County planning board report criticizes Aldi proposal, Mayor Wheeler calls county report inaccurate and biased
In an unprecedented move, the Madison County Planning Department recently issued a 9-page report of its review of the Aldi development proposal that meticulously dissects the plan and calls it merely “a start” that is so developer-driven as to be nowhere near approvable. In response, Mayor Kurt Wheeler has sent a letter to the county and the village planning board calling the MCPD report inaccurate and biased in a way “unprecedented in scope and tone,” and “a direct attack on the sovereignty of the village.”
While many people feel the county report helps clarify issues and offer solutions relating the Aldi development proposal, others feel the report has all but made this contentious issue worse.
“We are reviewing this unbiased — we looked at this project from the standpoint of what was in front of us, and did it meet the guidelines set out by the village; that is what the review focused on entirely. I’d do the same thing over again,” said Scott Ingmire, director of the MCPD. “I feel we’re the only ones objective about this — everybody else has already decided what they feel about this. I’ve never had a mayor write a rebuttal to a GML review. We have no bias on this. None.”
“I’m very concerned about both the scope and tone of this report,” Wheeler said. “I think it is concerning that the county planning department can issue a report that is so negative that it jeopardizes the ability of local government to complete a project. In my 11 years of public service, we’ve always had a very positive relationship with county planning, I’ve never seen another report even close to this one.”
The county planning board was asked in late August to review the Village Edge South development proposal on Route 20 that would include an Aldi grocery store, a drive-thru pharmacy, a drive-thru bank, a fourth retail space yet unspecified for a business and four, eight-unit apartment buildings. The land is owned by New Venture Assets, which is also the company proposing all the development on the site except for the Aldi, which is being proposed by New Market Development.
The MCPD is required under General Municipal Law to review this project because it is on property within 500 feet of a state or county highway and also because it is within 500 feet of a municipal boundary. The department has the capacity to issue an approval or disapproval of a submitted project, although it rarely does so, Ingmire said. Typically, it issues its findings and recommendations and then lets the applying municipality act from there.
The county planning department submitted its report to the village planning board on Oct. 3.
The report is detailed and extensive, and while it says the development proposal is a start and offers suggestions for improvement, its overall conclusion was that, as currently proposed, the project plans were incomplete and had done little to meet the intent and requirements of the Village Edge South mixed use zone.
Among the comments, the report stated that:
—Although the zoning for the land is mixed use, the project is “not true mixed-use and is even weak compared to the looser meaning of mixed use that the village has lent support.” The report states that having stand-alone, single story commercial buildings, and separate, single-use apartment buildings as the residential aspect does not meet the mixed use criteria. It recommends connecting the single-story retail buildings together or creating multiple story buildings to combine retail spaces.
—The creation of village streets and interconnectivity in the zone is “commendable,” and the streets should allow for on-street parking and the number of curb cuts on Route 20 should be reduced.
—While the design policy goal of the village for the VES zone is better walkability and bikeability, the project is “an auto-dependent development” that does little to encourage pedestrian or bicycle use. “Simply providing sidewalks is not enough,” the report states. “In order for those sidewalks to actually serve people and truly achieve walkability it takes more than just building a sidewalk, it takes a critical evaluation of not only where the sidewalk will be placed but critical attention to the details of the surroundings as well.”
The report states that much of the development pattern and design does not front or connect where most of the pedestrians will be coming from; that pedestrians will have to walk through parking lots, loading zones and drive-thrus as currently proposed; that walking along Route 20 is “not pleasant;” that the use of drive-thrus detracts from the village feel and from the walkability of the site; and that the village should work with the developer to hire a landscape architect to better configure and create walkable places.
—The Wellhead Protection Overlay (WPO) Zone in which the land is contained, and which previously did not allow high intensity uses such as drug stores and drive-thru banks, was amended by the village board in February 2016 to allow for pharmacies and banks with drive-thrus. “At the time our office had no idea what was on the horizon but now it seems the intent is pretty clear,” the report states. “At the time, our office made clear that this didn’t seem to support the vision for the village edge … Our recommendation was not taken … However, we stand by the previous judgment that two drive-thru developments are detracting from the proposed development’s ability to extend the village character and create pedestrian activity in this area.”
