Court to Edgemont: You Have No Standing on Land Use Matters in Edgemont
Last week, the New York Appellate Division ruled that neither the Edgemont neighbors of a proposed assisted living facility nor the Greenville Fire District has standing to challenge the Town’s granting of a special permit for the project in violation of its own laws. The decision underscores why Edgemont itself, rather than the Town, needs to govern land use in our community.
Recall that the Town granted that permit over objections by our fire district and individual residents, including ones who lived directly adjacent to the proposed site. Edgemont residents did everything that the law allowed: we organized, spoke at Town board meetings, wrote emails, and raised money for legal fees. We expressed for years specific concerns about the facility, including its inappropriate location far from a main road at the bottom of a double-hairpin turn and the additional costs to our fire department.
The Town ignored us. When we demanded the Town study the impacts, the Town said we should study the impacts ourselves – at our own expense.
Why? Because they could. Ultimately, because the court accepted the Town’s argument that even abutting property owners have no legal standing to complain, it never addressed the merits of Edgemont’s objections. As a result, no one in Edgemont–not even our fire district–has any legal recourse whatsoever when the Town makes a land use decision that adversely affects us even if the decision is contrary to the very Town laws enacted to protect us.
What’s the upshot?
- Only Edgemont residents will be forced to cover, indefinitely, the costs of additional emergency responder services generated by the facility. Those costs could easily exceed Edgemont’s share of any associated tax revenue.
- Emergency service vehicles will regularly run up and down steep, curvy Underhill Road for over a mile to the new facility despite a Town zoning law restricting such facilities to within 200 feet of a state or county road (i.e. Central Avenue). The fire district itself raised concerns about the safety impacts of an estimated 100 additional runs there per year.
- Our only “remedy” (if you want to call it that) is to take adverse land use actions up with, yes, the Town. But in the wake of the Shelbourne precedent, the Town is emboldened to ignore our concerns whenever and however it wants.
Incorporation laws exist precisely to protect small, unincorporated communities that have limited political influence within their larger towns. We’ve long known that Edgemont’s 8% share of the vote was of no consequence to election outcomes in the Town of Greenburgh. In the wake of the court’s ruling, we now also know we have no standing to take legal action.
We believe Edgemont residents should be responsible for zoning matters in Edgemont. We govern and operate excellent school and fire districts, so there is no reason why our community cannot also control its land use decisions. To that end, the EIC has prepared a new incorporation petition with an updated map of the proposed Village of Edgemont. Stay tuned.
