Tonight (2017-09-11) was a meeting of the Honeoye Falls Planning Board.
CYA looked to be the primary focus tonight, unfortunately. On the plus side, there was an audience, which led to some nice conversations before/after the meeting.
Ryan (of Mathstone, which is now Main Street Management?) was requesting an addition to one of his properties. Barely of note, if not for the attention to detail the board went through. Items that I would have expected to be glossed over as irrelevant were carefully discussed. Such as a site plan showing neighboring properties. Important if a new structure is being placed, but has no impact on a second story addition that does not change the building footprint. Took twice as long as it probably should have, but he did get his approval.
With that we were on to the travesty that is Muffy’s subdivision. What, in my mind, should have been an open/shut issue, just keeps dragging on. First meeting on this appears to be in July, next meeting should be October. Just to have permission to move a line on a paper. No construction (or destruction), just an imaginary line.
While the whole process felt like governmental abuse, there were some interesting moments:
The village attorney was amusing, as he jumped in to provide damage control. If I had to guess, he was looking ahead to defending the board in a law suit.
The board members were split along gender lines. Likely a coincidence, but it may point to viewpoints being influenced by biology. Or not, because correlation does not imply causation.
Someone mentioned illegal water, in the context of runoff. I found it amusing that a naturally occurring process (skywater aka rain) can be considered illegal.
Perhaps next month this will be resolved. Unfortunately, I think it’s more likely another delay will come up. What government cannot outright deny, it delays through bureaucracy until such time as denial no longer matters. Very different details, but see Charlie Gard.
Last item of the night was concept plan for Wolfberger Park. One of those completely unofficial discussions that means nothing (officially), but can be useful for developers to get an idea of what challenges they have to overcome. In this case, they are looking to turn an ~80 acre chunk of land in the northern area of the village into ~100 single family homes. I thought it was a decent plan, especially for this early on. Revision will be needed, but that comes with time.
One change I hope to see is openings to allow future connections to neighboring vacant land. Much like this project benefits from locations in a previous development, it would be nice if they left same option open for their future neighbors.
And those are my Observations From Audience Land for the September 11th, 2017 meeting of the Honeoye Falls Planning Board.
Link to agenda on Village website.
Link to agenda stored on this site, should the village lose their copy.