The report states that the type of businesses currently being proposed for development — high intensity retail, drugstores and banks — are “exactly the type of businesses that the WPO was designed to discourage.” The report also states that the proposed pharmacy and bank uses already exist in the village and bring nothing unique to this proposed development.
The WPO requires a 15 percent impervious threshold for development projects as a way to regulate the stormwater runoff and protect the water supply. The report states that the project has “significantly” more than 15 percent impervious surface and the county planning department “can’t see how this development, as currently proposed, would be allowed within the strict guidelines of the WPO.”
—The proposal lacks many important aspects contained in the VES design guidelines, such as mixed use, interconnectivity and creating pedestrian activity, and that the developer is “at best,” doing the minimum required in these areas. “Overall, there is very little creativity being proposed by the developer,” the report states. “The overall development proposed is quite typical and very similar to development in other communities, most of which don’t have design guidelines in place.”
The report concludes that the proposed development project needs more detail and modifications to conform to the VES design guidelines and the WPO zone requirements and a professional landscape architect should be consulted.
“As currently proposed, this project has done little to meet the intent and requirements of the VES-MU zone and would require many improvements before it could even be considered approvable,” the report concludes. The department offered five alternate design plans in its report and offered to provide more resources and guidance if requested.
Ingmire said this report, while certainly the lengthiest and most detailed his office has ever issued, was also the most complex.
“This is probably the biggest review project we’ve done in the last 10 years,” he said. “We’ve never done a 9-page report, which only speaks to the fact that this is significant and complex. This is probably the most strict zoning anywhere in the county, and probably the most difficult development site in the county, so the bar is set very high for what happens there.”
“I hope people take the chance to review and read our review … we spent a considerable amount of time reviewing this both individually and as a group in the office and its reflective of the scope of the project,” he said.
Mayor Wheeler responds
Multiple people concerned or involved in the development proposal have read the county report — and, at the village planning board’s Oct. 10 meeting, the consensus was that nobody had ever seen anything like it in their multiple years in municipal government service.
Current planning board member Anne McDowell said she was “taken aback” by the 9-page report and in 15 years on the planning board she had never seen such a thing. Local zoning attorney Barry Schreibman, who spoke during the public comment portion of the meeting, agreed about the report’s uniqueness. “It shows it’s a weighty and significant decision,” he said.
Bill Hall, a former six-year village planning board chair, also said he had “never seen anything like it,” and called it “a work of art.” In a recent letter to the mayor, which is included in the planning board file on the Aldi project, Hall wrote that he was “astounded” by the report and “rather than helping, the county report appeared to be bent on raising doubts about every aspect of the project. The report basically provided someone’s opinion and interpretation of the design guidelines prepared by the EHH committee. There was not one item that seemed to meet their approval.”
Wheeler also said he was shocked by the county report, “not only in [its] nature but in [its] tone.” In his four-page rebuttal to the MCPD report, which he submitted into the public record and also sent to department director Ingmire, Wheeler said he felt “compelled to object” to the conclusions and much of the content of the report. He said it was factually inaccurate, demonstrates a lack of objectivity and includes subtle editorializing, it “implicitly questions” the competence of the village board and professional staff and “is a direct attack on the sovereignty of the village.”
In his rebuttal, Wheeler stated that the entire tone of the report was “emotive rather than objective” and its suggestion that the Cazenovia Market project is “a threat to our way of life” is “excessive.”
He also stated:
—The applicant meets the acceptable definitions for mixed use as stated in village zoning codes, and the VES-MU and design guidelines were purposely created to offer flexibility. He later states that the county report “applies a rigid and idealistic standard that could jeopardize the ability of the village to ever redevelop this blighted area of the community.”
—The report questions the village’s ability to interpret its own code regarding building heights and also alludes to taller buildings “framing the viewshed,” even though this reference to the design guidelines is errant and misapplied by the county to the wrong part of the zone.
