GUILDERLAND — Fresh off tabling a request for his hardware store, Jonathan Phillips once again entered the breach on March 2 with multiple variance requests for signs for his gas station/doughnut shop/mini-mart project at the corner of routes 146 and 158. 

Phillips is running the mini-mart himself, and partnering with Mobil and a local Dunkin’ franchisee on the project. 

Last month, Phillips asked the Guilderland Zoning Board of Appeals for a variance to first hang four, then two, signs on the exterior of his hardware store, but then put that request on the back burner to concentrate on this month’s ask. 

Chairman Thomas Remmert said “nowhere in the application” did it say “how many total square feet” of signage the businesses were looking to put up. 

Remmert estimated there were 823 square feet of signage, with some exclusions — 150 square feet of signage is allowed for the project; 50 square feet for each business. 

That 823-square-foot figure got pushed into the thousand-square-foot range after the board discovered Mobil would be looking to install logos on two sides of a canopy that goes over the gas pumps. 

“That just complicates things even more,” Remmert said. “I can tell you right now it’s gotta come down,” he said of the square footage.

Remmert said it’s the largest variance request he’s heard since he’s been on the board. But the chairman later acknowledged, “It’s a corner lot, so you got two roads you got to deal with. And that’s one of the reasons that we granted these types of variances in the past.”

However, the current request “goes way above and beyond that,” Remmert said of Phillips’s variance in contrast with the variance that was granted to Cumberland Farms on the corner of Western Avenue and Route 146.

Phillips, being familiar with the variance request process,  said he “came in asking for more, because if I asked for the bare minimum” it would likely become a problem for his partners with their corporate partners.

Remmert said the proposal had to be revised.

A submittal for the March 16 meeting shows a scaled-down request for 322 square feet of signage. 

The signs themselves

Tom Wheeler of AJ Sign told zoning board members on March 2, “The purpose of the signage really is to get people into the building, so they know what’s in there.”

There would be two large pylon signs on the property — one on each of the state roads — advertising the three businesses, he said, and there would be additional signage on the buildings as well as directional signage. 

With the sheer number of signs being proposed, Remmert said he thought “the biggest problem is the size of the two freestanding signs.” He said he’d like to see the sign square footage for each business.

Miguel Teixeira, the franchisee who would actually own and operate the Dunkin’ shop, told the board the package of signs comes from the corporate office, “so we understand that it is actually a lot. They kind of throw it all at us. And we put up what they asked us to put up.”

Teixeira said the signs are necessary, and the “reason for [that] is actually because we are that impulse business and our business — most of our business — comes from people passing by, looking up, seeing a sign, [and] pulling in.”

Public hearing 

The March 2 meeting also acted as a public hearing for the application, with 10 people speaking, evenly divided for and against the project, making many of the same arguments that were made during the January and February public hearings for Phillips’s sign request for his hardware store. 

This month, four letters were submitted to the board in opposition to Phillips’s proposal, while two nearby neighbors said they had no problem with the project. And, once again, Phillips submitted a petition with hundreds of signatures in support.

Phillips addressed some of the recent criticism of his projects. 

“Anyone knows in this day and age, [after] seven years of planning, sewer lines, funding, government, lawyers, engineers, town engineer  — I could list 150 people I’ve had to deal with in seven years to get this project to where it is. Poorly planned? I think developing a corner like this that has never been developed has been very-well planned,” Phillips said. “And I’ve had a lot of support between the town, engineers, and everybody. What did I miss? Sorry, I wasn’t educated on signs. Poorly planned? No; there’s a variance process to help me with that.”

Remmert said, “When the state legislature created zoning … they realized that the zoning code can’t be written in concrete; there has to be some give and take. And that’s why the state created zoning boards of appeals, so that there could be give and take. And that’s why we do have variances.”

The chairman estimated the Guilderland Zoning Board of Appeals approved one to two variances at “just about every meeting.”