Moreau leaders are moving closer to updating the town’s zoning codes after a public hearing Tuesday and years of public effort.
The northern Saratoga County town’s zoning codes have gone more than three decades without any updates.
The effort to modernize the codes came after nearly three years of public outcry over a proposed biochar plant that would have seen 700 tons of biosolids, what activists label sewage sludge, shipped to the town’s industrial park six days a week.
A task force charged with rewriting the town’s zoning codes began meeting in June after town leaders enacted a construction moratorium in April to halt the biochar plant.
Town Building Planning and Development Coordinator Josh Westfall explains some of the initial changes that were the focus of Wednesday’s meeting.
“It reduces the intensity of zoning in the M-1, transfers some of that to the M-2. Something that’s been kind of considered a reduction in the intensity per our comp plan just because it’s close to our residential uses. The M-2 has always been envisioned to be a higher order of use, so that’s what the major changes are,” said Westfall.
He says the M-1-zoned industrial park at the north of the town is surrounded by residential areas including the village of South Glens Falls. The task force is hoping to shift industrial opportunities to the southern M-2 zone that is surrounded by agricultural and lower-density zones.
“As it stands right now, within the M-1 there is quite a bit that can be done up there, as far as power plants and all that type of stuff. So, you could have some of those uses that have been historically over in Glens Falls in the river, Hudson Falls in the river and it’s just making sure that those uses aren’t in that spot,” said Westfall.
Town board member Mark Stewart wants Moreau to find a balance between protecting residents and welcoming economic development.
“I think zoning laws in growing areas like Saratoga County and the town of Moreau are something that’s going to be looked at again for the next several decades. The use of land is going to change overtime as developments and different industries come. So, I think it’s important for all boards, as many people said, to make sure they’re up to date and accurate for what it is, but right now to iron out everything that we can before implementing it is important,” said Stewart.
Stewart does have some items he’d like addressed before the board approves any code changes.
“So, some of my concerns are with the current code that’s written, townhouses, multiple dwellings, would be able to be put in current residential areas where they would not be allowed to have such townhouses now. There would be single family homes with the potential of having multi-family townhomes next to them, that was never an option before. And setting a code where we know that there’s 28 non-compliant properties being that they’re already residential structures and establishing that as the M-1 Industrial code and including them, I think it would be the time to clean that up and get those properties out of the M-1,” said Stewart.
This month, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation rejected Saratoga Biochar Solutions’ permit applications, citing a lack of information on its technology’s safe implementation at industrial scale as well as a large number of questions about its effectiveness.
Gina LeClair helps run the NotMoreau Facebook page, a major organizing force in the effort to stop progress on the biochar plant. She says she won’t celebrate until the town’s codes prevent any future projects similar to what Saratoga Biochar proposed.
“Somebody said to me, ‘what do you hope comes out of this?’ And I said, ‘I hope other communities learn they can fight and they can win and that’s the biggest thing and the best thing that’ll happen – it’ll spread out and it’ll help other communities,” said LeClair.
Jennifer Kietzman sits on Corinth’s Planning Board. She attended Tuesday’s public hearing for similar reasons.
“The zoning laws are really a community’s first line of defense in terms of what gets built and what happens in your community. So, having witnessed what happened here, and having followed it, we felt that now that there was this move to amend the zoning laws here, we wanted to come and see what was being done to protect the community of Moreau going forward,” said Kietzman.
The next town board meeting is December 10th.
