A town comprehensive plan is just as important as zoning itself. It serves as the master blueprint to help the municipality wrangle future development to best suit the needs of the community.
Devising such a master plan takes considerable time. So, it’s not uncommon to see towns go a decade or two without revising the plan. Making changes to the comprehensive plan is often required to address a rate of development not anticipated before. That also tends to influence new needs for the community, such as how to divert traffic and increase the efficiency of infrastructure. And, then, there are the changes in development trends.
The Town of Colonie has been working on changes to a comprehensive plan last created in 2005. Since 2005, the town has continuously been named as the best place to live in local surveys. Exceptional public schools, award-winning services and scores of well-manicured neighborhoods, have made this town one of the most desirable places to live. And, as we’ve said in the past, that means more people want to live here. And, retire here.
It wasn’t too long ago when proposed retirement communities would be met with immediate opposition by residents fearful of hearing a cascading barrage of ambulance sirens and seeing increased traffic to their neighborhoods. Proposals for such developments often changed, or moved completely, before breaking ground in the ’90s. With the aging of the baby boomer generation, retirement communities are more common today. But, they are now often proposed through mixed-use properties — subdivided between residential and commercial within the same complex.
Aged comprehensive plans don’t address such plans, so Town Hall has little guidance. Does such a proposal help the community today? How will it impact future growth and future needs?
Boght Corners is now the focal point in another proposal for residential development. The crux of the issue is that developers want to build single-family homes, and a memory-care facility, with a plot of land left blank. The single-family homes by themselves, not a problem. The memory-care facility, on land zoned for single-family residence, needs a variance and opposition has already been expressed there.
But, then there’s that blank space, which was quite the contrast to last week’s full-house of residents waiting to hear and speak towards the proposal. Whether we talk of Boght Corners, Latham or Lisha Kill, the landscape has changed considerably since 2005. We see the work towards updating the comprehensive plan taking priority more each day. For more information on that work and how you can involve yourself, go to http://coloniepedd.org/.