To the Editor:

I’d like to bring something critically important to the attention of the residents of Guilderland. As you may know, the next and possibly last town board public hearing on the new draft comprehensive plan is scheduled for March 18.

I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to be on the resident subcommittee for the Neighborhood Housing and Town Character sections last summer/fall. That subcommittee included many very experienced and respected people, including Ellen Manning (head of the McKownville Improvement Association), Robyn Gray (chair of Guilderland Coalition for Responsible Growth), Elizabeth Lott (chair of the zoning board), Dominic Riguso (current planning board member), Lisa Hart (Westmere resident), Rosemary Centi (former town board member), Gus Santos (current town board member), Don Csaposs (chief executive officer of the Guilderland Industrial Development Agency), and myself (former town board member).

After several meetings, and a lot of hard work, this diverse group agreed on some very clear goals and objectives for both the Housing section and the Town Character section. I was shocked to see that months later, when the draft comprehensive plan was reworked by the consultant and town planner, not only did it recommend the exact opposite of what we recommended on many issues but, in fact, for the first time ever to my knowledge in Guilderland’s history, it totally dropped the entire section on Town Character from the comprehensive plan. This cannot be allowed to stand.

A town’s comprehensive plan is intended to be a recognition of what kind of town it is, and a road map for where it wants to be in the next 20 or so years. A comprehensive plan without a section on town character leaves the town rudderless, open to overdevelopment, spot zoning, a loss of community, and a destruction of the vision and values the residents hold dear for their town.

A path forward in any town is necessarily a compromise between the need to grow, and the sense of identity and community that it seeks to preserve.At the Feb 4 public hearing, the consultant casually declared, “There is no single community character” in Guilderland [“Speakers call for small houses rather than large apartment complexes,” The Altamont Enterprise, Feb. 7, 2025].

Part of what makes Guilderland so special is because it has so many rich neighborhood communities, like Mc Kownville, Altamont, Westmere, Carman Road, Voorheesville, and rural Guilderland. But because we have many pockets of close-knit communities does not mean that Guilderland has no town character. Quite the opposite.

I have lived here all my life and campaigned door to door throughout this town and, no matter what community you are from in Guilderland, there is most definitely a strong sense of town character, evidenced by closely held values and a vision that we all share for our town’s future.

Perhaps the reason why the consultant and the town planner don’t think there should be a Town Character section in the comprehensive plan is because neither live in Guilderland? Anyone who lives in this town knows just how important town character is.

Or perhaps the recent appearance of 3-, 4-, and 5-story apartment buildings all over town, some in historical residential neighborhoods or nearby the protected Pine Bush, have become so commonplace that they have torn at the seams of our town’s character to the point where we truly are poised to lose our identity as a town as Guilderland begins to look more and more urban?

Are we giving up?

Overdevelopment is not a reason to delete the section on Town Character from our plan, but instead its precisely why it is important to have it represented there, before our town character is indeed completely lost. A Town Character section grounds a town and incorporates our town values into our future.

The consultant has claimed that some of the Town Character points were incorporated elsewhere in other sections of the comprehensive plan. I have not been able to find this and, even if it were true, it does not negate the need for a separate full section on Town Character. 

The Town Character section, with goals and objectives, acts as an independent and equally strong check and balance to overdevelopment. This section balances the natural tension between the two competing interests, and prevents the town from losing its identity. Not surprisingly, the character section of a comprehensive plan often serves as the basis for residents to challenge a developer’s overreach in court when a town begins to lose its character completely.   

Since I think residents have a right to know what was deleted from their own comprehensive plan, and because no one is telling them this, here are the five goals from the Town Character section that were deleted in toto by the consultant and town planner:

— Preserve and enhance Guilderland’s identity, image, and quality of life; and maintain and strengthen the distinction between the town’s developed and rural areas, as well as the distinction between the town’s neighborhoods and commercial areas;

— Prevent any trends that move Guilderland towards the look of a city or large commercial town; namely, avoid putting all commercial businesses along the Western Avenue Corridor. Instead, spread them out thoughtfully in appropriately zoned areas in town that are in conformance with the town’s height limit and with landscaping and buffers to clearly separate them from the residential areas with native-species landscaping.

