April 9, 2010
by Christine Yeres
The primary consultant to the New Castle town board on the proposal by Summit Greenfield to develop residential units and increase the number of commercial tenants at Chappaqua Crossing, the former Reader’s Digest campus, reported her preliminary findings to the board members at a work session Tuesday evening, April 6.
The consultant, Joanne Meder of F.P Clark Associates, stated that three weeks after receiving the proposed “final environmental impact statement” (FEIS), much of the “housekeeping” aspect of her assessment is nearly completed. The document contains complete transcripts of the public hearings on the proposal, all written comments submitted by the public, organizations and town government boards and departments, and the developer’s responses to those comments.
Meder reminded board members that although prepared by the applicant, the final environmental impact statement will become the town board’s document, reflecting the board’s perspective of the environmental impacts of the proposed project and its alternatives. “We’ve gone through everything in general to see what the applicant judges are substantial comments,” she explained, “and we’ve found a few that were overlooked, not a huge proportion of the total.” She noted that the “alternative reuse study” requested by the town board had been treated as a comment by the applicant, logged in as a comment but with no corresponding response provided, and “a fairly large chunk of the HR&A report [on financial feasibility] was not responded to.”
Now that the overall vetting is largely finished, “over the next few weeks,” Meder told the board members, “we’ll help you to craft revisions to reflect your thinking.”
Playing catch-up with traffic
The next task, Meder said, is to conduct a more detailed review of certain topics. For example, Summit Greenfield revised its traffic study for its main proposal, but not for alternatives, noted Meder, “so we’re seeing [traffic analysis for alternatives] for the first time in this FEIS. An intermediate step was skipped, so we’re playing catch-up right now with regard to traffic.”
Town board member Michael Wolfensohn asked Meder whether the process is ruled now by a timetable. “Yes and no,” she responded. “Everyone knows that the FEIS will be rewritten at least once. More than twice wouldn’t surprise me.” She said that if board members can finish their review of it in April, she may be able to produce “a cogent summary of how it needs to be revised in May.”
Meder described the clumsy search process: “Each comment has a discrete number. With some, the applicant has taken a group of them and assigned them a master comment number, or master response number. It’s clumsy, because the response refers back to the place in the DEIS without referring to the substance of the comment. To go back and forth is not great.”
The town board’s special counsel, Robert S. Davis of Bryn Cave LLP, added, “It’s very complicated. You need to have all three volumes open [to refer to].” He noted that an electronic version of the document had been requested, but not provided.
Wolfensohn recalled that Summit Greenfield’s lawyer Steven Kass “said at the town board meeting [March 23, 2010] that if we asked for [an electronic version] he would give it to us.” Town Supervisor Barbara Gerrard told NewCastleNOW.org last week that she has not asked again for an electronic version since the March 23 meeting, when Kass declined to provide board members electronic copies, but offered to provide “searchable discs for your consultants who might need them.” Board members and the town’s consultants are working from three-volume paper copies. A single paper copy, located at town hall, is available for public inspection, on-site only.
During this environmental review process required by New York State, in accordance with the New Castle town code, the fees incurred for services of both planning consultant Meder and special legal counsel Davis, as well as other outside consultants such as Saccardi & Schiff and HR&A Associates, for their work on the Chappaqua Crossing matter are paid by the developer Summit Greenfield.
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To view NCNOW.org’s collected articles and letters to the editor on Chappaqua Crossing and the environmental review process, click HERE.
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