ALTAMONT — A village board is once again questioning a project proposed by Jeff Thomas. 

In 2018, Thomas was before the planning board seeking permission to build three stand-alone buildings containing 26 apartments at 120 Park Street, adjacent to the Altamont Free Library and behind the village post office. 

At the time, the planning board noted issues with traffic, water and sewer, and stormwater management, among others. The project went away soon after the meeting. 

Six years later, Thomas was before the zoning board, which took over all planning duties in Altamont following the 2018 abolishment of the planning board, with a modified proposal for the 1.6-acre parcel but heard concerns similar to those expressed years earlier. 

Thomas is looking to build:

— A 6,000-square-foot post office building;

— A 4,200-square-foot, two-and-a-half-story mixed-use building with commercial space and six residential units;

— A two-story building with six residential units; and

—  A 1,200-square-foot community center.

 The site is the current home of Altamont’s post office, a fire-suppression company, and a former rail station building. 

Thomas explained the project’s catalyst this time around was the post office. 

He told board members he was approached three to four years ago by the post office about needing more space — Thomas is the owner of the 108 Park Street post office building — the current building is about 2,700 square feet; the plan is to more than double that space, to 6,000 square feet. 

Thomas’s formal 2018 project did not include a new post office, but that didn’t stop him from proposing one. 

At the time, he proposed adding Victorian-style flourishes to the mid-20th Century brick building. But then-Trustee Dean Whalen, the village board’s liaison to the planning board, spoke from the audience and said that, since the public had not been notified about the post office proposal, the planning board could not consider it.

Village code

One of current zoning board members’ chief concerns, as it was in 2018, was that the project, as proposed, isn’t allowed under village code: 120 Park Street is located in the village’s Central Business District, which doesn’t allow for stand-alone multi-family housing.

But Donald Cropsey, a member of Thomas’s development team and, at one time, Altamont’s code-enforcement officer, told the board there was language in the village’s density control schedule that references mixed-use buildings, which suggested that the code, while perhaps ambiguous, did provide a basis for the proposed development.

Cropsey argued that the inclusion of mixed-use terminology in the density control schedule, which outlines parameters for lot sizes and building dimensions, indicated an intention to accommodate such projects in the Central Business District, but acknowledged that “the rest of the zoning law is silent on mixed-use buildings.”

Cropsey added that the “zoning law may need to be updated to reference that, but the control schedule does reference mixed-use buildings, and we looked at this project as a mixed-use project.”

Hyde Clark, the zoning board’s attorney, said code interpretation wasn’t within board members’ purview. 

“I think what we will do is have it referred to our code-enforcement officer to make a determination,” Hyde said on Nov. 26. “And then, based on that, we'll either come back here to discuss whether or not [the project] needs a variance,” or if the village board of trustees needs to step in and handle the issue legislatively, by amending the existing code.

Traffic, parking, and the environment

Another concern raised by zoning board members was the impact traffic would have on such an unusually configured project. The proposed development would have two entrances off of Park Street and one ingress-only entrance through the parking lot of the Altamont Free Library, which is allowed by an existing easement.  

And with the number of Park Street homes effectively doubling, board members sought to ensure that development wouldn’t compromise resident and visitor safety, to which project engineer Brett Steenburgh suggested that traffic-calming measures such as speed bumps or speed tables could help mitigate the impact. 

Parking was also a noted concern of board members. 

Thomas’s 2018 proposal did not have enough parking on-site and sought to use a provision in the village code that allows for a percentage of existing on-street village parking to be factored into a project’s total space count; up to 20 percent of parking could be on-street. 

This time around, Steenburgh sought to allay members’ concerns, explaining that the proposed 53 parking spaces — plus additional eight dedicated for post-office vehicles —  would provide enough parking for the development, while still maintaining a landscaped area around the site.

Another notable board concern from Nov. 26 was the project’s potential impact on the stream that runs right through the site. The village code requires a 100-foot development buffer from certain water bodies.

But Thomas pointed out, “There’s been a building on top of [the stream] for 150 years,” adding that the culvert would be made with Helderberg bluestone, which is both “beautiful” and “very structurally sound.” 

Since the Nov. 26 session was a pre-concept meeting, the board did not want to dismiss the project out of hand, choosing instead to allow for further evaluation and clarification of the proposal.