Depot Hill Farm reps debate fiscal analysis and 'pink houses'

AMENIA — The Planning Board decided that Depot Hill Farm would not have to conduct additional financial analysis pertaining to home prices for its Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS).

The decision came after an intense debate between the board, farm co-owner Jeff Stark, Brandee Nelson, a project manager from Crawford and Associates engineering, and advisors to the town Ron Miller and David Gaskell from The Hudson Group.

The board asked Stark to provide additional fiscal analysis to address the possibility of selling homes for less than $975,000. Stark said such an analysis would be as useless as doing an analysis of the impact of pink homes.

"The purpose of the DEIS is that the public has a rational understanding of impacts of what we’re doing," Stark said. "If we show the public pink houses, they would not have a good understanding of what we are doing. If we show the public that we’re selling houses at $500,000 that have taken $900,000 to build and has a fiscal impact to the schools of x, y and z, that’s not realistic. We want the public to have a good grounding of what we are doing. To offer them all these horrible, pink houses and $500,000, it does not show what we are accurately doing. It puts us in a poor light."

Miller disagreed and cited an example from the current deliberation over the Carvel Development Project in Pine Plains.

"Carvel proposed 90 percent second homes [in their DEIS] and the Planning Board decided that they would have to give the board a scenario if it was 50-50 primary and secondary homes," Miller said. "Carvel said that they can provide an analysis. While they intend to sell it as secondary home community, there is a chance that residents could make them primary homes. That is why the Planning Board said that you have to run process of 50-50 primary and secondary homes."

"We did that at the consultants meeting," Nelson said. "That is something we already incorporated."

"We agreed [a 50-50 study] is reasonable," Stark said. "But the difference is that we don’t have any control when a person with a child moves into a community. But I do have control of the color of the houses and the prices I sell the houses a for."

Eventually a compromise was reached between the board, Stark and Nelson. Stark agreed that a sentence will be added to the DEIS that says houses will be sold on the development at $975,000. No more, no less.

"If we don’t sell the houses at that price, then we won’t go forward with the development," Stark said. "If we or if a successor for the project would want to sell houses at a different price, they would have to come back to the Planning Board to talk about it."

If the project is approved, the farm would continue to operate as a horse stud farm and add approximately 138 residential units, a dairy barn, a community garden and a wastewater treatment plant. All will be built on 60.7 acres of the farm’s land.

An equestrian center complete with paddocks will be built on 90.3 acres of land. The existing horse stud farm will remain on 100.2 acres of land and 159.29 acres will remain open. The project’s total acreage is 480.

The project’s DEIS has yet to be approved for public viewing by the Planning Board.