Efforts to move the idea of a Northeastern Conservation Overlay Zone (NCO) forward in the Town of New Paltz may have hit a snag with the planning board in part because none of their members were consulted in developing the plan.
A presentation by attorney Emily Svensen and planner Ted Fink was the sole agenda item during a planning board meeting held on Monday, November 27, explaining as they did before the town board nearly four months earlier that the idea behind the overlay district is to ensure there is a framework for the environmental impact of cluster development without restricting the amount of housing within. As Supervisor Neil Bettez explained during a July 6 NCO presentation, “the goal is to help local land use planners balance future growth with protection of priority lands and waters.”
Standard municipal zoning districts are intended to guide development by regulating the kinds of land uses and buildings allowed in specific parts of a community. An overlay district provides an additional set of regulations in a defined area, even if it traverses multiple zoning districts. An example provided in the presentation by Svensen and Fink showed the creation of an overlay corridor designed to protect a stream and its riparian area ecosystems, with the coverage including segments of residential, office and commercial zones.
Svensen said enacting the NCO into town code could also prevent environmentally fragile areas from being irreversibly overrun by development.
“If nothing is done, you could have this sort of death by a thousand cuts with so many different little projects going in and carving that area up with a lot of buildings, driveways, roads, etc…and it loses its habitat value,” she said. “So the idea is to guide future development so that doesn’t happen. And the heart of it is really the conservation design process.”
The move would streamline the process by having the rules written into town code, rather than relying upon stipulations within the State Environmental Quality Review (SEQR) Act.
Under the NCO, uses allowed under existing zoning do not change, nor would the number of houses that can be built. Only the layout of sites would change, with a conservation design process using NCO-specific resource priorities determining where housing could be built, along with the use of impact reduction measures, such as minimizing tree removal, stream disturbance and lighting.
Regulated activities within the NCO would include new commercial construction, subdivision of land for multiple homes, and new construction of single family homes on parcels of six or more acres of land. Parcels within the NCO that are smaller than six acres would not fall under overlay zoning rules, and if a parcel is partially in the NCO, only that portion would be regulated.
The proposed NCO would be bordered by the Esopus and Lloyd town lines, Route 32 and Horsenden and Ohioville roads. Existing neighborhoods and densely developed areas were omitted from the NCO district due to their limited ecological value.
The lands within the NCO include high-quality forest, small and large wetlands and streams, an unconsolidated water supply aquifer, and state-listed rare plants and animals and their habitats.
Development within the NCO would begin with identifying areas of ecological concern, and then allowing for building outside of those areas, followed by plotting streets, trails and other access. After all that, lot lines would be drawn.
“The idea is lots of certain size that have these important intact large ecosystems…they’re the ones that are going to be resilient in the future with climate change,” Bettez said. “So you’re actually protecting them by keeping them intact.”
While the concept of a change in town code to facilitate the basic goals outlined in the proposed NCO was appealing to some members of the planning board in the period leading up to its development, some still feel there is work to be done to make it impactful.
“It just seems a little hazy of where’s the line, where it’s allowed or it’s not allowed,” said deputy chair Lyle Nolan during the November 27 meeting. “That isn’t very clear to me. I mean that’s my major objection, is that implementation.”
The Planning Board is expected to continue offering feedback on the proposed NCO to help guide its development by the town board.
The December 11 meeting of the planning board was canceled. Their next meeting should take place on Monday, January 8.
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