| Times Herald-Record
HAMPTONBURGH – The Town of Hamptonburgh Planning Board voted 3-2 Thursday to consider not requiring additional environmental studies for a pair of controversial warehouses proposed for 230 Neelytown Road North.
The project is a microcosm for pressure to develop Orange County, with its web of highways and close proximity to Northeast cities, Hamptonburgh residents say.
Real Deal Management Group LLC of Mahwah, New Jersey, is looking to build speculative 100,000- and 245,000-square-foot distribution centers on 33 acres of the 75-acre former Heck family farm, which has been used for corn and trotters.
RDM, which also is seeking to turn the former Playtogs department store in Middletown into a wholesale warehouse, recently closed on buying the 230 Neelytown Road North site in Hamptonburgh.
Morse Pitts, 68, owner of neighboring Windfall Farms, and his sister, Linda “Kathi” Pitts, 66, are leading a group of warehouse opponents, Hamptonburgh Neighbors, that includes the proposed RDM site’s residential neighbors.
On Thursday, Hamptonburgh Planning Board members Crawford McCloud, R. Noel Arnold and James Cawein Sr. voted to consider a resolution not requiring additional environmental study of potential negative effects for RDM’s project at a 7 p.m. Jan. 7 meeting.
Richard Calogero and James Campanale unsuccessfully voted for the planning board to consider a resolution requiring more research on the warehouses’ potential effects on an area that includes houses, farmland and industry.
Among the area’s industrial uses are an expanding pallet factory, a vehicle repair company and warehouses for Cardinal Health and Carlisle Construction Materials.
All of the planning board members agreed to allow the public to continue commenting on RDM’s project at the next planning board meeting.
But Arnold warned that the planning board could “have our hands tied by that little blue book” of town zoning codes, adding that the board “can’t legislate” to prevent the warehouses.
What’s Hamptonburgh willing to sacrifice?
RDM attorney Charles Gottlieb of Albany agreed with Arnold. He said that if the planning board votes at its next meeting to require a more detailed State Environmental Quality Review Act-related study, it would excessively delay and potentially kill a legally zoned project that’s long been before the board.
Indeed, RDM argues the project has been exhaustively studied since the firm first submitted a planning board application for the site in August 2018.
With Orange County farmers lucky to net up to a 10% return and Americans favoring cheap food – often without regard for sourcing – warehouses, solar farms and housing often make more economic sense than farms, said Maire Ullrich, a Cornell Cooperative Extension program manager. (Over a 40-year career farming produce, Morse Pitts earned a 3% profit).
For their part, Hamptonburgh residents have exhibited something of a cognitive dissonance in opposing development without taking lasting actions to prevent it and preserve farmland.
In May 2018, for example, many in the 5,500-resident town strongly and successfully objected to medical supply distributor Medline Industries’ proposal for a 1.2 million-square-foot distribution center, which landed in Montgomery.
At some point, however, likely in the ’90s. Kathi Pitts said, Hamptonburgh residents rezoned RDM’s proposed Neeleytown Road North development area – which includes a narrow, single-lane country road – for industrial use.
Hamptonburgh residents have since retained that industrial zoning, while not updating the town’s comprehensive plan since 2003.
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Hamptonburgh residents also commonly argue they’re not like other Hudson Valley residents, who support multiple government layers and services like police departments, while resisting tax increases and development.
Yet, like municipalities throughout the region, tiny Hamptonburgh still opts to have a town government, while supporting multiple school districts (Goshen and Valley Central).
Developer tries to address concerns
Big-picture questions about how much Hamptonburgh residents are willing spend, do and sacrifice to preserve land “are not unreasonable,” said Eileen Purcell, 51. She and her husband Danny, 65, oppose RDM’s warehouses, which would sit near the couple’s 60-acre homestead.
But addressing such questions doesn’t preclude the town’s planning board from nixing RDM’s project to protect the public, Purcell added.
Beyond fears of trucks hitting farmworkers, who regularly cross Neeleytown Road North, RDM’s opponents contend the warehouses would destroy local flora like wetlands, harm fauna like threatened bats and turtles, and cause too much runoff from impermeable surfaces, while creating too much noise and light.
RDM has repeatedly sought to address such concerns, even substantively tweaking its proposal as needed, RDM partner Isaac Neuman emphasized during a phone interview.
Neuman said the project would be hidden from Neeleytown Road North, and it would have a septic system to prevent discharge into streams and retention ponds to stop runoff.
Plus, RDM has vowed to widen and improve much of the road, adding striping lines for bike and runner use. The road ranges from about 18 feet to 22.5 feet wide, and RDM pledges to widen it from the entrance of its property to the Montgomery town line to better handle existing and future truck use.
The warehouses would take two years to build, according to RDM. And while the buildings would run 24-7, trucks would come and go from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., Monday through Friday, and from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., Saturday to Sunday.
“I want to be able to live next to this project,” Neuman said. “Every time I develop a site, I envision how it would impact my way of life, and what I’d say if someone said, ‘Hey, would you live next to it?’ My mother raised me well.”
RDM’s Hamptonburgh warehouse proposal also matters to a number of nonprofit land preservation organizations. In 2016, Scenic Hudson spent $400,000, while the state Agriculture Department chipped in $800,000 toward $1.2 million spent on buying Windfall Farms’ development rights. The Orange County Land Trust manages the conservation easement.
Farmland proves difficult to preserve
Two years later, in 2018, the Pitts siblings used a novel, multi-party arrangement to fight off an 88,000-square-foot warehouse plan, with room for a 42,000-square-foot expansion, on the former Nemeth Farm, a 72-acre neighboring property.
Equity Trust and Scenic Hudson split the roughly $300,000 cost of purchasing Nemeth Farm from Orange County. Scenic Hudson then bought the land’s agricultural conservation easement.
And Windfall Farms acquired the Nemeth site’s buildings, while executing a ground lease with Equity Trust to save the property for farming.
Morse Pitts and Equity Trust are currently deciding who to lease Nemeth Farm to – a challenge Pitts says won’t be overcome if RDM puts warehouses next to it.
As for Windfall Farms, Pitts said he leases that site to three small produce operations, which sell at farmers’ markets, including in New York City, and one Windfall farmer is moving because of the RDM warehouse threat.
Saving farmland in Orange County has proven difficult, over the years, as highways expanded and the exurbs crept up more than 50 miles from New York City, Ullrich said.
From 2007 to 2017 alone, Orange County’s farm total fell to 621, a loss of 40 farms (-6%), while the county’s agricultural acreage plummeted to 81,192, down 7,060 acres (-8%), according to county data.
Orange County had about a 1,000 farms in 1960, down from 3,935 in 1910, according to research co-authored by SUNY New Paltz Professor Brian Obach, a sociologist in the college’s interdisciplinary Environmental Studies program.
Over the last century, Orange County has gone from using nearly one in four acres for farmland to roughly one in six, Obach found.
“Communities have to decide if they are willing to sacrifice their rural character and the last vestiges of their agricultural heritage in exchange for development and the revenues that it can bring,” Obach said. It would take true “public mobilization and support to protect the farms that are left in the region.”
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