—The report criticizes the proposed curb cuts, but both the village and the state department of transportation have spent months negotiating with the applicants to arrive at the current configuration “which is infinitely better than existing conditions.” Wheeler said the village and the DOT have concluded the curb cut design to be acceptable. “I differ with the report’s conclusions with regard to the appropriate balance between the ‘ideal’ and the ‘achievable,’” Wheeler wrote.
—The report is overly critical of the project’s contribution to zone walkability when it would in fact add hundreds of yards of trails and sidewalks to the area. He again criticized the report’s tone that “an unrealized ideal is somehow preferable to an achievable, positive reality.”
—The village’s February 2016 change in the local law to allow for pharmacies and banks with drive-thrus was only to clarify language, it was part of the EHH Committee’s 2014 conclusion to allow drive-thru uses and was not a change of intent for the VES-MU zone as previously established. He also stated that he disagreed with the county’s conclusion about the project exceeding high intensity uses and impervious surface thresholds (per the WPO) and that the village attorney and village engineer both had “come to the opposite conclusion” of the county planning department on those issues.
—The report’s declaration that that the project proposal did not meet the intent and specific requirements of the VES design guidelines was absurd, especially considering it did not mention that the professional planner hired by the village to review the project — who actually wrote the design guidelines — said the applicants had “made significant progress” in meeting those guidelines.
Wheeler concluded that the report’s conclusion that the project had done little to meet the village zone development criteria was “clearly an outlier and inconsistent with the county planning department’s standards of fairness, accuracy and objectivity I have always appreciated in the past.”
What’s next
Ingmire said that he knew his department’s report on the Cazenovia Market proposal would be subject to much criticism, but he also maintains his belief that his department is “above the controversy of this project.”
“We don’t support or disapprove of it, we just try to provide an objective review,” Ingmire said. “We are not going to be beholden to pressure from either side on this. If it came out ‘biased,’ it’s a commentary on how far the developer was off the mark. If other people want to try to exert pressure — we’ve already been FOILed for this — if I had to do over again I’d do the exact same thing.”
As to Wheeler’s assertion that the report is an attack on the village’s sovereignty, Ingmire said, “It’s same thing we always do, it just happens he doesn’t agree with our decision this time.”
Wheeler said he was surprised that the report was “so incongruent” with the findings of others who have reviewed the project including the village board, the village attorney, the village engineer, Applied Planning and the Cazenovia Advisory Conservation Commission (CACC), all of whom have been reviewing this project for months.
“We expect and welcome feedback about county-wide implications or suggestions to improve the project, but were taken back that the village’s interpretation of its own zoning and the technical advice of its professional staff was being questioned,” Wheeler said.
Procedurally, the county’s report was a preliminary look at the project, and the application is still incomplete, Ingmire said. He said the department’s conclusion that it is incomplete is “not a negative to the developer or the village,” it’s just saying “all the pieces are not there yet.” If the proposal gets amended and resubmitted, his department will review it again and supplement their current report, he said.
Wheeler said he has encouraged the developer to review and consider the county report, along with all the other new input, make improvements to the plan and resubmit to the village planning board and the county planning department with some updates and improvements.
“I’m glad the county said they will take another look and we welcome that opportunity to keep moving forward. I hope they will also look at body of evidence I introduced into the record that comes to a very different conclusion than one in the county report,” Wheeler said. “As the person who led the effort to create this zone, I have a unique perspective on what our intent was. I continue to believe that this project has the potential to fulfill that intent and benefit the community. I love our village. Every decision I make is based on the litmus test, ‘What is best for our community?’”
Under the law, the MCPD has the capacity to approve or disapprove a project and “the ramifications of that are for the local board needing to overrule that,” he said. “We almost never do that. I can tell you, in this case, will not approve or disapprove; we’ll put the information down and probably return it for the local community to decide.”
Click here to read the MCPD full report.
Click here to read Mayor Wheeler reply letter.
