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WESTCHESTER,
CARMEL Ñ PAUL A. CAMARDA
a major residential
developer in Putnam County, built single-family homes here
for decades. Starting in 1986, he had an unbroken 16-year
run of developments in progress here - sometimes several
at once.
But that run ended in 2002.
"If you came to me today and asked, 'Do you have a single-family
subdivision where I could buy a lot, or have a house built?'
" Mr. Camarda said, "I would say no. I don't have any building
lots. Zero. Not even any on the drawing board for the approval
process, which is three to six years."
The reason for the halt in construction, he said, is water.
Northern Westchester and Putnam counties lie within the
380-square-mile Croton watershed - which, from puddle to
stream to river, feeds the vast reservoir system relied
on by New York City and parts of Westchester for drinking
water. Since 1997, when the city and the watershed communities
reached an agreement to protect the quality of the drinking
water, property in the Croton watershed has become some
of the most carefully regulated on earth.
Instead of resisting the city's rules, local leaders have
embraced them, in many cases doing the city one better.
Towns from Somers to Carmel, Yorktown to Southeast have
in recent years adopted stringent laws of their own to protect
the environment, preserve open space and limit development.
If the result means fewer housing developments, that is
just fine with them.
"There's
a land use revolution going on," said Frank S. Fish, a planning
consultant for Buckhurst, Fish & Jacquemart, which has designed
master plans for many New York suburbs. "In a relatively
short period of time, many towns in Putnam and northern
Westchester have significantly rezoned their communities,
from one-acre zoning to three and four acres. By doing that
they have reduced their growth potential tremendously. Development
is now leapfrogging over northern Westchester and Putnam
County to Dutchess County."
These
days the Croton watershed towns rival famously green communities
like Portland, Ore., in their aggressive conservationism,
Mr. Fish said. While wealthy, horse-country towns like Bedford
and Lewisboro have long had three- and four-acre zoning,
now more modest communities like Yorktown, Patterson and
Mahopac require homes to be built on opulent spreads of
land.
Just last week, leaders from North Salem, Lewisboro and
Pound Ridge met to begin tightening already strict zoning
codes - this time with an eye to protecting wildlife. Officials
are planning for a "biotic corridor": a 21-mile stretch
of land in which residential development will be limited
and animals protected.
"This
is a completely new concept in zoning," said Sy Globerman,
supervisor of the Town of North Salem. "Land can still be
used, but planning boards in the three towns will take a
harder look at certain types of development. Sprawl, large
residential developments, even driveways that are too long
can interfere with wildlife."
But the environment is not the only thing affected by the
changes. The shortage of buildable lots has contributed
to escalating home prices. Putnam County's population grew
in the past two decades largely because it offered affordable
housing. The new homes built today come with price tags
close to $1 million.
Robert
J. Bondi, the Putnam county executive, is not concerned
that the regulations will decrease affordable housing in
the six towns that make up the county. Unlike New Jersey
and Connecticut, New York State has no affordable-housing
requirement.
"If
you polled people around the county and asked them if they
wanted any more residential development, they would say
'Pull up the moat bridge,' " Mr. Bondi said. "We don't need
any more development. The schools are bursting at the seams."
THE
Croton reservoir system is the smallest of the three that
feed the city. It supplies about 10 percent of the billion
gallons a day of water used by 9 million people. The other
two systems, the Catskill and the Delaware, are for the
most part west of the Hudson River in regions far more sparsely
populated than Westchester and Putnam.
The
Putnam town of Southeast is the wet heart of the Croton
system. There are five reservoirs in town - the East Branch,
the Middle Branch, the Bog Brook, the Croton Falls and the
Diverting - and 99 percent of the land in town falls within
New York City's watershed.
In
the past, this has created tension between local interests
and those of the city's Department of Environmental Protection,
which oversees the watershed. One point of friction is Route
22, the main artery in Southeast, a busy and dangerous road
that area residents have for decades sought to widen. Because
part of Route 22 in Southeast runs between the East Branch
and the Bog Brook reservoirs, environmentalists have raised
objections to every state plan to widen the road, citing
serious concerns about runoff. Compromise has remained just
out of reach for years, and the road remains a daily traffic
jam.
But
the presence of the reservoirs has not been without its
compensations to Southeast. For one thing, it has added
legal backbone to highly restrictive zoning regulations.
Two
years ago the town, which encompasses the Village of Brewster,
reworked its master plan, a dictionary-weight document that
examines development patterns and recommends how growth
should be managed. The town board halted development while
the study was under way and then changed the zoning in most
areas from one acre per house to three acres per house.
