Speaker numbers apply only to this recording.
The Planning Board met on September 3, 2025, at 7:00 PM to carry over a public hearing, discuss proposed short-term rental regulations, review a petition from Purdy’s Hamlet residents, and handle routine business. The chair also reported on a presentation made that morning to the Westchester County Planning Board regarding the Croton Falls Master Plan. The board worked through a revised draft of the short-term rental ordinance, making key decisions on owner limits, zoning bulk requirements, and permit enforcement.
Okay. I'm calling to order the planning board meeting of September 3rd. The first item on the agenda, the public hearing is for the Grant Road LLC, is going to be carried over to the October meeting. Before we get into the work session, I'll give you an update on some recent happenings over the past couple of weeks. So I ended up doing that. I had to throw together a PowerPoint, a 10-minute PowerPoint while it was on Nantucket, it's all started. Came back, and thanks to Maria Holeschko, I got it thrown together and this morning presented to them. I did a brief overview of course the whole Croton Falls plan, which you know, emphasizing the limitations because of Route 22 that goes right through the middle of it, its narrowness, difficulty to get crosswalks in and sidewalks, no recommendation to expand the zoning. And that's like a multi-level issue with infrastructure because if you add more commercial and their wet uses, it's going to draw more on the water supply, which isn't that great. They just drilled well number four, and that's going to go into service, and they have to be filtered, and that's very costly. And we've got the proposed sewer district coming in and went through the whole thing, the historic character, etc. And I kind of anticipated at least one of the questions at the end, and that was about affordable housing and more opportunities for affordable housing. So, you know, I mentioned the ones that were there. Um, who knows? It is GB district does have multifamily housing and multi-family affordable housing if someone wanted to do it. Um after a couple of questions going back on affordable housing, I said, but one of the things we also have to keep an eye on as a responsible municipality is yes, we support affordable housing, we amended our um code uh to be in line with the county's model ordinance, but the next level of housing, you know, the 300,000, 400,000, which we have a lot of in that area, it's just as important to keep that affordable for the people who are currently living there. And when you add more layers of infrastructure in those costs, that's going to impact them. So we're trying to look at the bigger picture of you don't want a town of affordable housing and then million dollar homes. You want to preserve all the ones in between, otherwise those people are going to end up needing affordable housing. So you're creating another problem there. So I hope one of the board members went, mmm, it's like your first time he heard it presented in that way. And I I think it's very important. I've always kept my eye on all the different levels of housing opportunities. Um, and I think that's important for Croton Falls. And uh the other one, which I never thought of doing as part of this plan because the area is so small and the development potential is not gonna be increased that much with the sewer, you know, is already a fair number of apartments. There can be a couple more apartments above stores, um, and there are a few accessory apartments, but they said you don't have a build-out. You know, how many new um homes are you projecting with this plan? And um I said, no, we didn't do it. And I said, you know, it's it's a good point. I'll talk to the board about it. Um I said normally you would do something like that when you do a whole comprehensive plan for a town, and I said that's something the town board is thinking about its time. It's 2011, it's now 2025. It's time to consider that. But um, I don't know if the town board even wants us to even bother to do that, but that's something that's a question I think that the town board needs to answer, whether we