NEW SCOTLAND — A proposed subdivision off Route 85 was presented to the New Scotland Planning Board Tuesday evening, totaling 62 acres and 22 residential lots.

The subdivision applicant is Jameson Phillips, whose father is in the construction business, and the engineer for the project is Nicholas Costa, of Advance Engineering and Surveying, based out of Latham.
The planning board, as well as Building Inspector Jeremy Cramer, met with Costa and Phillips about a month before the meeting to discuss the application.

The 62 acres proposed for the subdivision off Route 85 are bordered by Bethlehem on the east side, private lots on Baltis Drive on the north side, a farm on the west side, and Route 85 on the south.

The space used to be Camp Shelley, which ran as a camp during the day and a theatre in the evenings. Corinne Weeks was a swimming instructor there when she was in her late teens in the early 1950s.

“That’s when it was in full swing,” she said.

“I met my late husband there, actually. He was an actor from Emerson College,” Weeks continued.

The theatre had a director and a few actors from New York City, and the camp would pull in local thespians from Slingerlands and Schenectady.

The camp was established by Shirley Kaye, who lived in an old house on the property with her husband while they ran the camp. Kaye is now living in Florida, according to Weeks. The camp ran until at least the late 1970s.

Shelly Pines — the proposed name for the subdivision — would lie within the existing residential agricultural district in New Scotland.

The RA zone requires each lot to be at least one acre, and the proposal states each lot would be anywhere from one to 12 acres. To make the neighborhood accessible, the applicant is proposing a new road be built off Route 85 to go into the development, ending in a cul-de-sac.

Each home is to have their own septic system, and, according to planning board Chairman Charles Voss, “Municipal water is the way to go.”

Board member Robert Staph spent some time going over the layout of the lots and the proposed driveway locations with Costa, giving him new ideas on how to best use the space available to them.

Part of the acreage has a slope of greater than 17 percent. Also, some of it is classified as wetlands. Areas of land with either of these characteristics cannot be used when calculating the size of a lot, according to the town’s zoning code.

A pond on the property will be accessible to all neighborhood residents, and Phillips is considering a homeowners’ association of some kind for the area.

As it is early in the process, things can easily change in the Shelly Pines proposal.

When asked by the board what the price range for lots will be, Phillips replied that the developer will have to do some cost analysis before deciding the price of lots.

Also, no builder has been chosen yet.

“It’s too early in the process,” Phillips said.

He continued that he wants to “have similar looking homes” in the neighborhood, so, while all the homes may not be exactly the same, they will have a similar overall style to make the area look consistent.

In other business, the planning board gave a positive recommendation to an area variance sent over from the zoning board regarding a request for 20 feet of relief from the zoning law, stating a buildable lot needs at least 50 feet of frontage on a public road. The applicant, Robert Samson, wants to split his lot in two if the relief is granted, so his son can build a home on a seven-to-nine-acre parcel, and the remaining parcel, owned by Samson and his wife, will stay as it is.