Speaker numbers apply only to this recording. Names come from transcript evidence. “Possibly” marks uncertain attribution.
The Pleasantville Village Board of Trustees held a regular meeting on October 29, 2025. The primary agenda item was a presentation by Lennar (US Home, LLC) regarding a proposed zoning amendment and the construction of a 102-unit townhouse community on a 20.5-acre site. The board also voted unanimously on the consent calendar. Extensive public comment was heard, and the board outlined the SEQRA review process. Note: The agenda and transcript list the meeting date as October 27, 2025, but the official instruction provided for this summary designates the date as October 29, 2025.
So welcome everybody. We don't often get such a party, but glad to have you. Thank you for coming. We got a bunch of people also watching on Zoom. So we'll start a regular meeting, reminding folks that uh the meeting is recorded via Zoo, and the entire recording of it will be available within a few days online at Buzzville-NY.gov. So here we go. Welcome all. The uh village board regular meeting of Monday, October 27. Um, as is always the case, we have a work session at seven, a regular session beginning in point. Our next regular meeting is on Monday, November 10th. So obviously the big matter tonight is a presentation by Lenar about uh their proposal for the site up behind Foxwood. As long as I have a captive audience, uh, let me just make a couple of announcements, and one of them I hope uh will engender widespread approval, and that is after months and months and months and months of effort. Yemi, Eric, Alyssa, uh Senator Stuart Cousins' office, assemblywoman uh Shimsky's office. Today, Governor Hokel signed the legislation. You wouldn't think legislation would be needed, but it is to allow us to have a red light camera on the Songmill Parkway at Grant Street. That's going to be part of part of the county system. They have the right, what is it? 50, they have the right to put up 50 red light cameras on county-owned highways. The reason it required a state state action is that their legislation only permitted them to put them on county-owned highways. They accepted the willingness to put it up on this state-owned highway, uh, which not for nothing. They're the contracted enforcers for. So uh our next effort is to go back to the county and say how soon can we let this happen? But within hopefully not too long, uh, the people who come speeding through red lights at Grand Street uh will be caught. So good news, long haul. Thank thanks to everybody involved. Um, I have a few other announcements, none uh perhaps significantly what we're going to do now. So, as you all know, um we have an application uh that we have received for a series of zoning changes that would allow the construction of a 102 unit project uh on a site up behind Foxwood. Um it's a it's kind of a crazy story about why this site exists in the manner it does. And so I just have a couple of slides uh that I think uh are worth buzzing through quickly so people uh realize the kind of interesting story behind this site. So here's the map. This circle is the approximate site. Here is Manville Road, here is Bedford Road, the Methodist Church campus drive. This little gray spot is the village-owned tennis courts. Uh this is the 254-unit Foxwood condominium. Um, this building here is what we used to think of as the Bank of New York site. Uh for many years, the backup emergency site for Bank of New York. And up at the top of the building, uh, the top of the hill is uh the Savan Engineering Building now owned uh by somebody else. Uh, there is a ridge here, so that this is all on one side of the hill. On the other side of the hill is uh the Toll Brothers Townhouse Project on Dennis Lane, which was redeveloped seven or eight years ago and had been um uh two off spillings. So way back when in the 1920s, Hiram Edward Manville, the uh uh the uh keeper of the Johns Manville asbestos fortune, owns something like 500 acres in Pleasantville. It was a big grand setting. Uh he built this house uh which was 56 rooms. It had elaborate gardens and uh uh landscaping and patios and terraces, and there were many other uh outbuildings that existed until the 1940s as Hiram Edward Vanville's estate. He died in 1944. Uh his wife uh sold the property to General Precision Laboratories, which was uh a company involved in making in in designing at the time high-end technology for sonar radar and the like. 1947, here's a New York Times article. Laboratory praises country life in Manville, place at Pleasantville. Mansion remodeled to permit precision work, stirs inquiries by other concerns, but zoning laws are a stiff barrier.