Letter to the Editor: SG has no automatic right to a zoning change

Monday, January 3, 2011
by Rita C. Tobin

To the Editor:

In a letter sent to the Town of New Castle Board on December 14, 2010, attorneys for Summit Greenfield (“SG”) issue the ominous warning that, if the Board further delays in granting SG a zoning variance to build 278 housing units on the old Reader’s Digest (“RD”) property, the Board will “set the Town on a course that is certain to prove costly to the entire community, economically or otherwise, in the near term and in years to come,” and urge the Town to “change that course while it is still possible to do so.” In other words, SG has told New Castle that the SG rezoning application is an offer that the Town “can’t refuse.”

As an attorney, I would gladly offer my services to the Town, pro bono, to respond to what would be a wholly meritless law suit by SG. Further, the Town’s attorneys will, I’m sure, respond in detail to SG’s litany of complaints, which reduce to accusations that the Town has “changed course” in response to public pressure, thereby double-crossing and damaging, SG. Yet it should be said at the outset that no one has prevented has prevented SG from using the RD property for the purposes for which it is zoned, or forced it to pursue a rezoning scheme that it knew was opposed by a majority of Town residents. Indeed, the Board has a right and, indeed, a duty to fully explore the effects of a project that will have a significant economic, environmental and cultural impact upon the Town.

Moreover, while most of us in New Castle would like to see more affordable housing built here, SG is not a government agency, or a charity seeking to help the poor, but rather a private developer seeking to maximize profits. Wrapping itself in the cloak of civil and economic rights is just the latest of SG’s ploys, and one on which a judge would laugh out of the courtroom. Judges aren’t naïve.

Indeed, SG has not “sustained damages” as the result of a defective review process, but rather has voluntarily, because of its own desire to make profits, waged a lengthy, determined, costly battle to win a zoning variance to which it had no automatic legal entitlement, and to which most of the community was opposed. Moreover, public opinion regarding community quality of life is not the “venom of project opponents,” as SG claims, but rather the legitimate views, to be taken into account, of those citizens who will feel the impact of new development. We are the citizens of New Castle, not mere nuisances that SG can run down; this is our town, not SG’s private fiefdom.

The Board should reject the project and let SG proceed with its lawsuit.

Sincerely yours,

Rita C. Tobin
____________________
To view NCNOW’s archived articles and letters—in chronological order, newest to oldest—on Chappaqua Crossing and Summit Greenfield’s application for a zoning change, click HERE.