Health care building renovation too costly?

AMENIA — Hudson River HealthCare is a step closer to site plan approval on renovations to its Amenia branch, following a Planning Board discussion concerning screening of the building’s parking lot from Route 343.

The proposal will slightly increase the size of the actual building, but inside the work will increase capacity of primary care by 50 percent, explained Chief Administrative Officer Allison Dubois at the  Thursday June 24, Planning Board meeting. It will also provide stationary integrated dental service (no more dental bus visits) and mental health services.

The main topic of discussion was the mitigated screening of the parking lot in front of the building. Environmental consultant to the board Michael Klemens was in attendance at the meeting, and had recently provided the board with his comments following a site visit.

Klemens summarized that his major concerns have been with creating some kind of a 5-foot tall screen between Route 343 and the parking lots. That 5-foot buffer, “the minimum,� he clarified, is to obstruct the view of parked cars from the road.

Sounds simple enough, but the best way to go about providing that mitigation turns out to be an extremely costly one, explained Rich Lanzarone, head of the construction management firm hired by Hudson River.

The two main options were a raised bed with plantings or a dry-laid stone wall. The raised beds were preferable to Klemens but as Lanzarone pointed out the cost estimate of the beds was far more than Hudson River could afford.

Hudson River HealthCare is a not-for-profit organization, Lanzarone said, and the grant funding making the project possible is “finite.�

“The cost [for raised beds] would be crushing,� he said. “We would love to do plantings, but the cost is just prohibitive. We need to find another way to meet the needs of the town.�

Klemens conceded that he was “shocked� to discover the high costs of the raised beds, but remained firm that a 3-foot high stone wall, as Lanzarone had proposed earlier in the meeting, would not meet the county’s approval for sufficient screening.

The compromise that was eventually worked out was to move the parking lot further away from Route 343, which would leave room for the stone wall as well as larger plantings behind it to achieve the 5-foot screen Klemens recommended.

Lanzarone said he would update the site plan and send it to the Planning Board, to then be sent to the county for review. The board voted to hold a special Planning Board meeting on July 22, as the  scheduled July 1 meeting has been canceled due to the fire company’s carnival. If the county approves the site plan within five days of the July 22 meeting, a public hearing on the project will be held that night.