FAYETTEVILLE — Though the proposal for the placement of a grocery store at 547 E. Genesee St. was given the Fayetteville Planning Board stamp of approval this past winter, some objecting residents in the project’s vicinity have retained their unease as new concerns have arisen.
A change-of-use notification letter submitted by a representative of the property’s owner FOUBU Environmental Services and separately provided to the Eagle Bulletin appears to indicate that the on-site manufacturing building formerly occupied by O’Brien & Gere has been set to be totally demolished. That document sent to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation was filled out in mid-June 2022 while the mixed-use project application was still being reviewed by the village.
The letter calls for that demolition to take place between Oct. 1, 2022 and April 30, 2023, though that estimated timeframe has been shifted partially due to litigation that has taken aim at village procedures pertaining to the assessment of the project.
The advance notification says the currently standing, vacated building “will be removed to the extent needed for access to soils under the building and to allow for integration of a sub-slab depressurization system into the slab of a new building.”
Another document shared with the Eagle Bulletin was the engineering company Ramboll’s remedial action work plan draft dated May of this year, which states that a “cost-effective alternative” would be the demolition of the existing building, the building slab and underlying utility conduits as well as characterization of soil beneath the slab for later grading and reuse.
Marguerite Ross, a Cammot Lane resident, claims that the developers have not been straightforward with the village and that their true intentions run contrary to what had been outlined on record during their presentations to the planning board.
Ross points to their stated goal to preserve, rehabilitate and reuse the nonconforming 130,000-square-foot O’Brien & Gere building as a “deceptive misrepresentation” and “a false premise” on which the board’s site plan approval was based.
She said that otherwise the permission to reduce the structure’s size to 56,500 square feet—and with that an allowance for the site to continue exceeding Fayetteville’s 10,000-square-foot cap on building size—would not have been granted.
Ross, a retired environmental and land use planner, said she believes the promise of remediation via a brownfield cleanup for the dilapidated building was therefore a way to circumvent the 10,000-square-foot zoning requirement only to later abandon that renovation route amid construction. The O’Brien & Gere building has not been in violation of the requirement because it was grandfathered in after the zoning code was amended to include that maximum size limitation.
“The village board of trustees determined in its wisdom that we don’t want big box stores and that we can’t handle big box stores, and so they put that limit in place in 2006 for any parcel anywhere in Fayetteville,” Ross said.
Ross is in the middle of appealing the decisions made in Onondaga County Supreme Court to dismiss her Article 78 proceeding against the planning board for their special use permit issued for the project and a lawsuit challenging the interpretation by Fayetteville’s zoning board of appeals and code enforcement officer Mike Jones relating to the downsizing of the O’Brien & Gere building.
Jason Feulner, another villager who lives in a neighborhood near the O’Brien & Gere site, has been following each proposal that has come in front of the village boards for the property going back to 2015 when there was a Morgan Management plan to put apartments there.
Though Feulner is not party to either lawsuit initiated by Ross, he said he too is unconvinced that any of the original building is going to be kept by the developers, referring to the applicant’s assertion to preserve a significant part of the existing building above surface as “absurd on its face.”
“That is for the most part an 80-year-old manufacturing facility, and you’re going to turn it into a modern grocery store to the specs that were outlined in the plan?” Feulner said. “There’s been no real detail as to how it would be possible, and outside of a dense urban area, it just doesn’t make common sense.”
Feulner, who has read over the aforementioned Ramboll and FOUBU Environmental Services documents, said the statements within seem to prove his concerns about whether that presented plan would go through.
“I ask myself why our planning board took the developer at their word when it seems clear, supported by this new evidence, that the applicant had no intention of honoring their own application,” he said. “What recourse do the citizens have if they go ahead and demolish the entire thing?”
Ross, who made clear she has not seen the structural condition of the building’s interior firsthand, said she was similarly unsure in the first place how it would work to tear down part of the current structure and not the rest.
“Cutting it in half or however much would ruin the building and all the structural integrity,” she said. “You don’t put up brand new walls on an old foundation. It just doesn’t add up.”
Though she sees the replacement of an “eyesore” with a “clean-looking building” as a benefit of the project, Ross said that boon “doesn’t hold enough water” because the failure to maintain a building is, according to her, the fault of the property owner and does not justify bringing in a development that is still more than five times larger than other businesses around it.
In Ross’ view, as long as the hazardous contamination left by Accurate Die Casting is cleared up, it would be preferable to put in light manufacturing, smaller retail, professional office spaces, a motel operation, or affordable housing or else leave the site untouched instead of siting a supermarket suspected to be a Hannaford.
She said she has worries about not only the size of the building but also the noise and traffic that would be generated by a busy store.
“People want to get to Creative Environment Day School, they want school buses to be able to come back and forth and get through there, and they want to be able to drive through there themselves and not be held up with too much traffic congestion,” Ross said. She also maintains that inherent in the village approving the supermarket construction is the go-ahead for the New York State Department of Transportation to widen New York State Route 5 in the village, a result she said “would not be compatible with the nature of Fayetteville” as a quiet community.
Feulner, who said he lives on the perimeter within short walking distance of the East Genesee Street property, further claimed that the project as proposed goes against what has been codified in Fayetteville’s comprehensive plan with regard to community character. He said he also thinks that there will be a noticeable increase in traffic brought about by the project.
“I hope I’m wrong,” he said. “Maybe they’ll build a supermarket and the traffic will hum along and everyone’ll be happy, but it just seems like a huge gamble in my opinion.”
Engineer Matt Napierala, the president of Manlius-based firm Napierala Consulting and a public presenter for the project from 2019 through until the approval last December, said every expressed concern relating to either noise, lighting, environmental impact or traffic has been “thoroughly studied.”
He also said he believes that the property’s ownership group has paid commercial taxes long enough to have the right to decide what the best use of the land is.
“As a local person, I look at a deteriorated old industrial building that is a significant size and impact to the village that is literally unmaintained and has no one in it,” Napierala said. “The bottom line is we’re looking at potentially bringing in a vibrant tenant to revitalize that particular piece of property, so I think that’s a huge amenity to not only the village of Fayetteville but the surrounding communities.”
He added that the establishment closest to being a grocer in the heart of the village is the next-door Circle K convenience store and that the Wegmans on East Genesee Street and the Tops market in Towne Center are not as walkable for a number of local residents.
“Anyone can have their own perceptions and it’s part of being an American to question, but perception is in the eye of the beholder,” Napierala said last month. “In reality, the process for this application was a 13-month process, and so there was a lot of information presented and there was a lot of information requested of us, and as a consultant we tried to answer every question in a transparent, thorough and complete manner. There’s no sleight of hand, and there’s no smoke and mirrors about it.”
Matt Lester, the contract vendee for the development on behalf of Northwood Real Estate Ventures LLC, said the planning board, village board of trustees and multiple attorneys took a “hard, deep dive” reviewing the project and were not duped in any way.
Napierala said at the time of the August interview that he was not certain about what portion of the O’Brien & Gere building will stay intact as that information would be included in Ramboll’s final brownfield cleanup program report, which he had not yet seen.
At press time, Ramboll had not yet responded to requests for comment on the details of the environmental cleanup plan.
