Resident Ryne Kitzrow
of the Blooming Grove Conservation Advisory Committee
The project under consideration is Blooming Grove Family Storage, at 20 Trestle Tree Lane, sitting on a 26.5 acre site, and is planning 2 one-story warehouse distribution facilities with a footprint of 147,000 +/- and 20,000 +/- for the second building adjacent to a section of the Heritage Trail on an extension of Trestle Tree Lane. The site includes a Scenic Viewshed Overlay and a Surface Water Overlay. .
The joint Town and Planning Board meeting Special Use Permit, Site Plan and Architectural Review on May 7 addressed particulars about the landscaping plan, trees on the site. and a proposal to take some down but follow with replanting of new trees, among other issues.
Resident Ryne Kitzrow, who chairs the Blooming Grove Conservation Advisory Committee commented about the project as follows:
My name is Ryne Kitzrow and I live at 120 Round Hill Road. To start, I would like to thank the applicant and the planning board for working together on this application over the past several months. While I have seen improvement over these iterations, I have specific points that I believe the applicant and planning board still need to work on to make this plan feasible.
My first concern is that this plan adds too many impervious surfaces. The warehouses themselves add 167,000 square feet and the parking lots may more than double that overall amount of impervious surfaces. In order to decrease the cumulative amount of impermeable surfaces, I recommend that the planning board and applicant consider using permeable paving for the parking lot and utilizing a green roof on the warehouse. Combined, these will decrease run off and will have less impact on the surrounding wetlands.
My second concern is that this plan is adding to a cumulative amount of truck traffic in this area of the town which will be an overwhelming burden for both nearby residents and for the Town and Village of Chester which will absorb the truck traffic heading back to the quickway. In the previous public hearing on the Craigville logistics warehouse, which is planned to be across the street, we heard extensive comments from residents who are concerned about the impact of the truck traffic on their residential community. They cited light pollution, air pollution, sound pollution, and truck traffic as their concerns. We also heard concerns from representatives from Chester who indicated that Chester is not in a position to take on more truck traffic from Blooming Grove, that these studies do not account for all current and planned truck traffic that exists in Chester, and that it would not be prudent to approve any business that will add truck traffic into Chester until the quickway infrastructure is upgraded. After hearing those concerns, I agree with the representatives from Chester and recommend that the planning board not approve projects that will cause additional truck traffic until the quickway infrastructure is upgraded to handle this additional traffic. There are ways in which these applicants can speed up this infrastructure upgrade. For example, LegoLand added an additional on and exit ramp specifically to handle the traffic volume for their park.
My third concern is that this project is too close to the heritage trail. The heritage trail is a valuable resource to this community and we would be doing our community a disservice to degrade the quality of the trail through the placement of large warehouses around it. In particular, the current layout of this plan places the warehouse right up against the trail with loading bays and parking lots facing the trail. I would like the planning board and applicant to find a way to distance the warehouses from the trail and position loading bays, parking lots, and bright lights away from the trail. This will help maintain the best possible experience for our residents and help maintain the value of this resource.
My fourth concern is that this large scale warehouse with truck traffic will negatively impact the active farm that is across the street. This situation reminds me of a recent project on Neelytown Road in which a large warehouse is being built next to a legacy organic farm. The farmers have been vocal about how this project threatens their business through pollution, changes in runoff, excess traffic, and how it threatens the safety of their workers. I recommend that the planning board get input from the farm across the street from the Trestle Tree project to ensure the project can be organized to limit any negative impact to this farm and the Town's valuable agricultural resources.
My fifth concern is that this project design currently requires the re-routing of a stream. A stream currently exists in the middle of the planned 150,000 ft warehouse. It would be rerouted around the warehouse and to the wetlands that are behind the building. Allowing an applicant to disobey the surface water overlay regulations and reroute a surface water body would be a terrible precedent for the Town to set. This could potentially result in streams and tributaries around the Town being rerouted for projects with major unknown consequences on flooding and the environment. I strongly advise the planning board to work with the applicant to re-configure the project so that there is no rerouting of the stream.
My sixth concern is that, in the current plan, the rerouted stream is less than 100 ft from the warehouse and parking lot, meaning it still does not meet the 100 ft buffer required by the Town's Surface Water Overlay regulations. The planning board should work with the applicant to ensure that all buffer regulations with relation to the surface water overlay district are met.
My seventh concern is that, while the warehouse largely maintains a 100 ft buffer from wetlands on the property, with the exception of the rerouted stream mentioned above, the 100 ft buffer is really insufficient, and the planning board should work with the applicant to increase the buffer of this project from the wetlands and surface water bodies. The NYSDEC considers the 100 ft riparian buffer to be a bare minimum environmental protection. Federally, there are recommendations to increase the size of these buffers. According to the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, the Conservation Standard for riparian buffers is 600 feet when it is habitat for nesting ducks, bald eagles, and turkeys (common animals in this area), and 200 feet when deer, frogs, and salamanders are present (also common in this area). To the Town Board, I strongly recommend the Board considers revising the Surface Water Overlay District to align to these modern Federal recommendations.
My eighth concern is that the tree and vegetation plan for this project is still insufficient. In my review of the tree plan, 54 trees are anticipated to be removed totaling over 800 diameters at breast height (dbh) inches. The standard for tree replacement is to replace 100% of the dbh removed, meaning the applicant would need to plant 800 dbh inches worth of trees. In the current tree plan, I counted about 180 trees to be added. If these are the standard 4 inch trees from a nursery, this would total only 720 dbh, instead of the required 800. I strongly encourage the planning board to work with the applicant to ensure that, at minimum, the applicant will replace dbh equal to what is cut, in this case 800 inches. This can be done by cutting fewer trees, planting more trees, planting larger trees, or any combination of those options. Furthermore, the applicant's tree plan shows that some existing trees will be preserved, which is a good thing. The standard for ensuring the protection of trees to be retained on site is to make sure they are marked and that fencing is placed around them at sufficent distance as to prevent soil compaction around the trees, which can kill them. The standard also advises that these trees be monitored for 2 years after the completion of construction and that, if any of these trees die within 2 years, that their dbh will also be replaced by the applicant. I strongly advise the planning board to get this commitment of tree protection and replacement from the applicant prior to approval.
Jean Galli, also a member of the CAC Committee, also spoke about the negative effects of the mass tree-cutting that has happened in the area recently, 4 large sites in particular (3 in South Blooming Grove and one in the Town portion). Two of the 3 clear-cut sites in VSBG resulted in flooding issues. The Villages largely operate under their own building codes, but given the propensity of many of today's builders to prefer cutting everything for machinery access and expediency in grading and eventually replanting, she warned that it only would take a few projects in the unincorporated Town of Blooming Grove portion to follow the same practice and cause both visual image and flooding issues that could impair much of the work that the Town has done in recent years to prevent flooding.
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