It’s springtime, and despite high inflation-fighting interest rates and an uncertain economic outlook this year three significant development projects are moving toward the starting line in the towns of Esopus and Gardiner and in the village of New Paltz. All three made the list of communications about community projects at the Ulster County Planning Board meeting on Broadway in Kingston April 12.
The planning board in Esopus is requesting lead-agency status for the Esopus Barns Resort Hotel project proposing “sixty total lodging accommodations and ancillary facilities and services, including conference facilities, restaurants and craft spaces, as well as a pool facility, landscape features, walking trails and other similar recreation areas.” The project will be located at the grandiose stone barns of the former 1911 Oliver Payne estate in West Park where Route 9W crosses the Black Creek. The barns will be adapted for reuse, and “limited” new structures will be added.
Some 153 of the 156 acres were listed as for sale for two million dollars in 2020. A larger project for the site had been approved in 2013.
A request for lead-agency status for site-plan review from the village planning board in New Paltz involves the construction of a 74,656-square-foot three-story mixed-use building at the former Agway site at 145 North Chestnut Street at the northern end of the village. Plans submitted by KES Chestnut Properties LLC call for 68 residential units and 7219 square feet of retail space plus 112 parking spaces on the 3-49-acre parcel between North Chestnut Street and the rail-trail.
Experience with Zero Place — a building of similar bulk on the same side of Route 32 closer to the village on Route 32 coming from the north — may have affected community attitudes toward the new proposal. “We’re definitely in favor of this,” New Paltz village planning board chair John Litton said encouragingly at a recent meeting.
The Town of Gardiner would like to be lead agency on a seven-lot major subdivision proposed by Millbrook Meadows Estates, LLC for four parcels totaling 211.3 acres at 2001 Route 44-55. The most recent ten months have seen 67 letters and other communications among the participants, with no end in sight. The environmental community would like a clustered development, leaving wetlands, agricultural land and other areas of environmental significance free from houses or roadways. The developer points out that each lot will be at least 20 acres in size.
Various engineers and other experts have been weighing in, adding evidence supporting the perspectives of whoever is paying them.
Differing markedly from each other, these three significant development proposals wrestle to obtain governmental approval. There’ll be others like them in the coming months.
“The only constant in life is change,” the philosopher Heraclitus said more than 2500 years ago. That maxim has lost little of its predictive accuracy in the spring of 2023.
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