New Paltz town council members have rejected the application to have the property of the proposed New Paltz Apartments project annexed into the village, setting up a likely court case to resolve the fact that village trustees last month voted to approve the move. In a two-hour meeting on the morning of the last day to act, September 15, council members went over the various reasons they found that annexation would not be in the public interest. Two questions also hung over the entire process. The first is whether voters will be asked to merge village and town governments in some way, and how they might decide. The second is why, if more housing for students is needed, don’t state officials step up and pay for dormitories?
Supervisor Amanda Gotto has recently registered distaste for public meetings held during traditional working hours, because it limits the ability of residents to observe and participate. That criticism was in reference to a public hearing held on an application to obtain significant tax breaks for an apartment complex on North Chestnut Street. This meeting had a different set of circumstances. For one, because council members were making a decision based on formal records that are already complete, they declined to take any public comment. Outside of public hearings, allowing anyone to speak is not required under law. Council members were also working against a firm deadline, and according to the supervisor the preparation of the documents under discussion continued through the weekend. Presumably the hearing regarding 151 North Chestnut Street did not pose such a burden upon the members of the Ulster County Industrial Development Agency, in part because that body has a staff attorney and an executive director dedicated to working on those projects, as opposed to a town supervisor who has many projects to oversee with the assistance of contract attorneys and part-time council members.
The contract attorney for this issue, Cassondra Britton, was at the table to advise the elected officials. Attendance was unsurprisingly sparse, and was comprised of a representative and consultants for the applicant, three members of the village board, two former town planning board members and the spouse of a town council member, along with this reporter. By the time a decision was reached about two hours later, only three remained in the gallery.
Britton approached this process with care, likely well aware that the record of these proceedings will be pored over by attorneys and judges seeking to find flaws in the legal reasoning. The town’s attorney guided council members first through their own determination regarding the environmental review, and then their decision on the annexation. At one point Britton advised council members to strike some paragraphs from their environmental findings statement, because while they under state law draw their own conclusions, they must draw these using the same record as village planning board members did. The suspect paragraphs were referenced comments that had been made during the annexation hearing, which occurred after the environmental review was completed two years ago. While the project is not in the village, the village planning board was the lead agency for the environmental review based on the rationale that annexation is needed for the project to proceed at all.
Environmental findings rejected
Council members rejected a number of the findings made by village planning board members. To help in that evaluation, they hired their own engineer to evaluate numerous reports. Other points did not need that level of assistance.
Council members agree that there is a housing crisis, noting that this has made hiring for town government positions difficult when those employees must also be residents. Their disagreement on this point is whether or not New Paltz Apartments, with 612 individual bedrooms adjacent to the college campus, would help with the housing problem. A common refrain, which council member Esi Lewis noted during discussion, is that “more housing is more housing,” based on the idea that students might prefer to live among other students in a development built for their needs, which would in turn result in some rental houses in the village returning to the market for permanent residents. Council members are concerned that more student housing being available would encourage university leaders to enroll more students, and offset any benefit entirely.
While this project would be subject to the village’s affordable housing law — of which there is not yet anything comparable in the town code, but one currently under discussion — council members can’t imagine how families in particular would find these units appealing, as they are structured as individual locked bedrooms with common areas. The village ordinance requires deed restrictions to ensure affordability, but not language that guarantees units will be affordable in perpetuity, council members believe.
Refuting the environmental benefits of an estimated tax assessment of $12 million, the elected officials noted that there’s nothing preventing the developer or successor in interest from applying for a payment-in-lieu-of-taxes scheme before the buildings go up, and also warned that if this complex is sold to the university, it would be taken off the tax rolls completely.
Upgrades to the water and sewer systems would be paid for by the developer, but the ongoing costs of maintenance would be shouldered by taxpayers, council members observed. That’s part of a wider question around public benefits; town officials don’t see any new benefits accruing to the public due to this project.
Town engineers who reviewed reports about contaminants on this former orchard land advised that far fewer samples were taken than have been for other projects similarly situated. “This issue was raised throughout the hearing process,” said Kitty Brown. The reviewing engineers also pointed out that since the lab results and analytical data were not included, it was not possible to independently confirm the findings.
Impacts to wetlands, particularly from the walking path to the campus, were also an area of focus. Council members find that the potential disturbance is sufficient to require a referral to the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation. In addition, since the village has not wetlands law, annexation would remove this land from being subject to the town’s law on that subject. While the land would remain in the town, village law—or absence thereof—would govern.
That trail raises other environmental questions for council members, too. They don’t feel a trail from this complex to the adjacent campus is a community benefit as much as it is an amenity. As Esi Lewis noted, its lighting is also a problem: leave it dark and it’s unsafe for humans, but light it up at night causes issues for nocturnal amphibians in the wetland.
Village planning board members found there was no significant impact regarding light, noises, or odors. Council members rejected this, because the project will change this from unoccupied land to a development of 612 bedrooms.
Annexation rejected
After accepting their own environmental findings statement, council members then took on the question of annexation itself, saying that it is not in the public interest and it particularly will not alleviate the housing crisis.
“There is a state agency we should be working with to get the university the housing it needs,” said Brown.
“I recognize the value the university brings to the community,” said Randall Leverette, “but why is the taxpayer responsible for providing housing for a tax-exempt entity?”
Esi Lewis took a different tack on that issue, noting that there will always be students who prefer to live off campus. “They are part of the community. We do want them here.”
Local landlords successfully compete by offering lower rates than what it costs to live on dorms on campus. The claim that some of this rental stock would be sold or rented to families “hasn’t been born out in other university towns with this contractor,” said Brown.
Council members also questioned the idea that annexation is even required to obtain the municipal services needed to support this level of population density. Attorney Britton read the village code that calls for annexation, but noted that another option exists for a hookup: the trustees must find that there is a hardship, the parcel must be adjacent to town water and sewer districts, and both the trustees and residents of those districts must agree. Presumably that would be a high bar, but it is an alternative.
Gotto noted that this parcel is only adjacent to the village at all by way of the college, which itself is not subject to village zoning. The supervisor also observed that options for this level of density under town code do exist: a planned unit development, and expanding the adjacent RV zoning from Belle Terre Apartments that allows for multi-family housing.
“It’s in everybody’s interest to work this out,” Leverette said, but that adversely impacting some town residents in order to benefit others is “not how you govern.”
A lingering question for council members is the potential vote on restructuring local government, which could occur as soon as November of next year. This has been framed as both dissolution of the village and consolidation of town and village governments; no updates to available documents have been made recently, and will likely not be until the results of this year’s supervisor election are determined. A dissolution vote would be only by village residents. Tim Rogers, the village mayor who is running against Gotto to become supervisor, has expressed a preference for consolidation, but also frustration with a lack of cooperation from town employees under the comptroller’s supervision.
Next steps
In the alternative, developers could decide to try to move this project forward under town zoning requirements, or abandon it entirely. Michael Moriello, one of the principals of the companies which own the land, had no comment after the meeting.
Join the family! 