"The D.E.P. regulations were part of it," said Town Supervisor
John Dunford, referring to the city's Department of Environmental
Protection, "but we did our own studies of the vacant land
that was left and saw that it was marginal land. There are
drainage issues and we have to protect the wetland.
"But basically," he added, "we don't have the infrastructure.
Our roads can't handle all the traffic we have now. Route
22 is a mess. Our schools are stretched."
The
zoning changes drastically reduced the available building
lots in the 35-square-mile town. Instead of 4,300 new homes,
Southeast now has room for 900.
The
town is in the midst of its second moratorium on residential
development in two years, while it fine-tunes zoning.
Yet for all these restrictions, large developments have
not been completely scotched. Two of the most notable are
projects approved before the new laws took effect. One,
a 103-home site just north of the North Salem border called
the Meadow at Deans Corners, has recently been mired in
litigation brought by environmental groups. Another, Terravest
Corporate Park, a 139-acre site with an 80,000-square-foot
food processing plant, is already under construction. Additional
office buildings and 60 detached homes for senior citizens
are proposed for future phases of development there.
"They just keep coming and coming," said Jane Caterina,
a nursery school teacher who has lived in Southeast for
23 years. Ms. Caterina used to look out of her kitchen window
and see hills in the distance, she said. Now she sees Home
Depot. At night the lights from the store's parking lot
blot out the stars.
"It's
enough already," Ms. Caterina said. "It's getting to the
point where it's getting ridiculous. If they are not careful
it will turn into Long Island, with strip malls everywhere."
Not
a chance, said Christopher O. Ward, who recently resigned
as commissioner of the city's D.E.P. "The changes in land
use and the implementation of other local controls are clearly
making a difference," he asserted. "The experience in these
communities is that they have seen such explosive growth
in recent years that they might not notice the changes,
but imagine, if we hadn't done this, what you would have
seen."
Mr. Camarda, for one, has walked away from several projects
because the regulations made them too expensive.
He cited one crucial effect of the watershed agreement of
1997: a limit on the number of sewage treatment plants allowed
in the region. Further, he pointed out, local regulations
now stipulate that septic systems can be built only on land
that has a natural 15-degree slope. No grading, no filling-in
with soil. Just a natural slope to the entire area.
"You can't ski on that 15-degree slope; that's your average
driveway," Mr. Camarda said.
Then
there is the stormwater retention issue. Since 1997, developers
have been required to prove that all water produced on a
site by runoff from roads, parking lots and driveways, must
stay on the site in retention ponds.
"They
want no increase in runoff," Mr. Camarda said. "That's pretty
difficult to do."
Finally, there is the zoning for larger lots.
"The bigger lot size means more road frontage per house,
which means fewer houses per road," Mr. Camarda said. "More
road surface means more stormwater runoff."
He
said he recently walked away from a 110-acre project in
Carmel on which he would have had to build 67 retention
ponds. Taking into account the septic-system grading restrictions,
he said, the site would have ended up with only 10 building
lots.
As part of the shift away from development, government officials
these days are happy to buy land that developers no longer
see as profitable.
The
D.E.P. has bought up 526 acres in the Croton Watershed since
1997; it is in contract to buy 783 more. The counties and
towns in the region, too, are conserving land at a surprising
rate. Westchester has preserved 1,500 acres of open space
as parkland and ball fields since 1998, at a cost of $41
million, said Gerard Mulligan, the county's planning commissioner,
and it still hasn't spent any of $38 million that the city
provided to upgrade sewage and buy land as part of the watershed
agreement.
Most
of the 10 Westchester towns in the watershed (Mount Pleasant,
North Castle, New Castle, Cortlandt, Yorktown, Somers, Bedford,
Pound Ridge, Lewisboro and North Salem) have passed referendums
to buy land for open space. And Putnam County, using part
of the $30 million it received from the city through the
watershed agreement, has bought or agreed to buy more than
700 acres that had been scheduled for development. The parcels
include the 200-acre Tilly Foster Farm and the nearly 400-acre
Putnam National Golf Course. Also, in October, the county
agreed to share the cost of preserving the 156-acre Camp
Wilbur Herrlich in Patterson.
Heartening as this may sound to some environmentalists,
Marian Rose, president of the Croton Watershed Clean Water
Coalition, does not see it as enough - either to protect
water quality or preserve land.
"It
is a pittance," Dr. Rose said, of the amount of land the
city has bought in Westchester and Putnam since the 1997
agreement.
