Like most townships, Gardiner’s first Town Board meeting of the year was also its annual “organizational meeting,” during which the procedures for the upcoming year are set in place. By the passage of organizational resolutions, details such as staff salaries, holidays when Town Hall will be closed, what law firms or engineers may be consulted, what banks may be used to deposit tax payments and which daily newspaper runs the Town’s legal notices get formalized – even if many of them don’t change much from year to year.
What set Gardiner’s January 3 meeting apart was that it was the first one in decades not to have its minutes recorded by Michelle Mosher, who served as Town clerk since 1994 and retired effective the end of 2022. Organizational Resolution #42 confirmed the appointment of Julia Hansen, who has served as deputy Town clerk under Mosher since October of 2019, as acting Town clerk through the end of this year.
“Michelle had three more years on her term. Julia will have to run for the Town clerk position in the upcoming election to be the Town clerk in 2024,” Town supervisor Marybeth Majestic explained after the meeting. “Julia is a lifelong Gardiner resident, and the daughter of a past Town Board member and dear member of the community, Barney Hansen.”
In another personnel change from the previous year’s municipal roster in Gardiner, Joan Parker was confirmed to replace Michael Hartner as chair of the Environmental Conservation Commission (ECC). The sole vote against Parker’s appointment came from councilwoman Carol Richman, who in October had also opposed the seven-year renewal of her seat on the ECC, arguing that Parker’s husband’s role as clerk for the Planning Board presented possible grounds for a charge of conflict of interest.
Scoping out Zoning Code update needs
The January 3 Town Board meeting also featured an update from planning consultant Dave Church on the results of his research toward revising Gardiner’s Zoning Code, a top-priority task for Majestic and the Board in 2023. Church said that he had completed interviews with most of the major players in the processes affected by zoning law and planned to attend the Planning Board’s January meeting to discuss that body’s perceptions of changes or clarifications needed in the code.
Among the points on which all the stakeholders seem to agree, according to Church: that there’s a need for clarity on “terms that are undefined or loosely defined” in the Zoning Code; that the Town’s new Natural Resource Inventory maps should be put to use by all boards and commissions; widespread support for expansion of the Town’s central hamlet and for “stronger water resource protection.” The latter concern could spark a revisit to the watershed preservation law that was drafted in Gardiner some years back but never adopted, and perhaps the hiring of a hydrologist as a consultant.
The Town officials and employees whom Church interviewed all seemed to like the practice of holding a joint annual meeting of the Town Board, Planning Board and Zoning Board of Appeals, and he found “a lot of interest in a flow chart for the approval process” for their mutual use in tracking site plan applications. “The role of the ECC in conservation analysis,” an issue that has prompted controversy in the past – even triggering a mass resignation of ECC members at one point, when they felt that their hard work was being ignored by the Planning Board – remains “up for debate,” Church said.
One surprising detail that arose out of Church’s research was the fact that “The Tillson Lake neighborhood generates the largest number of variance requests,” possibly indicating a need to redraft the section of the code that governs development in that densely populated part of Gardiner. “A town with a well-written code might arguably need a lot fewer variances,” he said. “In any case, we ought to keep the code updated.”
Councilwoman Richman pointed out that the question of whether or not New York State will require decommissioning of the dam that creates Tillson Lake has not yet been resolved. “You have to look at the ecology of that area before you can change the zoning,” she said.
“What about getting help from the code for more affordable housing?” councilman Warren Wiegand asked Church.
“In interviews, the only person who really proactively talked about housing was Paul [Colucci, chair of the Planning Board],” he replied. “I’ll be glad if this code work can incentivize affordable housing.” He noted that the process endorsed by Ulster County is for each municipality to appoint an Affordable Housing Committee, which would be appointed an advisor at the County level.
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