Note on Date Discrepancy: The agenda and minutes provided for this meeting list the date as September 22, 2026, but the meeting summary is generated using the date specified in the instruction (September 23, 2026). This discrepancy is noted for accuracy.
The Rochester Heritage Preservation Commission met on September 23, 2026, at 5:00 PM in the Government Center Council Chamber. The meeting included public comments, approval of a Certificate of Appropriateness, discussion of a historic preservation inventory strategy, and updates on public engagement and the Indian Heights Park project. All seven voting members were present; non-voting member Valerie Wassmer was absent.
Okay. Are we good on that feedback? Okay. Welcome everybody to the September 22nd Heritage Preservation Commission meeting. Before we call to order, we start each meeting with a 15-minute public open comment period. This is an opportunity for the public to comment to the commission regarding items that do not have a public hearing on today's agenda. Each speaker has up to four minutes. The commission will not discuss or respond to any comments made during this time. Please be concise and mindful of your time during your remarks so that everyone wishing to speak has the opportunity to do so. Will the first speaker please step forward and state your name into the microphone? Looks like we have a red light. Will you push the button till turn screen? Thank you. Okay. Yeah, I I would like to get updates on the Hal Henderson project almost every month, because I'd like to see where it's at. Even if nothing is submitted, it'd be nice to know even that's the status of it. I mean, there were 4,000 people who basically were interested in what what's happening to it. So I'd like to do sort of, as I said, updates at every see single meeting. I spoke to Michael Coop about it and uh about what other HPCs do about that. And he said that when they do have similar type projects, they routinely from staff get updates from the administration on on what the status is exactly and where and what's going on with it. So hopefully you can add that to your monthly information that you routinely get from Molly or Irene. Um another issue is um has to do with what's in the packet. While I like um community uh participation and uh and uh and public lecture series, we also have that uh you know, with the Olmstead History Center, and we have it in the library. The one thing that HPC is the only organization to do is landmarking and even giving out awards about uh history. There's no one else in the city that really does that. And so that's to me should be your priority in terms of what you're working on and not public relations or community relations or public lecture series. It'd be nice as an addition someday, but I don't think it should take precedence over um the the work on uh on the landmarking, which is woefully behind, and uh also uh even the awards. I think those things should be your priority and and not uh you know community relations just because you're the only person that can do it, and we're so far behind. Someday we can do the other stuff too. Uh Molly doesn't have time to do more than what she's doing now because she's busy all the time, so I don't really think there's any more time for to do other than our main priorities. Anyway, thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Skullnik. Will the next speaker please step forward and state your name? Thank you, Mr. Stelnik. Hello, my name is Barb Hudson. I'd like to talk a little bit about Indian Heights Park. No surprise. So uh we've identified the um inventory process and the um identification of the uh inventory. The HPC evaluates a property for the historic inventory, and this is called phase the phase one report. Where is that and is this available to the commissioners? Is this available to the public in the interest of transparency and accountability? I think the public would like to see that as well as the commissioners would like to see what's already been done with that. And then as far as the landmark designation process, uh the historic landmark eligibility is determined based on the eight criteria for historic context and the seven aspects of historic integrity. Apparently, somewhere in that process, we need a historical designation study written by someone with certain qualifications to provide all the evidence necessary to support the historic evidence and uh the historical evidence and the context of integrity. I understand that the request for the grant to fund the historic designation study was denied because it lacked pertinent cultural information or something to that effect. And I'd like to know uh community people would like to know what exactly was missing, and how can we, as a community uh of interested residents, uh how can we help ensure that the grant is presented in its entirety for the next submission? Um, I know we talked about this in last commission meetings that there are people in the community who can help with this process. So if we know exactly what was it, what was missing, we can perhaps look up this information and help contribute to that.