ITHACA, N.Y. — If this month’s City of Ithaca Planning and Development Board meeting could be described in one word, it would be “pithy”. While on the shorter side as these meetings tend to go, it was rather dense with material. One project got the green light of final Site Plan Approval, while plans for a large mixed-use development along the waterfront stared down a very long review timeline. In contrast, Cornell tried to reduce their timeline by splitting a project up into two independent submissions, a move which had to be approved by the planning board.
As always, The Voice is here to provide a summary of the monthly meeting. Read on for May 2024’s report. So those who wish to take a look at the agenda, that can be found here. Programming note, five of the six board members were present, with Elisabete Godden absent, and one seat remains vacant for the time being.
Subdivision Review
First on this month’s agenda was lot subdivision review. This is when property lots in the city, technically known as parcels, seek legal reconfiguration, which could be anything from being split up into two or more plots, reshaped or consolidated from multiple lots back into one parcel.
There was one subdivision to review at this month’s meeting for 312-314 Spencer Road on the southern edge of the Southside Flats. The property has two single-family homes, at 312 and 314 Spencer Road, and the owner, Modern Living Rentals, would like to subdivide them into 0.172-acre and 0.109-acre lots. The reason is that Modern Living Rentals, which renovated the century-old homes in 2016 and built two rental properties on the land to the west, would now like to sell off the homes individually, preferably as owner-occupied housing per the filing.
Lawyer Nathan Cook was present to talk about the submission. There are no physical changes to the homes and apart from some legal work to ensure easements for driveway access at the rear, the application wasn’t particularly complicated.” This is intended to be the easiest assignment I’ve asked the board to look at,” Cook quipped.
All the votes were unanimous from start to approval, and the subdivision was granted – “(t)here you go, you have what you need,” concluded Chair Mitch Glass.
Site Plan Review
Following subdivisions and the customary public comment period to start each meeting, the Planning Board delved into Site Plan Review (SPR). Site Plan Review is the meeting segment where review of new and updated building proposals occurs. Rather than give the same spiel about procedural details every month, if you want an in-depth description of the steps involved in the project approval process, the “Site Plan Review Primer” can be found here.
In short, during the SPR process the Planning Board looks at sketch plans, declares itself lead agency for state environmental quality review (SEQR), conducts a review and declares negative (adverse effects mitigated) or positive (potentially harmful impacts, and therefore needs an Environmental Impact Statement), while concurrently performing design review for projects in certain, more sensitive neighborhoods for aesthetic impacts. Once those are all concluded to the board’s satisfaction, they vote on preliminary site plan approval and, after reviewing a few final details and remaining paperwork, final site plan approval.
Lake Street Townhouses (261 Lake Street)
In Fall Creek, DMG Investments has proposed building 16 three‐story for-sale townhouses broken into two strings of nine units and seven units on a vacant, sloped stretch of Lake Street. The market‐rate townhouses will each have a back entrance and a front entrance onto Lake Street and will be a mix of three‐ and four‐bedroom units.
Site improvements include removing invasive plant species while introducing native plantings, a new sidewalk on Lake Street, along with street trees and stormwater planters to manage runoff from roofs. The project team proposes 16 surface parking spaces.
As planned, the project will require parking variances. The developer will have one parking space on-site for each unit, and have a 99-year lease on another 16 spaces from the underused parking lot of the Auden Ithaca apartments next door uphill, in which DMG owns a majority stake. Preliminary site plan approval was granted to the project last month, and the project team was seeking issuance of the Recreational River Permit and the final site plan approval this month.
Whitham Planning and Design’s Michele Palmer and Yifei Yan were on hand to represent the project team, joined by architect L. Bear Smith of HOLT Architects, and project engineers Jim Duba of Partner Engineering, and James Ritzenthaler of Passero Associates.
Yan went over modifications to the driveway, the two types of lighting bollards being considered along the rear driveway and walk, and confirmed that city engineering still has an interest in a stop sign to replace the yield sign at the intersection. Smith reviewed architectural screening (detached wood louvers) for the HVAC units. Bay windows were explored for the side faces, but in interior layouts, the side wall is likely where beds would be put by homeowners of those units, which made bay treatments an interior obstruction more than an exterior appeal.
