As Hudson Valley One reported in November, Mike Benevento, the owner of the landscape and trail design company Hudson Valley Trailworks, is seeking to build a new agribusiness hub in Gardiner. The 4.78-acre lot is located across Route 44/55 from Lombardi’s Italian Restaurant at busy Benton Corners, where a long-awaited traffic light is due to be installed by the New York State Department of Transportation in 2023. At its December 20 meeting, the Gardiner Planning Board voted to pass the site plan application along to the Ulster County Planning Board for review, and scheduled a public hearing on the project for January 24.
The new development, to be called Full Circle, is envisioned as a business complex made up of a 4,720-square-foot main building housing a service business, retail space and a bakery, clustered with a separate 1,120-square-foot farm store, a 600-square-foot coffeehouse and a 600-square-foot greenhouse for growing microgreens, with a plaza in the middle. The site, located on the northeast corner of the intersection, would also become home to two small freestanding offices intended for wellness services, plus a separate bathroom building to serve them.
Adjacent to Bruynswick Road, with two new curb-cut entrances, would be an 820-square-foot storage structure for equipment used by Hudson Valley Trailworks. The Planning Board decided that the storage building counts as an “accessory structure” and would therefore not require a special permit. Benevento has committed to conduct a traffic assessment to determine the impact of these two new entrances on traffic flow at the problematic intersection, which has a history of automobile and motorcycle collisions, occasionally fatal.
At the meeting, he said that his intent is also to build hiking and biking trails on the property and eventually link them up to other off-road trails. “Ultimately, the project is about creating connections,” he said. “We’re hoping the neighbors will open their properties up as well. We hope to demonstrate how that can be done.”
Planning Board members praised the color renderings of the project that Full Circle, LLC has submitted with its application materials, but asked for more of them to demonstrate the project’s full potential visual impact from all four directions at the intersection. “It’s a hamlet, not a mall,” noted Marc Moran.
Benevento agreed to tweak the application materials and resubmit them in time for review at the January meeting. The public can view the full packet via the Dropbox link at www.townofgardiner.org/planning-board-agenda.
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