VOORHEESVILLE — Village residents have been clamoring for a gathering spot since Smith’s Tavern closed its doors nearly five years ago. 

They will soon have four spots to choose from.

Northern Barrell Brewing on North Main Street has said it will be opening for take-out on April 15 while the owners of two proposed restaurants and a coffee shop were recently before the village planning commission with their latest project updates. 

 Anthony Berghela, owner of Romo’s Pizza in Glenmont, told commission members in March that his closing on the contract with Stewart’s Shops to purchase the former Smith’s Tavern is contingent on approval of a special-use permit. A narrative submitted with his permit application said Berghela has “an early April closing date to officially purchase the building.”

 Berghela didn’t get approval of a special-use permit this month, but he did receive a key approval. Commission members determined the project at 112 Maple Ave. would not have a significant adverse environmental impact, giving it a negative declaration under the State Environmental Quality Review Act.

The project will now be forwarded to the Albany County Planning Board for its review. And as long as Berghela submits a traffic study in time, the commission can schedule a public hearing on the special-use permit application and site plan for its May meeting, and make a decision on the proposal then. 

During the commission’s April 5 meeting, architect Dan Sanders said that Berghela’s restaurant would have some outdoor seating. A submitted site plan shows an outdoor patio in the front of the building.

There will also be interior improvements made, Sanders said, with new seating arrangements. “There may be a little bit of variety, but mostly six-person booths, four tops, and [a] banquette seating area in the upper level,” Sanders said. The restaurant would seat 98 so sprinklers would have to be installed. 

The basement would be used for storage and the second floor wouldn’t be touched, he said. 

Not much thought has been given to exterior improvements, Sanders said, “because there’s a timeframe in terms of … [Berghela] getting ownership, or potential ownership” of the building. But Berghela told the commission he would like to do “a mix of brick and siding.”

Business for Good

Parking and traffic from the new Business for Good projects were concerns of a number of attendees at the standing-room-only meeting Tuesday. Business For Good is the not-for-profit arm of successful Voorheesville native Ed Mitzen. 

Three properties near Village Hall — 40, 42, and 43 South Main St. — are due to become a new restaurant, café, and parking lot. A limited-liability company associated with Mitzen paid a cumulative $810,000 for the three properties: 

— $350,000 for 42 South Main St., a now-demolished Stewart’s shop, proposed to be a 5,000-square-foot restaurant.

The restaurant had 500 square feet shaved off since it was last before the commission, while proposing 150 seats.;

— $150,000 for 43 South Main St., a dentist’s office in a Victorian building slated for demolition to be replaced with another two-story building with two apartments on the second floor and a bike café occupying the first; and

— $309,900 for 40 South Main St., a four-unit apartment Victorian building, which is due to be razed to make way for a parking lot for the new restaurant next door at the old Stewart’s site. 

Gavin Vuillaume, of Environmental Design Partnership, said the tavern is showing 26 parking spaces, and a total of 37 between the two sites, while code calls for 83 — making the overall project 57 spots short. 

Vuillaume said, “We would be requesting a waiver for the parking on the property; we just don’t have enough room for the parking that would be required based on square footage or on seating.” 

Commission Chairman Steve Reilly said, “This is not a question; it’s a comment”: It’s a little disappointing how few spots we can actually get in these lots. Commission member Chuck Dollard saw the lack of parking as a positive, saying it would bring people past the other small businesses in the community as they walked to and from their cars parked on Main Street.

Resident Steve Schreiber said he didn’t see the need to demolish the building at 40 South Main St. just to make way for more parking, because using the village’s Main Street Master Plan, he was able to identify close to 100 spots within a two-minute walk of the proposed restaurant. 

Mayor Rich Straut told Schreiber he disagreed with him. 

“I was involved in that Main Street Plan,” Straut said. “It was a recognition that parking along Main Street is a problem. It was a recognition that there’s not enough parking.”

Straut, an engineer, said, “It is crystal clear to me that, for anything to happen on this corner, we have to have parking.”

A traffic study provided by Business for Good estimated the project would generate 16 new vehicle trips in the morning and 35 in the evening.   

A resident said the intersection of Center Street, Main Street, and Voorheesville Avenue is very dangerous, and asked what would be done about the issue. 

Brett Balzer, of Balzer and Tuck Architecture, deftly sidestepped the concern, saying he’d have the project team’s traffic engineer comment on the issue. 

“It is a legitimate question about traffic,” Reilly said, “at a really awkward intersection.”

Reilly asked Straut about infrastructure capacity in the village.

“In the event that we do need traffic control signals of some kind,” Reilly said. “Do we have, can we get ahead of that question here?”

Straut said Main Street and Voorheesville Avenue are owned by Albany County, “so that would really be something that would have to be taken up with the county if there was going to be signalization there.”

Reilly wanted to know if the provided traffic study made some kind of  recommendation that traffic lights should be examined once a certain threshold for additional trips per hour had been met. Vuillaume said it didn’t, but he can have questions like that answered for the next meeting.