Senior overlay bill to be adopted"



NEW SCOTLAND — A senior overlay district will likely become part of the town’s landscape.

The once-contentious bill would allow for development anywhere in town, including the commercial district along Route 85, where developer Charles Carrow has proposed 15 duplexes behind a medical facility he built.

At a public hearing for the law on Feb. 13, Carrow pitched his senior housing plans.
"This isn’t a low-income area," he told the board. "And I’m not ashamed to say that."
"I’m afraid I have to agree with Mr. Carrow," said resident Liz Kormos, who chairs the senior advisory board. She had also done research on the demographics of the area and came to, essentially, the same conclusion, but added that there would be a need for moderate-income senior housing.

Drafted largely by Democratic Councilman Richard Reilly over the last year-and-a-half, the bill was criticized in August by some residents and Republican Councilman Doug LaGrange and then-Supervisor Ed Clark, who had run on the Republican ticket.
"There seems to be a great rush to get this done," Clark said in August. "I feel it’s being done primarily to accommodate Mr. Carrow’s development."

Some residents objected that the bill had few criteria geared for seniors and they pointed out that the property Carrow planned to build on was zoned commercial.
Democratic Councilwoman Deborah Baron’s husband, Robert Baron, is a business associate of Carrow and would act as the project contractor for the development, he said last summer. Although Baron told fellow board members of "a possible conflict of interest" earlier, at the public hearing on Aug. 8 for the law, she said, as the town’s senior liaison, that area seniors are interested in the senior-housing district "because they’re interested in the community." She added, "I really don’t see them selling their homes for this sort of real estate."
One resident at that meeting had offered an answer to the town’s assertion that senior housing was good for the tax base since people over 55 will be paying school taxes but won’t have children attending school. "It’s like taking the people out of their house" and replacing them with families with children," said Irving Mosher, implying the town will still have children to educate.

LaGrange, the only Republican left on the board since Clark retired and Supervisor Thomas Dolin, a Democrat, took office in January, asked at the Feb. 13 hearing what percent of the units in Carrow’s project were likely to be inhabited by New Scotland residents. Around 25 percent, answered Kormos, since it’s so close to Bethlehem.
"You think there’s need here — go to Bethlehem," she said of the senior-housing shortage in the area.

The newly-completed senior-housing complex in Voorheesville has four of its nine units full, said Carrow.
Although Dolin expressed some concern over a lack of incentives for low-income senior housing, he concluded, "It’s kind of embarrassing, we’re the only one around here that doesn’t allow senior housing. It’s overdue."

No objections were raised from the few people who attended the hearing, held in the midst of a snow storm, and the board has submitted the bill to Albany County’s planning board and expects to vote on it at its April meeting.