Woodstock’s planning board has unanimously approved a seven-unit motel on Calamar Lane despite objections from neighbors over noise, traffic and safety.
Under Woodstock zoning, the motel is a permitted use “The site-plan review has to do with a permitted activity,” planning board chair Peter Cross said. “This is a commercial district, and commerce is permitted in it. Our job as a planning board is to get that commerce to fit in the community as best as possible. It is permitted. It can be done, and it can be done right.”
In describing the dilemma in which the planning board has found itself, Cross portrayed it as stuck between a rock and a hard place.
“This is not a question of affordable housing,” he explained, “Affordable-housing questions are for the town board to deal with, not the planning board. Affordable housing, we know, needs to be here. But, unfortunately, nobody is willing to build affordable housing. They lose money. It’s just not happening.”
His statement proved an apt prelude for what was to come.
“It’s residential, not commercial”
“I’m not going to try to pull rank here in any way, but I am the house most affected by this,” said Tinker Street neighbor Peggy Malkin, who rents apartments in her duplex on the property to long-term residents. “We didn’t buy the property as a business venture. We are not wealthy by any means, but we keep the rent very low because our tenants are long-time locals and people who have become like family to us.”
The developer, Michael Arnstein, had purchased the property after a devastating 2018 fire destroyed a home and several apartments.
Arnstein had proposed single-family homes when he first came before the planning board in 2021, intending to move his family into one of them. His plans changed, and the proposal morphed into seven boutique motel units in five cabins surrounded by gardens on a combined 1.43 acres consisting of three lots at 1, 3 and 5 Calamar Lane.
Malkin was concerned the motel guests would not be good neighbors.
“You’re going to have people stay at the hotel who are transient,” Malkin said. “They have no vested interest in the community. They’re going to litter. They’re going to make noise. I know that you consider this a commercial area. It’s not commercial. It’s residential, light commercial. And there hasn’t been anything commercial on that property in 25 years. I would think that somehow or other it’s grandfathered in that it’s not really commercial anymore.”
Nothing about the project matched what was there, she argued, “Please, I am urging you and begging you, keep Woodstock true to its roots and history and character. Do not permit a motel owned by a person with a very dicey background who will not be living on the premises.”
No new volunteers
Michael Platsky said Malkin had provided a home for him and his wife when they were displaced, What was needed was more housing, not more hotels and motels.
“This town direly needs more affordable housing,” he stated. “There is a fire department. Where are the new volunteers coming from that work for the fire department and the rescue squad? Because the people that serve on those two squads are not coming out of two-, three-million-dollar private homes. They’re coming out of really small, modestly priced houses or apartments. There is a school in this town that is in big trouble because they can’t get enough students to go there.”
There had never been one day in Woodstock where every hotel room in the hamlet had been booked on the same day, Platsky said he had been told. “Seems to me there are available hotel rooms.”
Platsky’s wife Kathy said the rescue squad has had trouble keeping ambulances going because people can’t find a place to live. The town needed affordable housing in the hamlet.
Fire pits and trails
Stephanie Kaplan, whose family lives near the property, expressed concerns over a fire pit for the guests, since the motel will not be staffed at night. An unattended fire pit was unlawful. Many of the neighbors still had the devastating fire there in their minds. The guests had no duty to care for the fire pit or to put it out properly. They had no duty to use it safely.
Businessman Bob Pearl argued that seven units were not going to impact traffic, and they would benefit the town. He recognized that “to everyone else in here, this is a NIMBY issue.”
Comeau advisory committee chair Jeff Viglielmo urged the planning board to consider requiring a connector trail from the motel property to the Upper Comeau parking area to reduce the chances of guests walking on the field on their way to the hiking loops.
“It is a short distance, yet without a marked path people will not know where they should go,” said Viglielmo. The field will be further trampled down. “People walk where they want to, and if we don’t put down a trail for that, and keep them on it, this property is just going to get further and further degraded,” he said.
Project requirements
Architect Brad Will said he had spent years planning for the Woodstock Commons affordable housing project.
“This is a different project. I hundred percent believe in this project, and these people, the Arnsteins, are a beautiful family. And it’s my honor to work with you,” he said to them,
Addressing concerns of the fire pit, Will said it will be propane-fueled and remotely controlled, with an automatic cutoff after a certain hour.
A traffic study commissioned in 2023 showed no higher impact than when there were five houses on the properties.
Gardens on the property, designed by horticultural expert Lisa Taranto, are a key point of the project. “In the work of development, not many people are willing to invest into doing full-on ecological landscaping and hardscaping and pay for it,” Taranto said. “So it’s really a rare thing to have a client and a person who is concerned about that as being integrated deeply into the project,” The gardens will feature 15 native tree species, with hundreds of different shrubs, grasses and perennials.
The landscaping will take up eight or nine times the amount of footprint as the buildings, Will said.
The planning board ultimately decided against requiring a path to the Upper Comeau parking lot because it thought it would require work past the bounds of the property owned by the applicant. It did require the posting of signs outlining the rules and expectations of the Comeau preserve.
Among many conditions of approval, a planned pedestrian footbridge will require locks on both ends and be closed from dusk to dawn. Signage about the Comeau property must be displayed. A control and timer for the fire pit will be required.
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