If you live in the Crown Heights neighborhood of the Town of Poughkeepsie, you might soon be able to give your car a rest. With the passage of the town’s master plan for development, town officials hope to make that neighborhood and four others more pedestrian-friendly. After six years on the drawing board, the new master plan was approved last week.
“I’m glad its done,” said town resident Reed Sparling outside the Arlington Branch Library. “I think it’s good for global warming – to combat that. It should be good for businesses – people are living right there and can come into the shops,” he said.
The plan is intended to preserve undeveloped open space and create pedestrian-friendly town centers. But a few critics said it doesn’t go far enough to protect undeveloped land.
Stopping sprawl
Putting an end to sprawl is the aim of the new plan. Zoning codes focus on preferred areas for development. Other areas the plan seeks to protect.
Much of the town has been up-zoned: that means fewer residential units are allowed per acre. A more rural landscape results. Resident Anne Mikusinski said she approved of “keep(ing) rural places more rural. I think Poughkeepsie is getting pretty overly built-up as it is. It would be nice to have more quiet places,” she said.
By contrast, the town is encouraging a mix of residential and commercial development in newly created town centers. There are five of these mixed-use centers: Rochdale, Mac Donnell, Arlington, Crown Heights and Salt Point. In these neighborhoods, shops alongside homes make them pedestrian-friendly, reducing traffic and its negative impacts.
In Arlington – the neighborhood around Vassar College – restaurants and businesses already rub elbows with apartments and homes. But town centers are new to Salt Point and Mac Donnell. The town plan gives the green light to those districts on further mixed residential and commercial use. It also gives the go-ahead to mixed development at Rochdale, although expanded sewer service may be needed first, according to the town’s outside consultant Neil Wilson, who has been spearheading changes made to the plan. “The limiting factor (to Rochdale’s development) will always be sewer,” Wilson said. Crown Heights already has the residential development, but new zoning adds commercial to the mix.
A number of design standards for Arlington aim to change the visual appearance of the neighborhood and make it more pedestrian-friendly. But some of those changes will only occur over time as existing buildings are torn down and new ones (that must conform to the codes) replace them.
Planning board members are likely to encounter a tricky scenario as they oversee development of the new centers: “If individual smaller landowners each want to implement their own vision, that will be a challenge for the planning board to try to get its hands around,” Wilson said. A unified plan from one developer might make the big picture more immediately clear.
Green space
Another major aim of the plan aims to preserve open green space – the undeveloped stretches of farmland, parks, golf courses, historic estates and buffer lands.
The largest section of remaining rural landscape, according to the master plan, is in northern Poughkeepsie, around Bedell and Van Wagner Roads. Other green space lies to the southwest, including the buffer areas around the Trap Rock quarry, Bowdoin Park, Mt. Alvernia and the Audubon preserve along Wappinger Creek. Locust Grove, the Poughkeepsie Rural Cemetery, Vassar Farm and land to the southeast of the Casperkill golf course are all green space area.
But rather than prohibiting any structures on green space area, Wilson said determinations would be made on a “strictly case-by-case basis with reference to what the open space actually is.” Farms could allow for barns and fences, for example.
Resident Doreen Tignanelli said she had wanted to see more protection for the Girl Scout property on Spackenkill Road. A 40-acre parcel on the site formerly used by the Girl Scouts will be donated to the town by Harold and Carol Buchner, owners of another section of the Girl Scout property where the Woods at Cliffdale development is planned. An eight-lot subdivision (down from 39 lots originally proposed) received preliminary subdivision approval from the Planning Board on Aug. 28.
Tignanelli said a green space overlay district in an August draft of the plan was removed without public discussion. “This again leaves the Girl Scout property with no protection even though the 1990 master plan deemed it worthy of protection,” wrote Tignanelli in an e-mail. “It was never zoned accordingly. This was the board’s chance to remedy that oversight but they chose not to at the last minute. The reason given for taking out the overlay was (that it was) not properly vetted,” she stated, adding that other changes had been made at the meeting.
Wilson said a green space overlay zone for the Girl Scout property was discussed in August. Analysis of potential impacts such a district would have was not performed at that time in favor of completing the master plan. At the Sept. 26 meeting to approve the plan, the Town Board passed a resolution declaring its intent to revisit a green space overlay district as a possible amendment to the planning document, as well as a recreational overlay district for ball fields and recreational space.
“I’m in favor of a green space overlay, but I won’t support it tonight,” said Dominic Seminara (R-2nd Ward), calling for more review time.
“It’s a very restrictive set of codes,” Wilson said of green space overlay. “That’s all the more reason to go back and reconsider with a SEQR (state environmental quality review) analysis to assess the impact of applying that zone to those types of properties,” said Wilson.