Town board will release FEIS in which “direction will be clear” for Chappaqua Crossing
Board still expects 60 “fee simple” townhouses; 6.5 acres of land to the town is off the table
March 25, 2011
by Christine Yeres
In a public conversation yesterday with Supervisor Barbara Gerrard sponsored by the League of Women Voters, the supervisor revealed that the FEIS she expected to release today would consist of a 40-page executive summary that will make clear the direction in which board members expect development of Chappaqua Crossing to go, as well as sections describing the proposals.
Gerrard was headed to an afternoon meeting on Thursday and had scheduled two more meetings on Friday morning and afternoon, all with the purpose finishing the FEIS and releasing it by afternoon on Friday. It will be published on the town’s website.
The executive summary, which Gerrard described as “laying out our concerns and what we’re not concerned about” will be “written in sentences,” rather than in technical terminology. In addition to that narrative, another two sections of about 400 pages will discuss both the original proposal for 278 units of housing and the “Modified Plan” or “Alternative I,” which proposes 199 units of housing. Also included in the FEIS will be responses to comments by the public and other interested parties and agencies that were gathered during the SEQR process.
Gerrard admitted that the inclusion of 20 “fair and affordable” housing units in Alternative I “was appealing” to board members, since “the town is interested in increasing fair and affordable housing.” The board would still insist, said Gerrard, that 60 residential units—of whatever total number is—be taxed “fee simple,” as single family homes are, and described the 6.5 acres of land that had been part of Alternative I as no longer on the table, a casualty of the developer’s proposed parking plan.
“[The developer] never came up with a decent parking management plan in our opinion,” said Gerrard, “then in January they came up with a way to provide more parking. But to do that they could no longer give the town the [6.5 acres]. That’s the only part of the executive summary that people might say ‘What’s that all about?’” Aside from that issue, Gerrard maintained, the document will be comprehensible.
Once the FEIS is adopted today and mounted on the town’s website, Gerrard will wait until Monday, March 28, to start a ten-day clock ticking. The final public hearing on the revisions to town code Summit Greenfield is proposing will take place on Monday, April 4. [NOW POSTPONED to Monday, April 11] A week later, the board is required to issue findings, spelling out what will be allowed in the development of Chappaqua Crossing.
In today’s edition, read an account of Tuesday’s hearing.
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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.
I have attended several hearing on this issue and I am waiting for the first person who lives in the district to come forward and say they are FOR the proposed Chap Crossing plans in any way, shape or form.
Enough said.
Is the FEIS out? I don’t see it on the town website.
Editor’s note: Not out yet, at 12:05 a.m. Saturday, March 26.
Another day of waking up to no FEIS? What are the odds of we will be checking (it) out today? Feels like Groundhog Day again
The Town’s page where it posts documents re Chappaqua Crossing now has the following message:
Chappaqua Crossing Review
Final Environmental Impact Statement Available
The Town Board has accepted this FEIS, but because of production difficulties, several exhibits and charts referred to in the text will only be posted on Monday or Tuesday of this coming week. The Board, however, did want the public to have access to as much information as quickly as possible, and therefore we are posting Section I (Executive Summary) over this weekend.
A hard copy is available at the Chappaqua Library.
Thank you for your patience and understanding.
And here is the link to the page where it will be posted once those technical difficulties are resolved. Uh huh?
http://chappaquacrossingreview.mynewcastle.org/
And Mr. Connors, what would you say the odds are now?
Has anybody read the information that can be found on Greenfield Partners on the internet? If you want to get an idea of who these people are, and what they’re up to, just go to their site. They use terms like, “investing in the opportunistic arena,” “troubled assets,” “assets no one wants,” “extract hidden value,” “covet cash flow,” “squeeze,” “focus on what happens between the buy and the sell.” This company is focused on maximizing investors profit on development before the partners move on (with their profit in hand.) These people have no concern for and nothing to do with community. This is about vulture investing. They want the citizens and taxpayers of Chappaqua to step in and help them make a profit in a tough market. I say no concessions of any kind.
This document was a tremendous amount of work and, whatever happens in the end with this project, I think the board and its counsel should be commended for all the labor and thought that went into it. (I am opposed to residential by the way!) From what I have been able to take in from the FEIS, they have been quite thorough. The circumstances have been extremely challenging to say the least.
Dear “Wake Up People”,
I’m always curious when I hear someone vilifying companies that seek profit and make “profit” sound like a dirty word (even though it’s what business is all about in our country), and this piqued my interest in your posting. You quoted some explosive terms that made the site and company sound like they were extreme. So I went to the Web site you referenced and I didn’t see any of the words you have in quotes, though I didn’t read every word and won’t question you on that. However, your depiction of the site and the company was very different from what I saw when I went there.
I see they have among other divisions a “distressed property” division, though when you look at their current projects none of them look distressed to me, except perhaps Chappaqua Crossing given RD’s move out of the complex.
You deliberately wrote a deceptive post. You may not like the company or what they are doing in Chappaqua, and you may question their motives in Chappaqua and the way they are approaching things, but let’s stick to the facts.
The web site for those who were curious is www.summitdevelopment.net.
