Public Hearing Set for Proposed Pleasantville Building Moratorium
A public hearing to pause development in downtown Pleasantville has officially been set for Monday, Jan. 23 at 8 p.m. at Village Hall.
Village trustees voted unanimously last week to hold a required hearing on the proposed moratorium. If after the hearing the moratorium is approved, a six-month pause on development will go into effect retroactively to Nov. 16, the date of the special town hall meeting on village development.
Properties impacted by the moratorium are within Pleasantville’s Central Business A-1 district. The goal of potentially putting new development applications on hold is to provide time to review new applications for site plan approval, special use permit approval, subdivision approval, variance relief and building permits for properties in the downtown.
Announced at last Tuesday’s meeting was one change to the originally proposed moratorium resolution concerning the size of retail spaces that would be exempt. Initially, retail spaces up to 3,000 square feet would be affected, but that has now been changed to 4,000 square feet.
“The basis for that was the desire to allow reasonable, logical evolution of existing properties to continue,” explained Mayor Peter Scherer.
Also exempt from the proposed moratorium are applications submitted before Nov. 16 for area variances for one- and two-family dwellings, permit applications not requiring approval from a land use board and applications relating to work for health and safety reasons.
The board also voted to hire BFJ Planning to study possible future development under the current zoning regulations and the impacts it would have on public safety, infrastructure and traffic. BFJ Planning, the village’s longtime planning consultant, worked with the village in 2017 to update the master plan.
The village has agreed to pay BFJ Planning $30,000 for the zoning study, which will be done whether the moratorium is enacted or not.
“BFJ is familiar with the community and with Westchester and the region,” Scherer said. “They have done similar work with quite a few Westchester municipalities and we are confident they are the ideal team to assist us.”
BFJ will provide a build-out analysis of the A-1 business district, focusing on vacant or significantly underbuilt sites such as one‐story buildings where development would most likely be proposed under the current zoning.
Also, BFJ will detail mitigation strategies to identify the need for zoning changes to the A‐1 district and help with any zoning amendments should the village decide to revise the A-1 zoning district regulations.
That Pleasantville is facing too much development too quickly is an ongoing issue, one which came to a head in early October when a mixed-use development was proposed for the 97-year-old former Chase Bank building on the southeast corner of the intersection of Wheeler Avenue and Bedford Road. The proposal would use the five-story structure as part of a larger building complex containing 40 rental housing units, plus one commercial space to potentially house a transit-oriented establishment such as a coffee shop.
Shortly thereafter, the Village Board held a special town hall meeting on Nov. 16 where more than 100 people filled the Pleasantville High School auditorium. For over three hours residents urged the village to pause what they considered an escalating pace of development that was spiraling out of control.
There had also been concerns last summer that the assemblage of four separate properties near the Bank of New York property on Campus Drive could also be developed, although those parcels are outside the area for the moratorium.
Village documents on the proposed moratorium can be viewed at
https://pleasantville.novusagenda.com/agendapublic/CoverSheet.aspx?ItemID=3973&MeetingID=546.
Abby is a local journalist who has reported on breaking news for more than 20 years. She currently covers community issues in The Examiner as a full-time reporter and has written for the paper since its inception in 2007. Read more from Abby’s editor-author bio here. Read Abbys’s archived work here: https://www.theexaminernews.com/author/ab-lub2019/
