Woodland Hills developers try to ease board’s concerns

TOWN OF MANLIUS – The developers of the proposed Woodland Hills subdivision off Hoag Lane have made several alterations to their plans in an effort to gain favor with the town of Manlius Planning Board.
Nearly two years ago, the board rejected a larger development proposal on the site. Over the course of three years, the planning board sparred with the former development team over issues related to stormwater management, among other concerns. The board declared that the development would have a significant environmental impact and was not satisfied with the developer’s responses to their concerns.
On Monday, attorney Chris Danaher of Hancock & Estabrook led a presentation by a series of engineers and developers that he hoped would provide planning board members with some assurances that the concerns that led them to reject the project a couple of years ago would be addressed. The presentation focused on four areas – the use of conventional, rather than “cluster” development, the preservation of existing vegetation on the site, a new stormwater management plan and the amount of earth that would need to be removed or added to the site to “balance” the site.
The new site plan calls for a 16-lot subdivision on a 30-acre site that would be accessed from a new circle off Hoag Lane. The new conventional plan fits within the town’s RA zoning and doesn’t require any variances from the zoning board of appeals, Danaher said.
Homes would be in the $750,000 and higher ranger, he said, and would sit on parcels ranging from around one acre to three acres.
Danaher said one of the goals in creating this development is to retain as much existing healthy vegetation as possible.
“I can assure you that they’re not going to remove anything that isn’t approved by the town,” he said of the existing vegetation on the site.
The plans call for a new stormwater management plan that includes a secondary stormwater facility downstream from the retention pond in the original proposal. The retention ponds would sit on a parcel on the west side of the property that would be owned and maintained by the development’s homeowner’s association.
“In order to try and help the community with some of their flooding issues … we’ve added some redundant storage,” said Rudy Zona of R.Z. Engineering, pllc., who created the preliminary drawings of the new stormwater plan. “It reduces the discharges by choking it off from downstream areas.”
“We tried to hear what your concerns were and do something about it,” Zona continued, adding that he searched for articles related to similar stormwater facilities that failed and found only one in the state of Illinois that was built to different standards. “These basins are tried and true methods. They’re not experimental.”
In response to planning board member Rich Rosetti’s previous concerns about the amount of fill necessary Joe Mueller of J. K. Tobin Construction was called on to discuss the grading of the site. He stated that preliminary plans call for about 39,000 to 40,000 cubic yards of earth to be moved around the site to provide balancing, which far different from the 100,000 cubic yards of fill that Rosetti had indicated would be needed in the previous plans. Mueller said that nothing except building materials would need to be brought onsite.
“The optimum thing is to move as little earth as possible to balance the site,” Mueller said. “We’re not hauling material on site or off site.”
The board will continue to review the new plans at its meeting on Jan. 23.