Here is SAVE's report on last night's Colonie planning board meeting. As always, we caution that this represents our members' impressions of this public meeting and is in no way an official document.
The entire board was present as well as Town Board members Rosano and Whalen. LaCivita was replaced by Tengeler and CHA’s Joe Grasso was replaced by Heather Wild. Just for the record, there were several inaccuracies with the material presented to the PB. The first was that the site plan for the mini warehouse showed an office building that was no longer contemplated; the second was that the office building was listed in the agenda as a medical building and it is an office building; the third is that it was listed as a 44,000 square building and it is a 40,500 square foot building; and the fourth inaccuracy was that the Starlite documents did not show a day care facility, just office & retail. So the Planning Department is still presenting sloppy material to the Planning Board.
—Mini Warehouse Storage Facility (Concept Acceptance) Approved
39 Old Sparrowbush Road
This project would construct a storage facility for large recreational vehicles. Part of the original parcel has been sold to Upstate Veterinary Hospital next door. The facility shouldn’t generate much traffic since renters will only come to the site once or twice a year and stay for about 20 mins a visit. They are not allowed to work on the vehicles or do anything else onsite. The applicant owns a couple of other RV storage businesses. Stuto was concerned that the plan in front of the didn’t accurately reflect that the parcels had changed and were now non-conforming. Milstein was unhappy that the original office building wasn’t going to be built but remained on their plan. It has an unlisted SEQRA designation. Brian Austin was busy re-designing the building architecturally, suggesting that the large window in the front might not be appropriate for a storage facility. Stuto made the point that the former approvals given to the parcel would be nullified due to the modifications from the original plan. Concept approved.
—J Luke (Hodorowski) Office Building (Concept Acceptance) Not Approved
767 Troy Schenectady Road
This project took about an hour and a half of the meeting. There were about 10 residents in attendance. The project would construct a 44,000 square foot office building on an empty lot on Route 7, across from the State Police barracks in Latham. It is zoned COR and is surrounded by single family homes. The plan called for entrance on Route 7, exit on Whitney and an access road on Bailey. The bulk of the time spent concerned traffic, the appropriateness of the egress and ingress and other options. CHA pointed out that their opinion and NYSDOT’s were that both the Whitney and Bailey access points should be omitted from the plan. The applicant agreed after extended discussion to revisit the traffic...their engineer pointed out that although traffic isn’t required at concept, they had ‘spent the money’ to hire a traffic engineer to do a study. The Planning Board indicated an interest in postponing a vote until the traffic issues are resolved. The applicant’s representatives pushed for a vote and the vote failed, concept not approved. Now they must go back and develop new traffic options for the plan.
—Starlite Retail Plaza
625 Columbia Street (Sketch) No vote
This sketch presentation was a little odd. It began with Stuto announcing that they had just received an email from the TDE that the applicant (Galesi) had not yet seen. They passed out copies to the applicant’s representatives....Paul Felati, the architect and a substitute for Dan Hershberg. Of course the public didn’t have the luxury of seeing the letter so it was a little difficult to follow the discussion. The project would be a three building mixed office/retail property. One would be a two story, 20,000 square foot day care and office combination with a playground in the back. The second would be a bank with a drive through, and the third ‘food-related’ retail. They would require several waivers for setback, parking and the drive through. The TDE briefly mentioned some of the issues in the email, which included moving the building closer to Columbia, many poor sight lines and bad corners, need for additional curb cuts, etc. She noted that the right in/right out on Columbia would require NYSDOT approval. The commercial subdivision needs to be submitted together with a conservation analysis as part of the package. Trip generation data for project should be put together with original traffic data to analyze full impact. Brian Austin suggested that the Latham Ford driveway should be shared for this project....they kept saying ‘when Latham Ford gets developed’ which was odd because there is a long-time active business there. Shamlian didn’t like the Latham Ford shared driveway concept, and Chief didn’t either. Stuto noted that CHA had a ‘lot of comments’ and Starlite should come up with a better plan to get a better reaction out of the PB. Several were concerned about the daycare parking...meanwhile, the plan that the TDE had been given didn’t show a daycare at all, but just an office building. The TDE also suggested that green space be reserved around the daycare building. Shamlian noted that they were getting a lot of credit for green space around Coliseum and not enough around Columbia. Stuto is concerned where the conservation overlay borders are and where the parcel sits within the conservation district and that it should be looked at in its entirety. The TDE said that the entire parcel is located within the conservation district. Heider said that it was a vintage 1970s parking mall look on a ‘very important corner’ and he would like to see something a little more impressive. No one mentioned that issue of segmentation resulting from considering several phases of the same project independently. No public comments were allowed.