Planning Board - Regular Meeting

Just Oh yeah. What is it? All right, everyone. Good evening and

welcome to the February 3rd meeting of the City of Rome Planning Board. I would like to call the meeting to order. Meeting is called to order. I'm the board chair Mark Espazito. Vice Chair Joe Kandra is not with us this evening. Um he's got a work uh work emergency. He's working overtime. We have uh members Eric Gonzalez, Britney Fumeola, David Smith here this evening. We also have Garrett Wyoff directly to my left from community and economic development. Jim Rizzo from corporation council. Danielle Salsbury, also from community and economic development. Um, we're your all volunteer board members. Uh, we live in Rome. We love where we live and, uh, kind of give back a little and, uh, perform a good service for the community. We try to be fair to petitioners and members of the community, neighbors. Um, so with that, our agenda is review and approval of the 6th January 2025 meeting minutes. It's our first item on the agenda. Make a motion to approve the meeting minutes from January 6th.

I second. All those in favor? I. All those opposed? Motion carries unanimously. Um public service announcement. Upcoming meetings March 3rd uh as our regularly scheduled meeting. The dates are set on January December. December. We set them in December of the prior year. Uh so the meetings uh all 12 meetings are set um in December. So March 3rd and April 7th are our next two regularly scheduled meetings. And our next item on the agenda is our annual election of officers. We get a nomination for chair and then vice chair. I make a nomination for chair for Marcus Wisto. Second.

Second. All those in favor? I I All those opposed. Motion carries unanimously. Vice chair. Make a motion for Joey Kandra for vice chair. Second the motion.

All those in favor? I. All those opposed. Motion carries unanimously. All right. Now on to old business. We have an environmental seeker review and a subdivision review. The environmental seeker review is item four. And the subdivision review is item five, request by James Donigan for a three lot minor subdivision at 1814 Black River Boulevard. Make sure I get those numbers right. Um and then uh so can we get a motion to take both items off the table? I make make a motion to remove uh four and five off the table. I second.

All those in favor? I. All those opposed. Motion carries unanimously. Petitioner I. Um yeah, come forward. Give us a little update. Same last. I think we looked at it last month. The only problem is we hadn't heard back from the county. and came back like two days after the meeting as per usual. That hasn't changed. Okay. Pre-existing businesses that are lease and they're going to turn into conveyances already exist.

And refresh my memory. We're taking how many one parcel and splitting actually two tax par two into three. Davidson Carpate and they've got everything worked out. Snow plowing, maintenance of the roads for all three. Right. Right. It'll be owned by the car wash. Okay.

Right. Okay. Questions. Board members. I think our only inquiry was whether it was written in somewhere that the par the other two parcels would maintain access through the Okay. Okay.

Nice. Any other questions board members? Thank you. Any uh community members of the community like to comment on this proposed action? Items four and five. Environmental seeker review subdivision review request James Donigan three lot minor subdivision at 1814 Black River Boulevard. None heard. Community economic development.

First I can confirm that Onida County Department of Planning returned no comment regarding the uh proposed project. The proposed parcel dimensions are compliant with zoning code minimums. Uh the property is located within New York um state historic preservation offic's arch archaeological buffer area um as most of the city of Rome is and the applicant should uh confirm with shipo if any actions are necessary prior to initiating ground disturbance in any future construction project. Um that doesn't really affect this but we always throw it as a note. Um our department recommends issuing a seeker negative declaration via uncorted review and approving the proposed subdivision plat as presented.

Thank you. We get a motion on the seeker. I make a motion to approve the PLA as issued. As issued. Well, the seeker. Yes. I second. You're picking up. Yeah. Okay. Uh, all those in favor? I. All those opposed. That was the issue negative deck on the seeker and then subdivision review request. Can you get a motion on that? Make a motion to approve the subdivision review request. Second. All those in favor? I. All those opposed. Motion carries unanimously. Okay. Uh good luck with your project. You got a file updated. Uh I I'll I'll stamp them and you can pick them up tomorrow if you or I'll just Okay.

All right. Or you want to just pass them up? Yeah, you want to just pass them. So they're not out in the public there. Yeah. Thank you. Good luck. And then yeah, I don't know whatever permits you got to file with the county and work with square that all the way. you trust us. Perfect. Thank you.

Good luck with the subdivision. Yep. Yep. Appreciate it. Okay. New business. Uh site plan review request by Chbani for revision to a previously approved site plan for construction of an approximately 1 million plus square foot dairy processing facility at 150 Perimeter Road. Good evening and welcome. Please state your name for the record. Uh, is that on? We We probably didn't have the last guy turn it on, did we?

Mr. Chairman, members of the board, my name is Kevin McAuliffe. I'm an attorney with Barkley Damon Syracuse and here representing Chbani tonight. Uh, we've made several revisions to the site plan and would like your approval of those. So, we want to put it up. I'll start to run through them. Uh I think Danielle's it's doing its thing. It's doing its thing. Okay.

If I start first with this building over here, we refer to this as the ASRS. On the old plan, there was actually another building right here uh that we had identified as the fruit building. We're not building the fruit facility now. We'll obtain the fruit needed from other things. So that gave us the capability then to reduce the arc of this curve and bring in the ASRS. This corner, the southwest corner, used to be 400 something feet from Mr. Carman's garage. It's now 684t from the property line. So it's somewhere between 250 and 300 ft different further away from the Bell Road Bell Air neighborhood than it was.

