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ZBA Issues Dominate CS Village Board Workshop
Higher fees for applications/permits, etc. contemplated
by Kevin Foley
Cold Spring Village residents can expect higher fees for services and fines for violations of village law in the near future and extensive changes to the Village code book in the long run if the impression given at the weekly Board of Trustees workshop on Tuesday, January 22, 2008 is any indication.
The trustees, only three of whom were in attendance, began their meeting by spending considerable time in an wide-ranging dialogue with Zoning Board of Appeals chairman, Donald MacDonald, over issues he had presented to them in a letter discussed at the meeting the week before.
Later in the meeting Trustees Mancari, Dunn and Gallagher compared notes with each other and Assistant Building Inspector J. Ralph Falloon on the fees and fines charged by surrounding communities as compared to Cold Spring.
The discussion with MacDonald demonstrated that making changes to the code that governs land use in the village will be a painstaking process. There were several instances where the trustees or MacDonald indicated that more research would be needed to understand the solution to a problem or even to understand the intent behind language in the existing code.
MacDonald began by identifying three current parcels of land in the village that combined different zoning designations. "The code doesn't say what to do when a project is proposed and there are two zoning designations for the property," said MacDonald.
In response to questions about how other jurisdictions handle the issue MacDonald said one approach is to use the zoning for the piece of property on which the proposed building will be located. "On the other hand, other communities have ruled that the more restrictive of two zoning designations should prevail," he added.
MacDonald offered to do further research to see if there is a consensus among areas most like Cold Spring.
This issue, like others, engendered discussion about how different parts of the village might have contradictory or inappropriate zoning designations that are the product of many years of the changing use of properties and the granting of innumerable variances.
Trustee Seth Gallagher then asked MacDonald why the definition of a cellar was a problem for the ZBA, a matter he had questioned in the workshop the week before.
"With a lot of proposals, when they are in the public hearing phase, you can see manipulation of the actual grade of the property with what is a three story building being proposed despite a two and a half story code. This has raised red flags. It's mostly new home projects," said MacDonald.
Gallagher asked if the problem was really one of aesthetic objections to what is a practical attempt to get the most out of a house.
"People seem to be trying to manipulate their way around the intent of the code. They are trying to add more scale. The trend these days is to get bigger," said MacDonald.
After further discussion regarding safety, legitimate uses and the problem of measuring the angle of slopes on properties, MacDonald said, "it's a question of the character of the village we want."
Next, a discussion of whether the requirement of forty feet setbacks for residential corner lots should apply to commercial lots as well, moved quickly into the sticky issue of village parking.
"Big setbacks for commercial lots encourages parking in the front," said MacDonald who questioned whether that was desirable.
Seth Gallagher pointed out that parking for multi-family dwellings wasn't even addressed in the parking section of the village code.
MacDonald described the current parking standard of counting the number of chairs in a waiting area for many professional properties as "super manipulative." He said he would look at other jurisdictions' parking codes.
This discussion quickly moved into another about limits on the amount of impervious materials as opposed to soil and greenery used on a property especially when parking is an issue.
"What about when an entire lot is a parking lot, then everything is impervious," said Gallagher.
MacDonald, who is also a member of the Comprehensive Plan Special Board, said the working groups of the Board are trying to define numerically things like lot coverage, set backs and the like, "so we'll be able to discuss future change base on the actual numbers in the village."
Returning to parking, Karen Dunn asked about businesses that outgrow the parking spaces they started with. MacDonald said parking and offices was a particularly difficult area to deal with.
"What's an office? How do you define an office?" he asked.
Assistant Building Inspector Falloon brought up the fact that "the current village code requires three parking spaces for home offices and nobody even thinks about it."
This engendered another discussion about defining home offices in an Internet world. Seth Gallagher said he thought most people believed you could have a business at home as a matter of right. To which Falloon quipped, " what we have is a lot of nonconforming uses."
MacDonald suggested the Special Board could study home businesses based on size, number of employees, and other factors to use that data for changing the code.
"There are lots of positives to people being home during the day in a neighborhood,' said MacDonald. "In today's world there are a lot of businesses people can do in their homes without disturbing a neighborhood," he said.
MacDonald also added excessive accessory building on properties as yet another problem the village was likely to increasingly confront citing some residents' desire to use the second story of garages as an example of the issue.
As if all these topics were not enough to contemplate, Seth Gallagher asked if anything else was happening at the ZBA. MacDonald then described the problem of several individuals seeking to develop property on the hillside overlooking the Marathon property. He said the issue involved judgments about a steep slope that exceeds New York State code, erosion studies by engineers and the mutual dependency factor wherein a collapsed house can affect others unlike on level land.
"Land values have given rise to development in places that wouldn't have been considered in the past. A steep slope law for the village is needed," said MacDonald.
On the matter of fees and fines the trustees are just beginning their exploration of the issue but they signaled clearly that the system need revision with price increases at the heart of it. Karen Dunn stressed the goal wasn't to increase revenue generally but rather to properly rationalize the cost of services the village performs.
J. Ralph Falloon presented the trustees with some comparison costs from nearby communities such as Fishkill and Dunn had more from still others including Croton. It was immediately evident that Cold Spring charges much less for things like building permits, recreational fees or fines for violations of code.
The trustees agreed to continue to look at examples from other localities before making any decisions.
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