By
comparison, since 1997 the city has bought more than 50,000
acres in the Catskill and Delaware systems, at a cost of
more than $137 million.
"That's
been a sort of sore point," said James M. Utter, a professor
of environmental science and biology at Purchase College.
"The city does not seem interested in buying land in the
Croton Watershed. If they bought more land, they could reduce
the number of pollutants entering the water. It makes a
lot more sense than what they are doing, which is essentially
triage."
Dr.
Rose, a physicist who lives in Bedford, ascribes that approach
to the city's expectations regarding a $1.2 million filtration
plant planned for a site under Van Cortlandt Park in the
Bronx. It is destined exclusively to meet a federal requirement
for filtering the Croton system's water. No such requirement
exists for the Catskill and Delaware systems, provided that
periodic tests show their water to be clean.
"The
Croton Watershed is under tremendous development pressure,"
Dr. Rose said. "By and large the residents don't want more
development, but if a developer buys a piece of land and
follows the rules, there is not much they can do."
They
are certainly doing as much as they can, though. Often for
reasons that have little to do with water quality and more
to do with the quality of life, towns in Westchester have
rushed to preserve land.
The Town of Somers increased the lot sizes for all of its
vacant land four years ago, in part to fight off development
that has swarmed north through the county. "We still have
a very small-town atmosphere," said Mary Beth Murphy, the
town supervisor. "People are very involved. A lot of things
get done by volunteers. We have a volunteer fire department
and a part-time police department; we didn't want to lose
that."
THEIR
answer: three-acre lots. The zoning change has gone a long
way toward preserving open space, Ms. Murphy said. Recently,
for instance, the town used the zoning rules as leverage
to work with the developer of a new 115-acre site, Windsor
Farms, and came up with a compromise for a "conservation
subdivision": 34 houses clustered on 35 acres, with the
additional 80 acres left as undeveloped land.
"It works," Ms. Murphy said. "Everyone was happy."
Part of the reason it may work is that recently strengthened
regulations on wetlands, septic systems and even tree removal
fit into a long tradition of land use regulation in Westchester,
said Edward Buroughs, deputy planning commissioner for the
county.
"Planning boards and regulations are such a tradition here,
we have had zoning laws since the 1930's," Mr. Buroughs
said. "That is very early compared to the rest of the region
and the rest of the country."
Edward
Barnett, Putnam County's watershed information coordinator,
said compromise had been the hallmark of success.
"The changes haven't stopped construction, but they have
made construction more responsible," Mr. Barnett said. "Developers
have to make sure that stormwater is not an issue. They
have to show that the nutrients from road runoff and septics
and fertilizers are not going to end up in the streams."
Not
that builders haven't complained.
Robert Conlin, a home contractor who has worked in the watershed
towns for 20 years, said the regulations make doing business
more expensive. Construction in the watershed requires more
planning and more permits than it does in Connecticut, where
he lives and also works.
"You
can't do anything without talking to the king," Mr. Conlin
said. "The D.E.P. is king. They are running the world. If
you are building a deck or a garage, it not only can't go
into a wetland, it can't go into a wetland buffer. If you
are painting a house and you're washing latex brushes in
a pail in the driveway, you'd better make sure none of the
paint runs down the driveway. If it does, you are in trouble."
Mr.
Bondi plans to put a $2 million open space referendum on
the ballot. He is now working on identifying properties
that the county should buy.
That
is, if developers don't get there first.
Mr.
Camarda has not been driven out of business, or even out
of the county. He simply changed from developing single-family
homes to building commercial and multi-use projects. Right
now he's working on two of the biggest developments in Putnam
County.
Mr.
Camarda has plans to build the Gateway Summit and Fairways
off Route 6 in Carmel. The project, on 190 acres, would
include a 150-room hotel, a conference center, office space,
retail shops and a Y.M.C.A. In addition, there would be
140-townhouses for senior citizens and 48 assisted-living
units.
All of this is possible, because the property sits within
an existing sewage district. (Only 2 percent of land in
Putnam is sewered.)
At the same time, Mr. Camarda is working on a plan to build
a big-box shopping center, featuring Costco and Lowe's on
Route 311 in the neighboring town of Patterson. This is
possible, he said, because retail stores don't produce as
much wastewater as housing produces.
Still,
Mr. Camarda is not giving up on single-family housing. He
is suing the Town of Carmel to force it to reverse its blanket
three-acre zoning law. That type of zoning, he says, is
exclusionary. Copyright
2004 The New York Times
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