Cumby to come to corner of Western Avenue and Route 146
— Site plan from Stefanie DiLallo Bitter
The Cumberland Farms to be constructed at the corner of routes 146 and 20 will have a 5,275-square-foot convenience store and five gas pumps. In the future, a car wash may be built toward the property’s southeastern edge.
GUILDERLAND — A long-vacant building on Western Avenue will soon be demolished, to make way for a Cumberland Farms gas station and convenience store.
The building is the abandoned bank near the corner of Route 146, across from Stewart’s, a gas station and convenience store on the southwestern corner of that same intersection.
Cumberland Farms is taking over the corner parcel as well as the adjoining parcel and its lot will extend up to the edge of the town-owned Western Turnpike Golf Course. The entire lot is 2.35 acres in size, said attorney Stefanie DiLallo Bitter of Bartlett, Pontiff, Stewart & Rhodes, P.C. this week. DiLallo Bitter is the local counsel for Cumberland Farms.
The gas station will have five pumps — 10 dispensers — beneath a canopy and a 5,275-square-foot convenience store. There will be no drive-through, DiLallo Bitter said, adding, “People will get in their steps.”
The gas station will have entrances on both Western Avenue and Route 146. In keeping with a decision by the New York State Department of Transportation, the entrance on Western Avenue will allow left turns into the store but will not allow left turns out, while the entrance on Route 146 will be full access, said DiLallo Bitter.
A two-year study will also be done, DiLallo Bitter said, to “make sure there are no issues” with the entrances.
“This project has been approximately four years in the making,” DiLallo Bittner noted at the zoning board of appeals meeting Oct. 18, at which the final stage in the approval process was granted: a special-use permit to allow for a gas station to be built on this property in a general-business zone.
This week, DiLallo Bitter said the project got its start in 2014, and construction will be done in 2018. “It’s a good project,” DiLallo Bitter said. “It was worth waiting for.”
The project may also have, at some point in the future, a car wash, which would be located at the eastern side of the lot, closer to the golf course, further from Route 146.
DiLallo Bitter called the car wash proposal “exciting,” noting that it was Cumberland Farms’s first such proposal in the Capital District.
If the company does decide to build a car wash, it will need to come back to the town “for some engineering analysis, to make sure there’s enough water at the site for it,” said Jacqueline M. Coons, the town’s acting chief building and zoning inspector. She added that the car wash has already been approved, though, as a possible “Phase 2” of this project.
This long-abandoned bank building at the corner of routes 146 and 20 will be demolished “by spring, if not before,” the developer said, to make way for a Cumberland Farms gas station and convenience store.
Traffic engineer Wendy Holzberger of VHB (Vanasse Hangen Brustlin), said that the Route 146 entrances to Cumberland Farms and Stewart’s will be across from one another.
Asked if this will create traffic issues in that area of Route 146, Coons said, “You would hope that people would use whichever is easier to turn into [depending on the direction they are driving], but who knows. People like what they like.”
As a condition of the town’s approval, Cumberland Farms will need to put in a sidewalk and connect it to a sidewalk that the town plans to build soon, in front of the golf course, zoning board Chairman Thomas Remmert said at the meeting.
The bank building, DiLallo Bitter said, will be demolished “by the spring, if not before.”
