December 4th, 2025 meeting.

Were there any questions or concerns as written?

No.

None.

No.

Motion to approve is written.

Second.

All in favor?

Aye.

So motion passes.

First applicant this evening is for 921st Street, the Assumption Church.

Good evening, Father.

Good evening, everyone.

My name is Father Sanchez, the pastor from Church of the Assumption.

First thing most thank you for all the work you do on behalf of our city to look more beautiful than cities.

Also, we are here to ask for a new approval a renewal of the approved plans, which were already approved almost a year and a half ago.

And we were not able to begin the work because of some technicalities with our archidioces of New York.

So after the plans were approved, I submitted for the approval from my immediate bus, but because of some again, technicalities, they were just approved a more a month and a half ago.

So when the permit yeah, you provided to us already expired.

So we are here to ask you for the renewal of that is that plan already.

Yes.

Understood.

Thank you.

Go ahead.

Um and while Father is doing that, I guess if you want, I can give you just a quick rundown of what we were actually doing back there, you know, a year and a half ago.

That'll be helpful because a lot of us are new to Yeah, uh fair enough, because I know there's a bunch of new faces that are um are on the board here.

So Mary Allen's probably the only person who was there.

Yeah, um long time have not seen you in a while, but nice to see you again.

I was wondering what happened to it.

Um as Father said, um ultimately uh we did everything that we were doing and handling it kind of in-house, and uh when the Archdiocese got involved, uh they have consultants who basically charge the Archdiocese of New York a large amount of money for consulting services and basically inserted themselves into the process and slowed everything down.

So um that's why we're back in front here tonight.

Uh real quick, uh, my name is Chris Borchardt uh from CBDB Architecture.

Um and um in terms of getting the PDFs you said hit the on the share screen.

You have the PDFs open, don't you want?

Uh you could start with basically S10.

Okay, which is the main site.

Oops, I think I got the wrong one there.

Okay.

Go to here and share screen.

Okay, cool.

Okay, um so before I kind of start to get into the PDFs a little bit, just in real basic um terms.

Um the purpose of the main goal of the project or the main purpose of the project was to approve the functionality of the existing parking lot.

Um it started out as a kind of a repaving job, um, just to some of the asphalt paving is probably dates to the 60s and 70s, uh, you know, in front of the school building and stuff like that.

So that was kind of the impetus for the project was to just repair the paving.

And as we started to get into the design of it and trying to figure out how we could maximize uh the number of spaces available, maybe some of the features, um, and more s probably most importantly, um just access to the the actual parking lot.

At the current moment, there's really one entrance all along the sidewalk um on union or on first street.

And um, so we're proposing to basically add a second entrance on union.

Uh that would basically uh first street at that section is a one-way street.

So everybody coming out of the parking lot is making that one left turn and dumping into you know, kind of the downtown area right there with um very little uh options to move traffic out after a mass or something like that.

So like I said, the big idea was to basically introduce a uh new entrance and exit off uh at Union Street and then um rework the existing bollards that are ringing the perimeter of the site um to close those off to where people aren't like cutting through areas that they're not supposed to and coming up on the sidewalk where they're not supposed to and kind of trying to separate the vehic vehicular traffic from the pedestrian traffic, especially like on a real busy, you know, ten minutes before mass on a Sunday morning, it gets kind of crazy up there.

Um the second uh part of the whole process uh was coming up with ways to basically identify um signage locations, um, some features that Father Esteban wanted in terms of the the church um facilities, so to speak, um stations of the cross, um, some other little um statuary reliquary that would be installed around the perimeter of the parking lot to um kind of try to soften it um all the paving, just try to soft you know, soften up all that.

Um and so uh we'll go through the drawings in a second, but uh specifically like along Union Street, or I'm sorry, along first.

Um we're trying to create uh planters with benches for people to kind of sit and you know, maybe sit before mass or congregate after mass if it's a nice day, um, and basically uh utilize a little bit more of the the campus feel of how uh Assumption Church basically is on both sides of uh First Street there.

Uh we're trying to make it feel a little bit more like a campus.

And so to that end, uh we're proposing that there's some signage that um I'm not sure why it's not shown up here on the PDF, this drawing, but down here on this corner here, um, we're actually proposing to do some new signage that basically um organizes uh people to know where the rectory is, where the um you know parking lot is where the main church is, stuff of that nature.

And um yeah, um for what it's worth though, it's on the PDF, it's a full-size drawing, but it seems to be bigger cut off here for some reason.

I'm not quite sure why.

Um the third part of all this is to um, like I said, uh at the end of the day, uh there's a lot of paving up there.

And so uh just with the kind of the new emphasis on green design, sustainability issues, things of that nature, uh water management uh during a uh you know, heavy downpour in terms of a rainstorm.

Um we've introduced uh a series of planters that basically uh work along those sidewalks on both uh streets.