by 2025.
Hooking into the village system would also make it possible to more fully realize the development potential of the relatively new Ohioville zoning, which is thus far limited to what can be built using wells and septic fields. “The capacity is there,” said Bettez, citing commitments made in connection with creating a hotel and butterfly conservancy on the old Plesser property. Part of that land is now slated for a new county emergency services center, with the fate of the remainder 56-acre parcel to be determined at a legislative meeting to be named later. Ohioville proper, one of many communities ripped asunder by the building of massive interstate highways, could be a place to live and work if this comes to pass. Town officials are seeking competitive state grants to make that connection, and make it easier to use the Empire State Trail to access the rest of town. If that came to pass, then the sewer plant would be replaced with a pump station, and possibly a park.
The west side of town
On the west side of town, the deck of the rail trail bridge over the Wallkill is nearing the end of its useful life. Its existence is a creative use of railroad ties from the tracks replaced by the trail, but even chemically-infused wood breaks down eventually. The current deck has an estimate four to five years left before it won’t be safe to use any longer, and Bettez is loath to make it harder to walk around by allowing that bridge to be closed for want of funding.
Henry W. Dubois Drive bike path
Wrapping up work on the Henry W. Dubois Drive bike path is also possible in 2023. What’s been completed thus far has been behind the scenes; obtaining approval for where the path intersects with a state highway has been a complex process. Bettez said that transportation officials are “very particular on easements,” and that considering an existing village easement took about a year. What’s next is going to be the visible part of the work, which is likely to include terminating certain trees that were effectively sentenced to death through this plan. In balancing the needs of human and non-humans, some of the human residents of this street felt strongly that these trees should not be executed, but it appears that the benefits to humans and the planet will hold sway in this case. The path is a bicycle portion of the Empire State Trail, a high-profile project of the prior governor that gained support because it could shift human behavior out of individual, motorized vehicles that have been a significant contributor to climate change.
Critical environmental overlay district
Another environmental push in 2023 will be to create a critical environmental overlay district to add into the zoning code. This is in response to the amount of resistance planning board members and their paid consultants mounted against adding several Critical Environmental Areas (CEA) to town maps instead. The CEA is a mechanism that works within the State Environmental Quality Review act, or SEQR, and are adopted by resolution. The idea is that properties within a CEA are flagged during the environmental review, as a way to ensure that planning board members actually consider the larger context and not just the specific lot. Only one of the six proposed areas has been adopted, but out of the process came the idea that using a local law instead of this existing, state-sanctioned process would be preferable, and that’s why town council members plan on undertaking this more expensive process instead.
Plains Road residents to see a new water district
Down on Plains Road, a new water district will be coming online in the spring, after supply chain issues delayed construction. “The iron pipes are made in Ukraine,” Bettez said, and war there has been the most recent logistical challenge.
Water district 5 will ultimately be paid for by New York City residents to minimize local dependence on the local water being extracted for use in that downstate metropolis. While district residents will only use a trickle of the available water, the system is designed such that when the tap is turned all the way on, it should make it possible to cut locals off from the Catskill aqueduct for a period of time. Performing long-neglected maintenance on this aqueduct is necessary in order to shut off the Delaware aqueduct under the Hudson, and install a bypass around a problematic leak; in 2017, DEP spokesperson Adam Bosch estimated that 15 to 35 million gallons a day are disappearing under the river. This project faced stiff legal resistance from some Plains Road residents, but is now on track to become a fully operational water district.
During normal use, it’s expected that 80 gallons per minute will be needed. During an emergency shutdown of the aqueduct, that can be ramped up to 400 gallons a minute for several weeks at a time. While there’s been some concerns raised about potential pressure spikes and water hammers resulting from turning the tap all the way to 11, Bettez is confident that engineers will have a standard operating procedure in place by the time this district is hooked into the wider community system.
Composting
Composting will be transformed by grant-funded technology that will be installed at the reuse center during the next warm season. Solar-powered air pumps will accelerate the natural rotting process driven by microbes, while hopefully preventing larger critters from enjoying easy access to a food source. Compost will be available faster, and will be created with fewer odors and uninvited visitors. This will ramp up the capacity of a composting program that’s already a model of how to prevent organic waste from being carted to a western New York landfill. Bettez said that it’s now going to be possible to explore taking food waste from the local school district. State law already requires composting programs on SUNY campuses, leaving public schools as the most significant single source of food waste not being composted in town.
Municipal services
Town residents could find that it’s easier to pay for specific municipal services in the coming year, if a scheme to improve online integration comes to fruition. The supervisor envisions a future when it will be possible to book community center use, secure building permits, and pay other fees by setting up an account on the town website. In addition to being more convenient, it could reduce traffic to the aging trailers where most town employees—including the supervisor — are stuck working.
Bettez is starting to see an end to the decade-long use of temporary trailers for most town offices. That odyssey predates the current supervisor; it was under Susan Zimet that the old town hall was determined to be too toxic for human use. Bettez did oversee demolition of that old building, which after its sudden vacancy had deteriorated to the point that it had to be shored up to be safely torn down. The strategy has long been to resolve the other town building issues in order to find the room to create a new permanent town hall. Building a new justice center got the police out of an expensive lease and court personnel out of a building with considerable maintenance problems of its own, and now that old Plattekill Avenue space has been assessed by a local architect to figure out what it would take. There’s a lot of space, because the town building includes both the court and the old police station.
The information to formulate estimates and release a request for proposals was ready in the fall, but rising prices were extreme enough that officials decided to hold off moving ahead with this last major building project to resolve the current crisis. That is not a permanent solution, however: those trailers were indeed meant to be temporary, and there’s been a lot of fixing to keep them usable for this long. There’s also no potable water hooked into those trailers, which alone makes this an untenable situation because that’s a legal requirement.
Once it’s possible to remove those trailers, Bettez would like to see at least some of that space attached to Clearwater Park rather than becoming parking again. In particular, the supervisor would like to see trees planted to provide some shade to attendees of sporting events there. There also remains the question of what to do with the Veterans Drive property where the old town hall once stood. The supervisor believes that finding a recreational use for that property is important, because that’s one of the most densely-packed parts of town and the closest park – Moriello — is denied during the summer to anyone who doesn’t want to pay to use the pool.
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