Pine Plains enacts building moratorium

By Darryl Gangloff, Special to the Freeman Daily Freeman January 29, 2006

PINE PLAINS - The Town Board has set a 12-month moratorium on subdivisions consisting of four lots or more.
The moratorium will allow the review of some pending applications to continue under the State Environmental Quality Review Act, but only to the point of filing a final environmental impact statement. It also will allow certain developers, such as Carvel Development, to continue working on draft environmental impact statements.
Prior to a Jan. 19 public hearing on the proposed moratorium, Town Attorney Warren Replansky said he had changed some minor typographical errors in the document and added a line to Section 9, paragraph 1, on granting variances, on the recommendation of the Dutchess County Department of Planning.
The addition was as follows: "The reviewing board shall consider in its review any interim data, recommendations and/or conclusions which, to date, have been promulgated, produced or drafted by the zoning commission in its recommendations for amendments to, or the enactment of, new Land Use Laws or Regulations."
"I don't consider any of these to be substantial changes that would require a new notice of a public hearing," Replansky said. "The form that we have now is virtually identical to what we had before."
Don Bartles, chairman of the town zoning board, asked how the moratorium would address the cumulative impacts of successive subdivisions of 3-acre lots.
"I see what you're saying," Supervisor Gregg Pulver replied. "If somebody had a 100-acre parcel and they subdivided three 5-acre lots, then come back in and subdivide three 5-acre lots, and so on."
"It depends on how quickly they came in," Replansky said. "It would be an interesting legal issue."
No other comments were offered at the hearing.
After the public hearing was closed, Pulver asked if board members wanted to discuss the moratorium before they voted.
"We're ready," said Councilwoman Dorean Gardner. "We've discussed it enough."

©Daily Freeman 2006

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