(Note: Although we recommended twice to avoid adding more development to Western Avenue, the draft comprehensive plan not only ignores this, it does the opposite — proposing to rezone an older residential area along Western Avenue near Route 155 to General Business.);

— Prioritize residents’ quality of life while encouraging small businesses to grow and flourish;

— Town character should recognize the abundance of ethnic groups in the town and encourage and promote diversity; and

— Establish resilience goals/strategies that reduce the town of Guilderland’s vulnerability to potential natural hazards and events. Reduce risk to future developments through a careful planning process, and take steps to protect existing infrastructure and natural resources. 

Here are a few of the Character Objectives we recommended, all of which were again deleted from the draft comprehensive plan:

— Establish guidelines to ensure that future residential and commercial development is of a scale and design that is appropriate from both a neighborhood and townwide perspective. Recommended action: The town should proactively select one or two designated areas in town on main roads (avoiding Western Avenue) that have enough population to support small non-residential commercial uses in Business Non-Retail Professional or Local Business districts in order to bring light offices, dining, professional services and employment opportunities to areas that need those services;

— Identify boundaries of existing, or locations for potential, mixed-use community centers or hamlets (similar to the village of Altamont);

— Create neighborhood “community centers” and identify necessary transportation improvements for each area that will address traffic calming and other pedestrian safety issues;

— Work with residents in the town’s traditional neighborhood communities to generate strategies for enhancing their existing environments, and require town leaders to provide updates on progress achieved with the comprehensive plan’s goals and objectives to each neighborhood corridor community periodically;

— Ensure adequate, but not excessive parking;

— Support continued use of viable agricultural lands; preserve open space, and protect and preserve natural resources;

— Encourage use of vacant properties … [developing] abandoned or vacant property for new housing and commercial uses, rather than breaking ground in open or green spaces in town;

— Encourage green energy like solar and wind farms in appropriately sited areas that will not cause a negative impact on any town or residential natural or historic viewsheds;

— Do not allow major solar or wind farms in residential areas;

— Promote use of solar panels as much as possible on (a) town properties, such as the town hall, the Nott Road garage, the school bus garage, etc. and (b) on large private commercial structures such as perhaps Crossgates Mall and the Guilderland Center industrial park;

— Encourage residential rooftop solar panels, perhaps with tax incentives; and

— Retain and strengthen the character of Guilderland’s residential neighborhoods, and develop building, landscaping, and signage guidelines for commercial areas to create a cohesive and aesthetically pleasing visual environment and sense of place rather than a sprawling suburban patchwork.

These goals and objectives represent the residents’ values and what they want to preserve in town as good and guiding principles for the next 20 years or more. Why were they ignored and deleted? What was the harm in including them?

Here is where you come in. If ever there was a time to save our town, now is the time, or we will just be handing the keys over to the developers for the next 20-plus years and giving up.

We cannot afford to have Town Character erased from our town comprehensive plan, or all is lost. It’s time to make your voices heard.

The town board is holding a public hearing on the draft comprehensive plan on March 18. At this time, there are no further public hearings scheduled before the plan is approved.

If you feel that your town’s character is important, and should continue to be a part of the comprehensive plan, as it has for decades, please attend this important meeting, or, if you can’t, then please write a letter or send an email to each of the town board members telling them you insist that the Town Character section be reinserted into in the draft comprehensive plan, and please ask that your email or letter be included in the record.

It only takes a minute to send an email; this is your chance to preserve your quality of living and keep this a beautiful town for everyone to live, work, and raise a family in for generations to come.  Please help. Email addresses of the board members are: ; ; ; ; . 

Laurel L. Bohl

Guilderland

Editor’s note: Laurel Bohl was formerly a Guilderland Town Board member.