The board’s Daniel Correa was disappointed that his bay window idea was foregone, though he understood the reasoning, and his colleague Emily Petrina considered the stop sign a “huge win”. The Planning Board cautioned that final site plan approval is contingent on city engineering signing off on the driveway and sidewalks.
“Living in the neighborhood, walking my dog there every day, it really is far enough (from Fall Creek). I think the applicant really has gone far in the design of the building and the landscape screening to hide it even more. I’m comfortable,” said the Board’s Andy Rollman in his support of the project and the Recreational River Permit.
The Recreational River Permit was issued unanimously 5-0. As for Final Site Plan Approval, the board found itself a little cautious given the HVAC treatment and sensitivities from neighbors, but in the end, it too passed unanimously.
Water’s Edge (683 Third Street)
Arnot Realty’s expansive waterfront project was back before the city Planning Board on Tuesday. The project team proposes demolishing three existing Department of Transportation maintenance buildings to redevelop the 8+ acre site into a mixed-use development.
The proposal includes two five-story buildings along Cayuga Inlet and two 4-story buildings inland, with approximately 452 residential units total and approximately 10,000 square feet of commercial space.
The project will be constructed in two phases over 34 months, with approximately 200 units in the first phase and about 252 units in the second phase, with each phase including a waterfront and inland building.
The waterfront buildings will be connected by a second-floor roof terrace and will have a mix of parking, commercial, residential and amenity/service space on the first floor, with apartments and additional amenities above. The two inland buildings will include a mix of residential units and amenity service space.
Site improvements and amenity spaces include fire pits, outdoor recreation, eating, cooking and seating areas. There will also be landscaping and lighting enhancements, and several new terraced stairways and ramps along the Waterfront Trail to provide access to new boat docks, with a kayak launch along the inlet.
This is a large and complex project. While the project team has been hoping to avoid a positive declaration (“pos dec”) on their SEQR/CEQR determination, meaning the project’s team would need to put together a lengthy Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) before reaching the approval stage. The board was initially lukewarm to the idea, though after a Special Meeting to discuss what would be desired (DOT inputs on traffic, reduced parking, revised egress and fire access), they were open to the idea, if the information was provided, and which was the project team’s objective last night.
Arnot’s Ian Hunter was joined this month by Frank Armento and Tim Faulkner of Fisher Associates, as well as architects Erik Reynolds and Marlee Beers of SWBR. Entries and exits have been modified, new traffic data is being obtained to include the latest buildings and avoid COVID-related contamination, and drone footage was taken a couple of Saturdays ago to observe traffic behaviors and Cayuga Waterfront Trail use. The sidewalk along the Ithaca Farmer’s Market would have one of two options of pedestrian connectors to Waters Edge, not including the Waterfront Trail, with the elimination of some parking spaces.
The board had mixed feelings. Rollman preferred to see more parking eliminated with a linear green space along the Waters Edge and Farmer’s Market properties, which Chair Glass agreed with. Rollman also cautioned that the day they used the drone was a rainy Saturday, and Glass said they’d need more drone runs and more data before any decisions could be made regarding transportation connections and traffic impacts. Glass said they also seek third-party review of traffic data.
The clear message from Tuesday night was there are still a lot of outstanding items that need to be addressed, from an aquatic flora and fauna survey to visual simulations of sight lines, to a utility impact analysis. As currently laid out in scheduling documents, review on Water’s Edge wouldn’t be completed until February 2025 for an option that avoids the positive declaration on SEQR. So even if it avoids the cost of an EIS, it’s still going to be quite a lengthy period of time, though Planning Director Lisa Nicholas said it’s not an especially long review timeline for a project of this size. The board seemed to feel that the length of time reviewing everything, much more than a typical project seeking a negative declaration, was a factor in why some of them now seemed fine avoiding the pos dec and EIS.
“Materially, how is this different from a pos dec?” asked the board’s Bassel Khoury.
“When you do a pos dec, it’s a very different process from a neg dec,” explained Nicholas. “There’s a scoping document, the applicant prepares a draft, it goes out to a wide audience for comments and every comment has to be responded to.” For reference, the last EIS the city reviewed, for Chain Works (now Southworks), required three years of review. Nicholas cautioned that at any point they hit a significant negative impact that they feel can’t be mitigated, they’ll have no choice but to do a positive declaration on SEQR.
