GUILDERLAND — Peter Barber, Guilderland’s supervisor, gave the town board’s first comments on an updated comprehensive plan following a March 18 public hearing.

Eleven people spoke at the second hearing session, including four who had spoken at the first, on Feb. 4. The hearing will be extended until after the planning board comments on the plan, as required by law, which Barber speculated would be “sometime in May.”

A committee of nine residents worked with MJ Engineering for two years on updating the town’s quarter-century-old plan. The 198-page plan is available on the town’s website and in hard-copy form at the Guilderland Town Hall, the Altamont Village Hall, and the Guilderland Public Library.

Barber ran through a list of recommendations based on his reading of the plan, which ranged from updating data and photographs in a number of places to some larger issues on which the public had also commented.

Town character

“I think putting a separate section of town character is necessary,” said Barber, noting there was such a section in Guilderland’s prior plan and that plans for Bethlehem and Rotterdam also had distinct sessions on their towns’ characters in their plans.

Barber went on to say that having the pine bush and the University at Albany “as part of our town makes us unique.”

He also said, “The fact that over 60 languages are now spoken in our schools … that wasn’t true 25 years ago. So we’re more diverse, more welcoming. I think we want to make sure our character statement reflects those ideas.”

Laurel Bohl, a former Guilderland Town Board member, who had served on a subcommittee that worked on the plan, had pushed for including a section on Guilderland’s character both in a letter to the Altamont Enterprise editor and at the March 18 hearing.

“Every town needs to have some identity to it ….,” Bohl told the board. “Without that, we will be, in my opinion, rudderless.”

Bohl noted that, at her request, “protecting established neighborhoods” was included in the request for proposals for the consultant the town would hire to help draft the updated plan.

Several speakers echoed Bohl’s recommendation for including a section on town character.

“I think she nailed it,” said Steve Wilson, citing Bohl’s letter to the editor.

Wilson, a member of the update committee, said the two big issues for him from the start have been water quality and quantity and adequate housing.

Susan VanDerWende also praised Bohl’s letter. When she participated in community workshop sessions to create the updated plan where participants used Post-it notes to make their views known, VanDerWende said, “The word ‘character’ was there constantly.”

“So the fact that the committees found that important and it didn’t even end up in the plan and it was in the old plan seems very important to me,” said VanDerWende.

Several of the 10 written comments submitted to the board also called for a section on town character.

Pine bush

Three speakers at the March 18 hearing advocated explicitly for making conservation of the pine bush more prominent in the updated plan.

“I do agree with all the speakers about the pine bush,” said Barber after the end of the hearing comments. 

All three of the people who spoke about conserving the pine bush are members of Save the Pine Bush, a grassroots advocacy group that formed nearly a half-century ago to resist development in the globally rare pine barrens.

Andy Arthur said he watches “every year as a little bit more of the pine bush is eaten up piece by piece; it’s looking more and more fragmented.”

Arthur went on, “Part of the vision of the town for the next 20 years should be to preserve more of the pine bush and that’s just not in the plan right now.”

Visitors to the Pine Bush Preserve, he said, bring in money to local businesses.

Lynne Jackson, one of the founders of Save the Pine Bush who lives in Albany, said, “The pine bush is a very unique area and it belongs to all of us.”

She referenced an Enterprise story about loss of butterflies and said, “Right now we’re in the sixth major extinction of animals and plants on Earth.”

Jackson went on, “I think the town board should just say, ‘No more development in the pine bush’ and look to purchase the land.”

The pine barrens once covered over 40 square miles or about 26,000 acres; currently, 3,400 acres across several municipalities are protected as part of the Albany Pine Bush Preserve. “But we have another 2,000 acres that we need to add to the preserve,” said Jackson.

She said, “Around 800 acres of privately owned pine bush is in the town of Guilderland and I think the town should purchase it …. If we only had the areas in the preserve right now, it’s probably not enough for the pine bush ecosystem to survive. It’s very fragmented,” she said, noting the roads that cut through it and the development in the midst of it.

Russell Ziemba, who lives in Troy, said that Guilderland’s comprehensive plan should incorporate the Albany Pine Bush’s 2017 master plan, which calls for adding about 2,000 acres to the preserve.

While wildfires have become a pressing problem in recent years with climate change, he said, “The pine bush is a fire-adapted ecosystem so it naturally burns …. Areas that are in the preserve are managed and burned so they’re less of a  problem.”

He also noted, “There are endangered and threatened species in the pine bush” and their survival depends on the commission’s intensive management.

He concluded, “It’s much more easy to manage if there are larger parcels that are contiguous areas that can be burned or managed in some other way.”

Affordable housing

“The discussion about housing is probably the one that’s the most difficult one to get into,” said Barber. Referencing accessory dwelling units, he went on, “I think there’s some agreement about ADUs and tiny homes and whatnot, but that’s not going to be the only answer as to whether or not we’re going to provide affordability, you know, in our town.”

Barber went on, “We had somebody interested in doing some tiny homes but the infrastructure costs are still too great and that’s the problem.”

