Rich Souto is in the final year of a five-year term on the Village of New Paltz’s planning board. Will he want to return?
As has become commonplace at these meetings, members of the public turned out to oppose a proposed site-plan amendment for 7 Prospect Street, which along with its adjoining property at 5 Prospect has been under scrutiny from neighbors for over two years, when Prospect Estates, LLC — principal Bassam Serdah — was granted the right to demolish a single-family home and replace it with a two-family dwelling; and an addition built onto an existing single-family home for conversion into a two-family home.
Originally, neighbors bristled at their perception that the plans had exploited a zoning loophole for an area that sits at the line of the B-2 (Core Business) and R-2 (Residential) districts, with the former allowing for three bedrooms of unrelated occupants in each single-family dwelling to rent individual rooms to college students. They have also levied accusations against the development for, among other things, water runoff, and work they say defies the character of the neighborhood.
After a lengthy public-hearing period during the July meeting of the planning board, Souto revisited a suggestion he once made about streamlining the public-comment period in an effort to determine whether they were “important to us as a volunteer” entity.
“The things that are cited in there — length of people’s comments, repetition of comments, inaccuracies, tangents, presumptions, character assassinations — are all things that we agreed were inappropriate to enter into the public hearing,” he said. “And 45 minutes into our meeting today, where there might have been a lot of really valid points made …. We have to find a way to at least advise against if not have the right to interrupt and govern what happens at our meetings, or there’s just lots of irrelevant information, lots of time that no one here who’s an additional applicant deserves to have to spend.”
He as a volunteer member of the planning board was not willing to tolerate the situation much longer. “And it’s my sixth year serving here,” he continued, “and I think I should have maybe a little bit of good will to have that consideration brought back in this board because the time we’re spending, the information we’re getting in public hearings, are full of the … exact things that I recommended we should ask to prohibit because they’re not effective in helping us make decisions about projects.”
He made similar comments a year ago.
“There’s a lot of inference and a lot of subjectivity to the way some of the comments are framed,” Souto said at the July 5, 2023 meeting. “I would ask that we be really thoughtful as a community and as contributors to this dialogue in making that distinction when you bring your comments to this board.”
Planning board chair Zach Bialecki said Souto’s proposed changes would be revisited at the next meeting scheduled for Tuesday, August 5.
Join the family! 