And that's the closest residence.

That's the closest residence. All the residences are up here. Um there's one right here and then there's Mr. Carmen. Several here and then the rest are up further on Bell and then Bair which is over here parallel to Bell. Uh next thing is we moved the front entrance of the building around. So previously all of this parking for employees was on the north side of the building. Now we've moved it around to the east side of the building. uh made the gateway building slightly smaller. You know, it doesn't really matter. The the square footages are just about the same as they were before uh this plan versus the old plan. There's not much shrinkage or nor is anything bigger. Over here, we consolidated the receiving building and the utility building into one. Similarly, here we consolidated the driver's building and the uh wastewater treatment plant into one. in this area during our meetings with the neighbors and uh the last meeting there was discussion about stacking of trucks as they came in and where were they going to stack etc. So, we used to have 10 spaces over here. Now, we have 28 spaces for trucks. Um, other things here, we now have a gateway on here which will control trucks in and out of the ASRS. One of the things I didn't mention at the last meeting was our ability to post an interior speed limit. So, at the moment, uh, we're going to say that the speed limit is not going to exceed 25 miles per hour for vehicles on site. we have the capability should we have a problem in the future to make it lower. But for now, we think that with the imposition of a gate here, uh that that that speed limit at 25 at the moment should suffice. To go back to our noise study, that noise study was done assuming 40 mph traffic around that road. So, we're substantially below

that. Therefore, all the noise modeling should be reduced even from the level of DBA at the property line that it was at that time. Um, down here we've moved in the lease line a bit. So, we have the ball fields down here. off the plan in this area is where Gusk is going to put its uh pump station. Excuse me, not Gusk, but the city of Rome uh wastewater treatment facility is where this is where the pump station's going to be. In order to access it, the city asked that they have a permanent road here rather than a road that went through the parking lot roadway for the ball fields in the event that they had to get in there in case of an emergency, they didn't have to get everybody out of the way. So now we will have a road that comes off which will be the city's road to the wastewater treatment plant. And I suspect that they'll probably share that right away with both Gusk and with Niagara Mohawk because both of their features will be over in here supplying uh gas and electricity onto the site.

What did I say? Niagara Mohawk. Oh, I do that all the time, too. Yeah, right. I'm that old. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Go back to Syracuse Lighting Company. like uh so you know aside from that you know this is pretty much the same plan as before. Uh the main things are that the building the closest building to the neighborhood is now over 200 feet away. Um everything else is pretty much the same and um you know the site's the same. I guess the other thing is our original plan talked about uh 160 plus acres on the golf course, but we're not going to develop over here at all. So now we've added this dotted line, which was not on the prior plan. This is what we're calling the lease boundary. So we're only leasing 93 some acres of the golf course from the county. And so in a sense we shrunk the area down uh but our building uh footprint is pretty much the same as it was before.

Um the parking looks a little tight. You complied with all of the city code. They have to have a certain amount of non-pervious Oh yeah. We got all of that stuff and we still have a thousand1 parking spaces. So think that was my next question. Same number park. Same number of parking spaces. They're all there. Um, all of those code issues, none of those things have changed. Might have a little bit of a maintenance issue. Might have to remove snow in the winter. Uh, trucks or something. Does it snow around here? Sometimes. Sometimes. Okay. Once in a while. Yeah. Yeah. We'll have a little bit of snow to remove. Yeah. Yeah. So,

uh, and then just as an aside, uh, you know, after our last meeting here in November, I think we're here on November 18th, a number of the neighbors said, "Can we get together and talk?" So on January 21st at Chabani's new sort of recruiting meeting office over in Air City Lofts, we sent out notices to every resident of Bell Road and Bair and we had a meeting and I don't know, we probably had 20some people there and we went through these plans. We went through all of the changes and we answered all the questions on our operation and the development etc. and we'll probably have more meetings as we start moving into the construction phase. We've also provided those neighbors with my email and uh phone number also for Jeff Alman who's here with us tonight and Rolando Morales. So, they have three people they can reach out to with any questions or problems. Okay, good.

Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. Appreciate it. Board members, any questions? Uh members of the community, any members of the community that would like to speak for, against, comments, questions? I just like to say thanks. Thank you for everything you guys done to just what you did do. You didn't have to do what they did. Nice. Excellent. Nice. Yeah, I think they're very good corporate citizen. Yeah, it's going to be a great great addition for Rome for sure. Um it's nice that they got together with you all. Would you mind stating your name for the record, sir? Chris Cardell.

Chris Cardell. Thank you, sir. Appreciate your comments. Anyone else? No. Community economic development. Proposed revisions are relatively minor with the most significant change being the relocation of the primary parking from the eastern side to the southern side of the main building. Uh our department has reviewed the proposed revision, does not see any substantive issues with the proposed changes. We recommend approving the proposed site plan revision as presented. Okay, we got a motion on the uh revised site plan item six on our agenda for um 1 million square foot plus uh dairy processing facility at 150 Perimeter Road. Make a motion to approve the site plan as presented. A second.

Second the motion. All those in favor? I. All those opposed. Motion carries unanimously. Uh thanks again. you guys have been uh you know really really good working with uh the city and getting things taken care of and uh appreciate that. Best of luck to you and motion to adjurnn. Make a motion to adjurnn. Second the motion. All those in favor? I. All those opposed. Motion carries unanimously. We are adjourned. Yep.