GUILDERLAND — The Guilderland Town Board recently declined to sign off on the environmental feasibility of a proposed 46-unit development near the town’s center, choosing instead to send the project back to the planning board for further site-plan review. 

The town board on March 21 tabled a vote that would have determined if the proposed Black Creek Run development at 6250 Depot Road would have a significant adverse impact on the environment.

Board members had concerns with, among other things, stormwater management on the site, traffic, and who would ultimately take hold of large portions of the land. 

Rosetti Acquisitions is proposing to build 24 single-family homes, 14 senior apartments, and eight townhome units on about 41 acres across the street from Guilderland High School. 

Supervisor Peter Barber observed that the development had “been around for quite some time,” with the project first appearing on the town’s radar sometime in 2004, and staying there for well over a decade before going silent for seven years, and then reappearing last year.

Rosetti in 2014 paid $306,000 for the 34.8-acre parcel.

Under its current zoning designation, Rural Agricultural 3 (RA3), only a fraction of the units would be permitted that are allowed with hamlet zoning, which would allow for the clustering of buildings. The Guilderland Town Board is lead agency for all country hamlet project applications.

The project had been in development limbo for years in part because of issues Guilderland boards — both planning and town — had with the design and placement of the proposed stormwater drainage system. There was a concern that site runoff into the Black Creek would be contaminated. The Black Creek feeds into the Watervliet Reservoir, the town’s main source of drinking water.

The proposed development, known in the town code as a Country Hamlet, requires a change in zoning, which the town board did approved for the project once before; however, a local law with the changes was never adopted by board, nor was anything ever filed with the Department of State, Town Planner Ken Kovalchik explained in a March 2022 memo to the board.

“At some point,” the town board will have to “make a SEQR determination,” Barber said on Tuesday, referring to the State Environmental Quality Review process. Barber said the town board could have made the determination that night and referred the project back to the planning board for final site-plan review, at which point it would come back to the town board for a final decision in the future.

For example, he said, there’s a reference to a deed restriction on over 6 acres of land. Barber asked if the deed restriction prohibited activity on the property or if it meant the land was potentially being dedicated to town. “I just don’t know what the rationale was for that,” he said.

Barber was told by project engineer, Nicholas Costa, that the site contains federal wetlands — a topic that, coupled with stormwater management, received quite a bit of of attention at the March 21 meeting — and in order to get a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers the applicant had to agree “the wetland area would be deed restricted,” so only “very limited types of activities can occur in that area.” 

The town board also took issue with a proposed drainage pond on the site that could have as much as three to four feet of standing water in it during the summertime. 

Barber then asked about 12.4 acres that the presentation from Costa said would be conveyed to the project’s neighboring family, the Ginders. Barber thought the Ginders did not live there anymore, which is correct, according to the town’s assessment roll. Barber also said town code doesn’t permit the transfer of property to a private property. It was eventually made clear that the acreage would be conveyed to the town.

After all the clarifications were made, Barber pointed out that, with the 12.4 Ginder acres going to the town, along with the 8.4 acres already being conveyed to Guilderland, plus the 6 acres of deed-restricted wetlands, close to 75 percent of the site would be preserved “in some fashion.” The project is a little over 41 acres in total.

Barber then brought up traffic. 

He said the high school had, because of the pandemic, been starting class at 8:15 a.m., but now students are back to their pre-COVID 7:30 start time, but he didn’t think the project would have “appreciable difference in terms of traffic,” although it is something he wants the planning board to take a look at.

But Councilwoman Amanda Beedle disagreed with Barber. 

“I drive to that school, my son drives to that school. And the drop time actually starts at 7:05,” Beedle said. 

She said the route she takes from Altamont along Route 146 to Depot Road is “a constant nightmare,” and noted that, “since the pandemic, there are a lot more parents still driving their kids.”

Beedle said she’d seen it herself, “and I think this is going to be problematic.”

She said she thought “this is going to be problematic when it comes time for construction,” with large vehicles creating a bottleneck as they come off of Route 146.

Charge for the planning board

After some more discussion about the site’s saturation, Barber summed up  the issues the town board wants the planning board to take up:

— Make sure the site plan indicates what property is conveyed to whom, a somewhat similar ask to a later request that the planning board take a better look at the deed-restricted land coming to the town;

— Look at what Barber called the “Moak buffer,” so-called for neighbor Michael Moak, whose 9-acre property is surrounded on three sides by the adjacent project parcel.

Barber’s request is to ensure what is being proposed serves its intended purpose: The buffer would block the view of the large retention pond, both with proper landscaping and possible re-siting; and 

— Take a closer look at the change in start time at the high school as it relates to the traffic evaluation. 

The August 2021 report estimated the new housing would generate an additional 71 trips for the morning and afternoon peak travel hours, between 7:30 and 8:30 a.m.; an additional 31 trips between 4:30 and 5:30 p.m. with 40 more cars on the road.

When a traffic study was conducted in 2006 for the project, the proposal at the time was for 37 housing units: 27 single-family houses and 10 townhomes. Engineers estimated that those homes would generate an additional 78 a.m. and p.m. peak-hour trips, 36 in the morning and 42 in the afternoon.

Peak and weekly traffic counts observed along Depot Road in the time between the writing of the two reports has also increased.