Chair Glass was torn. On the one hand, he acknowledged significant impacts were likely, but he also liked the project and didn’t want to do a pos dec unless the board had to. With that uncertain juncture, the board agreed to revisit the project next month.
Meinig Fieldhouse (239 Tower Road)
First proposed this past fall and discussed in greater detail earlier this year, Cornell has introduced plans to construct the Meinig Fieldhouse, an indoor sports and recreation center of approximately 90,000 square feet on the existing Robison Alumni Fields.
The Meinig Fieldhouse will accommodate a field programmed to support NCAA requirements for women’s and men’s lacrosse competitions; a varsity soccer pitch and/or varsity football field for practices; and the facility will host campus recreation, club, and intramural sport teams. The proposed building will also include a mechanical room, restrooms, a training room, and storage on the ground floor; two team rooms, restrooms, an area for elevated filming and mechanical spaces on the second-level mezzanine accessible by both stairs and elevator; and on each level there will be an area for a limited number of spectators.
The project is located in central campus and the limit of disturbance is proposed to be approximately seven acres total, split between the city and Town of Ithaca. The project site is located in the U-1 Zoning District in the City of Ithaca and will require no variances, but is located in the Low-Density Residential Zoning District in the Town of Ithaca and will require variances for the work there.
Given the variances in the town and the building crossing the municipal boundary, the SPR process gets a little complicated. The City of Ithaca Planning Board is lead agency since the project’s primary impact will be in the city’s municipal confines, and the Town of Ithaca Planning Board is a concurring body.
The town Planning Board will provide input and feedback, but it will not be the entity calling for and taking votes on the site plan. However, the Town Planning Board would need to vote on a Special Use Permit for an institutional building in the low-density housing zone, and a trip to the Town’s Zoning Board of Appeals (ZBA, not the city’s BZA) for a height variance.
Landscape architect Kim Michaels of local landscape architecture firm TWMLA led the presentation on behalf of Cornell. Although the city declared itself Lead Agency in January, Michaels explained that the project was delayed a couple of months as Cornell needed to review its objectives. The original plan was the fieldhouse and an outdoor field hockey space, which has very specific needs. Cornell revised the playing field to be more general purpose, and now the plan is for a new field hockey playing field to eventually be located on Game Farm Road in the Town of Ithaca, next to the McGovern Fields.
That adds a new complication to this environmental review – whether or not to allow SEQR segmentation, which is typically a big no-no. However, here it was recommended by city planners that the SEQR be broken into two parts, because that future field hockey portion of the project will now be placed entirely within the Town of Ithaca, and the timeline for construction of the new field hockey field has not yet been established. That project is totally outside the city’s jurisdiction and functionally independent from the field house proposal. This is a legally rare case of permissible segmentation, and it was one that the planning board agreed with. To note, this segmenting does not mean the future field hockey plan is obligated to be approved by the town. It just ends up being a separate project, no longer related to the fieldhouse.
As for specific changes, the outdoor field is now larger, with the outdoor flagpole, press box and spectator seating removed, and the light poles have shifted and grown slightly, from 70 feet to 80 feet. The fieldhouse itself hasn’t significantly changed, and the goal is to obtain approval by October for a Q4 2024 – Q2 2026 construction period.
Regarding the artificial turf controversy, Michaels said “we’re going to have a dialog,” so that issue will continue to be of concern with environmental advocacy groups.
“Why aren’t we looking at natural grass here?” asked Chair Glass. “There are some great technologies around.”
“Next month I will bring someone who knows more about the sciency stuff. Absolutely we should be thoughtful about when we’re using plastics, and reducing it where we can,” said Michaels.
So for now, the segmentation will be allowed, but the project team has more explaining to do. The project will be back before the board next month.
Other Business
According to Planning Director Nicholas, comments on the Downtown Plan, and design options for the Route 13 Corridor rehabilitation will be presented to the Planning Board in the next month or two. Nicholas says three scenarios are being developed for the segment of Route 13 from Purity (700 Cascadilla Street) to Ithaca High School. On a personnel note, Chair Glass said he will be taking a year-long sabbatical away from Ithaca from August on, and the city will need to fill his seat for that year, so that will be another Planning Board seat for the city to fill.
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