The Town will make a decision tonight on Shelbourne Assisted Living's special permit; the Appellate Division ruled today on our request to expedite the Supervisor's appeal on the referendum petition.
Is this road non-circuitous?
The Town Board will meet tonight to decide to grant or deny Shelboune its request for a special permit to construct an assisted living facility. The law requires that assisted living facilities be within 200 feet of the closest state or county road and that the route be direct and non-circuitous. This law was enacted to make it safe for emergency medical responders to get to and from such facilities and to avoid disturbing the residential area with increased emergency traffic.
An assisted living facility will increase the number of emergency calls to the Sprainbrook Nursery site from 2-4 per year to over 115, or roughly 9% of the total calls to our Greenville Fire District. Edgemont, and only Edgemont, is responsible for our fire district’s $9MM annual budget. Nevertheless, our Town said that the best use of this land is an assisted living facility--not single family homes as Town laws permit.
The Greenville Fire District (the primary interested agency), along with numerous Edgemont residents, implored (see here and here) the Town to conduct an independent study to learn exactly what impact the proposed facility would have on our community. How many annual emergency calls would the Fire District likely make to the facility? How would traffic be impacted? What safety concerns exist? Despite these requests, the Town chose to approve the project with incomplete and inadequate data.
The facility would be 6,000 feet away, a 3000% variance from the 200-foot legal requirement. The ZBA (absurdly) granted this variance, but Shelbourne neither requested—nor did the Town or ZBA grant—a waiver for the non-circuitous route requirement. Why? Because no such waiver is permitted by law.
To overcome this disqualifying impediment, the Town must take the position that the route is direct and non-circuitous. However, anyone who has driven this road, or merely recognizes the shape of a circle, can see that the double-hairpin turn is circuitous. The Town Board's finding that the route is non-circuitous completely contradicts the ZBA's own conclusion that the route has "severe vertical and horizontal curves" (bottom of page 6).
In order to achieve its desired result, the Town Board will have to ignore the findings made by its own ZBA and pretend something people can plainly see isn’t there. Watch what the Town does tonight at 8pm on Cablevision Channel 76 and Verizon Channel 35.
Hey Edgemont, this is the body that currently governs our area.
We can do better for ourselves, our emergency service employees, and future residents who will choose Edgemont by incorporating and electing a law-abiding, accountable village mayor and board of trustees who live here.
In other news: the Appellate Division ruled today on our request to expedite.
On Friday, the Town filed an objection to our request to expedite, arguing that six months is necessary to respond.
Today, a four-judge panel of the Appellate Division decided to accelerate the matter. All papers from both sides must be in by May 4th.
-The EIC.
