The evening of 2025-06-02 was a meeting of the Honeoye Falls Zoning Board.
There was a surprising amount of push back against a basketball court. In contrast, no one seemed to care about demolishing three buildings.
The Hildreth’s got approval to put in a ‘sport court’, which means a concrete pad with basketball hoop. This is for their kids to play on. Which seems pretty straightforward. It is a corner lot, so it looked like the backyard, where the court will go, is against the neighbors side yard. But those neighbors appear to be fine with it (probably have kids who will use it too).
It’s the neighbors a few houses down that showed up to complain. To be fair, they did have some valid concerns. Although, those concerns look to be already handled by existing Village Code. If someone wants to have their 10000 closest friends over for a rock concert at 2AM? That’s going to violate the Village Code, regardless of whether it’s on a sport court or grass.
In any case, I think it was good to have them show up and comment. Hopefully they went away happy to have been heard. And more importantly, hopefully their concerns won’t materialize down the road. And if they do? Everyone at the meeting now knows the official response is to call the Code Enforcement Officer. Unofficially? Perhaps the neighbors will be invited over to play a game or two.
Mathstone received approval to demolition 2 of the 3 buildings Ryan wants to take down. The timing here appears to be driven by insurance more than anything else. They don’t want to deal with an attractive nuisance.
The two barns were straightforward. By the sounds of it, they are gradually self-demolishing anyways. At some point, helping them down is just prudent.
The house was delayed so that SEQR can play out. There were concerns that if it were approved tonight, someone might complain about the destruction of a ‘historic’ building. Going through SEQR should show there is no historical value here. While the potential future complainer might not like that, at least it shows the Village did their due diligence. And it sounds like Ryan will have to go through a similar enough process to cart away the debris. So it shouldn’t be too much more work on anyone’s part.
And those are my Observations From Audience Land for the June 02, 2025 meeting of the Honeoye Falls Zoning Board.