SUNY New Paltz students with visions of Cheesy Gordita Crunches dancing in their heads will have to wait a bit longer for good news on the Taco Bell front, as hopes for site plan approval have been delayed at least until later this month.
The eventual 2,192 square foot Taco Bell will share a property with the longtime Burger King at 238-240 Main Street, which itself recently had a renovation proposal approved. Last week, attorney Keith Brown of Melville-based firm Brown, Altman & DiLeo, made a virtual appearance before the town planning board on behalf of the prospective Taco Bell owner Haza Bell, a division of the Haza Group, a Sugarland, Texas-based company with a focus on quick service restaurants. To date, Haza Bell is the franchise holder for 144 Taco Bell locations across the United States.
The Burger King is a franchise of Edison, New Jersey-based Devs Foods, LLC, and owned by Sanjay Patel of NP Rest 5994, LLC. Patel also owns the property at 238-240, and according to Brown gave Haza Bell the authority to get the (Taco) Bell across the finish line. They very nearly made it.
On Monday, October 21, the applicant cleared seven hurdles, area variances from the town’s zoning board of appeals, relating to signage for the Taco Bell. Haza Bell submitted updated site plans to the planning board reflecting the zoning board’s approval three days later. And on Monday, October 28, they came before the planning board one week later with the hope of receiving final approval.
But a cross access easement between the northeast corner of the Burger King property and 236 Main Street, which features a Walgreens drug store, has pushed the potential site plan approval at least as far as the next planning board meeting, scheduled for Monday, November 25.
The issue stretches back into the 1990’s when the cross access easement was created, allowing access between the two properties without having to use Main Street. While historical site plans include the cross access, attempts to find a formal recording of the easement at the Ulster County Clerk’s Office were unsuccessful. Some board members said it was possible the easement in its current configuration might subsequently be non-compliant.
“And so we proposed…that we submit to the board what’s called a perpetual offer of cross access from the Burger King property to the Walgreens property,” Brown said. “And that was agreed upon by our landlord who owns that portion of the property that is adjacent to the Walgreens. This way that if the perpetual offer is on the east side of the property line, that when the Walgreens goes back and needs additional approval, he would have to also enter into perpetual offer. And this way both property owners would get together and they’d agree on some type of cross access.”
Brown said the Burger King property owner attempted to get the adjacent property owner to agree to the easement, but were unable to find middle ground.
“The response we got was pretty much a demand by that property owner to pay a pretty large amount of money in order to enter to that agreement,” Brown said. “So in my mind, there was an inability to have a meeting of the minds as it related to that agreement…I would characterize it that they were willing to enter an agreement subject to their terms and their terms were, as far as I understand, untenable with our property owner, our landlord. All of the construction that needed to take place with regard to the easement, the Walgreens owner wanted our landlord to pay for them, even though they were going to occur on his property.”
Planning board members said they weren’t comfortable agreeing to the perpetual offer of cross access without first seeing proof that the two sides had attempted to come to an agreement.
“I don’t know how much negotiation was really there,” said Ashley Torre, an attorney representing the planning board.
Brown said his position was that the two property owners should bear the costs of any upgrades to the easement, but he added that as Haza Bell doesn’t own the property, the matter is out of their hands.
“II think it benefits both owners, I think they should share accordingly, but that’s not up to me,” he said. “We can’t be held hostage. We can’t put pressure on either party because we’re immune from it. We’re not a party to the transaction at all.”
“Your landlord is responsible for his tenants, and they have to be in some kind of compliance,” said planning board chair Adele Ruger. “The fact that it affects you is just something that happens. But in my opinion, your landlord is responsible to make a good effort to talk to the owners of Walgreens.”
Ruger suggested, and the planning board agreed, that they would need more information before signing off on the Taco Bell site plan.
“I’m going to suggest that we review this correspondence and see that there really was a real effort to come to some kind of agreement between the two landlords,” she said.
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