Barber explained that area median income, a concept used in the federal Housing Act of 1937, is a way of finding “the middle person” in town — with the richest person in town being balanced by the poorest.

“You might be surprised to know that the average median income household in Guilderland is now $107,000,” said Barber.

Affordable housing is 30- to 60-percent of the area median income, he noted.

“Single family homes are really beyond the reach of the average citizen in our town,” said Barber.

The Guilderland School Board this month heard that there are “significant declines in early elementary enrollment and future kindergarten projections.”

Even though there is a nationwide declining birth rate in the United States, the district’s assistant superintendent for business, Andrew Van Alstyne, said the projections for future kindergartners in Guilderland are lower than in neighboring districts.

Van Alstyne noted that families with kindergartners are “often early in their income-earning cycle and looking for more affordable housing” of which there is a dearth in Guilderland.

At the March 18 hearing, Guilderland resident John Haluska reiterated his views from the first hearing that the town should work with developers to build houses with 600 to 1,000 square feet of living space on small lots “so that people can afford these things.”

“They can be either starter homes or finishing homes,” he said, “but they’ve got to be homes” as opposed to condominiums or apartments.

Joan Mckeon, too, spoke in favor of small “quality” homes as opposed to more apartment complexes.

Several residents who submitted written comments on the plan also called for affordable homes.

Bohl suggested incentivizing the building of smaller homes “to make sure that we don’t slip away from our town look into an urban look.”

Robyn Gray, who chairs the Guilderland Coalition for Responsible Growth, said the town has a lot of protected land, including the pine bush and wetlands. “We are running out of land to build on,” she said.

“People don’t want more apartment buildings,” said Gray. “And when you look at the ratio of apartment buildings to residential and what this town wants, many people came here because they didn’t want that kind of environment.”

David Bourque of Altamont said he grew up in a two-bedroom, one-bathroom ranch house in Westmere in a neighborhood of houses built after World War II for returning soldiers.

“It was a wonderful place to grow up,” he said, describing his boyhood Westmere neighborhood as setting a precedent for the small homes currently being called for.

Preserving Altamont

Most of Bourque’s comments though were made as president of Historic Altamont, speaking for the not-for-profit group.

The group supports the comprehensive plan’s recommendation for a network of multi-use trails in town and is working on a trail network for Altamont, Bourque said.

Historic Altamont also supports a ridgeline protection overlay mentioned in the plan. “This is going to protect the slopes of the Helderberg escarpment,” he said.

Similarly, the group supports the recommendation to incorporate the Helderberg escarpment viewsheds into permit reviews.

“This will strongly help the Helderberg Greenway that The Enterprise has been reporting on for several years now with the whole goal of creating a green belt around Altamont to save the rural character, not let it be suburbanized,” said Bourque.

Historic Altamont also strongly supports town planner Kenneth Kovalchik’s application to the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation for a conservation overlay district to protect the Helderberg viewshed, he said.

Bourque concluded by telling the board, “A plan is only a piece of paper unless the recommendations are implemented …. So please drive forward with all these recommendations. It’ll make Guilderland a better place for the long run.”

“We’re hoping to get DEC support for that,” Barber said of an overlay district to protect the Helderberg viewshed, “and they will provide us with an attorney and consultants. But, regardless of whether that happens or not, we’re still going to go forward with a conservation overlay district. We already set up the committee.”

Process

Robyn Gray praised the work the planning board is doing in reviewing the draft plan “nitpicking paragraph by paragraph.”

She said this process has raised “red flags” about “what these consultants actually did.” Gray noted outdated tables and data among the problems.

“I personally think this town paid way too much money for what you got,” said Gray.

She also said, “They didn’t pay attention to what the residents had to say.”

Gray went on, “If it’s going to take another six months to correct this stuff, I would rather take that extra time to make sure that it’s done correctly and that it actually reflects what the residents of this town want.”

Karen White said she reviewed the plan completed for Rotterdam, which also used MJ Engineering as its consultant.

“Their finished product seemed to talk more about town character and matching development to the existing neighborhood character and protecting established neighborhoods.”

White said of Guilderland’s plan, “It should not be a one and done.”

She went on, “We need residents on a committee to track the progress over time, as well as we need residents on the committee that is considering zoning changes and interpretations.”

She concluded, “Democracy is messy but it’s necessary.”

In his comments after members of the public had finished speaking, Barber said, “I do think that we need to take a look at how, when this is all said and done and we’ve adopted it, how we go back and see how we’re doing in terms of progress on the recommendations.”

He also said it is important to have citizen members of the committee to gauge progress.

Barber said, too, it is important to make sure any recommendations are “reasonable in terms of achievement.”

Many recommendations would require both state and federal assistance, he said, adding, “And the way things are happening in Washington these days, that’s never going to happen for four years or 44 months.”

Barber concluded, “Once you adopt a comprehensive plan, you’re going to have to follow it. We’re not going to go back and amend it. OK? So this is going to be it.”