Granite Pointe clears regulatory hurdle

By Tom Bartley
For The Somers Record

A decade after winning—then losing—final subdivision approval, the Granite Pointe housing proposal inched closer to regaining it last week when the Planning Board endorsed the latest review of the controversial project’s environmental issues.

Setting aside a number of eleventh-hour entreaties to delay action, the shorthanded planning panel voted, 5-1, to accept as complete a supplemental environmental-impact statement (EIS) on plans to clean up lead from the site. Discovery of the lead contamination, which in 2004 quashed the project’s earlier initial approval, triggered the remediation study.




While acceptance of the study’s report was seen as a victory for Granite Pointe’s developer, Suelain Realty, it remained only another milestone on the project’s long, winding and sometimes unpredictable regulatory road.

“People get confused,” said Marilyn Murphy, the Planning Board secretary, after the latest vote. “They think we’re approving the subdivision. We’re not. We’re just approving the cleanup.”

The Planning Board, which has led each phase of the state-mandated review, must still weigh public comment before adopting a final supplemental environmental-impact statement, or FSEIS.

Until Oct. 22, written comments can be mailed to Murphy at the Somers Planning and Engineering Dept. The Planning Board will next consider the issue at a special meeting Oct. 29, not at its next regularly scheduled session, Oct. 9.

If the FSEIS is adopted, the board would then formally present its findings before moving on to grapple with the details of building a 23-home subdivision.

The homes’ proposed location—some 29 acres of wooded, environmentally sensitive real estate on a promontory in Amawalk Reservoir—has energized opponents of the project. Critics contend that development would create a visual blight and threaten a source of drinking water for Somers, Yorktown and New York City.

Thirty years of target and skeet shooting have contaminated the site’s soil with lead. Tests conducted from 2003 to 2009 also found semi-volatile organic compounds, pesticides and PCBs, but in limited areas and at levels that did not exceed state standards for drinking water.

The board scheduled the Sept. 24 special meeting specifically to discuss with consultants, its own and the applicant’s, the “completeness” of the project’s final supplemental environment-impact statement. Fedora DeLucia, sat in for board chairman John Currie, who was out of town.

Writing on the day of the meeting, James Bryan Bacon, lawyer for the Croton Watershed Clean Water Coalition, urged a delay in acting on the supplemental statement. In a 16-page email, he said his not-for profit organization was asking the board to “refrain from accepting [the FSEIS] as complete… until the board has fully reviewed the project’s phosphorus loading impacts and has crafted appropriate mitigation measures.”

Failing to keep pace with state standards for phosphorus loadings, Brown warned, “would violate New York’s antidegradation policy and shift the burden to offset phosphorus loadings” to the Town or the East of Hudson Watershed Coalition.

With the meeting under way, two longtime critics of the project, Olga Shamraj and Julia Rellou, presented written comments. Rellou also broke in during planning board consultant Joseph Barbagallo’s presentation, prompting a contentious exchange with DeLucia, the acting chair.

A seven-term former chair of the planning panel, DeLucia told Rellou, “If we’re going to have interruptions while the consultants are speaking, we are going to have debates. I do not want to have debates; I want you to listen to what they have to say.”

“Someone,” Rellou protested, “has to give voice to the environment.” She expressed concerned, among other things, with the visual impact of the remediation, particularly the need to cut down trees.

Another board consultant, Paul Muessig, called the cutting unavoidable, saying, “The trees are being taken down strictly to get at the contaminated soil.”

Tim Allen, a consultant for the applicant, Suelain Realty, said the loss of trees on subdivision land will be shielded by a hundred-yard buffer of undisturbed woodland. “Any tree removal on Suelain property will not be seen by the public,” he said. “You’re not going to see this from the road.”

He pledged, “This grand peninsula that we have here . . . is preserved.”

Planning board member Eugene Goldenberg decried the lack of formal documentation, saying of Allen’s assertions, “I don’t understand why somebody doesn’t write these things down.”

Goldenberg, who has been openly critical of the FSEIS process so far and was the night’s lone dissenting vote, told Allen, “You get up and you make a statement that you’re not going to see this, you’re not going to see that. [But] I have nothing in writing.”

Until Oct. 22, residents are encouraged to send comments on the Granite Pointe project to the Planning and Engineering Dept., 335 Route 202, Somers, NY 10589, or email as “Granite Pointe FSEIS Comments” to mmurphy@somersny.com.