BETTER THAN HEARSAY - What Just Happened Here

WINDHAM - It was done without a whisper of resistance but it is still hard to understand why it was necessary for the Greene County Soil and Water Conservation District to join the county’s Agricultural District.

GCSW was admitted into the Ag District at a Greene County Legislature meeting, last week, after being denied entry a year ago.

Considerable controversy surrounded the original GCSW application which generated a wave of protest from residents of the Big Hollow, on the outskirts of the hamlet of Maplecrest in the town of Windham.

It all started quietly. GCSW executive director Joel DuBois, in the spring of 2023, attended a Windham planning board meeting joined by an engineer as part of a relatively routine site plan review.

The agency wanted to build a 2-story structure with a paved parking lot in the middle of the remote Big Hollow, consolidating multiple offices and equipment storage facilities.

DuBois had been given authorization to move forward on the project by the GCSW board of directors who apparently didn’t anticipate the strongly negative response that arose from a handful of Big Hollow folks.

Their opposition was initially voiced at the planning board session, saying the building and parking lot would forever blemish the Big Hollow, one of the last remaining relatively undisturbed areas in Windham.

Planners made some suggestions to GCSW on how to possibly lessen the visual impacts, a common scenario in many mountaintop municipalities.

Nothing out of the ordinary was recommended and it appeared the project would ultimately go through, after a few blueprint changes, until DuBois unexpectedly issued a legal challenge to the town’s site plan law.

DuBois submitted Freedom of Information Law requests, putting the town on notice that he believed GCSW should be exempt from local oversight, setting the stage for a potential and protracted court battle.

Shortly thereafter, the GCSW board of directors pulled the project, saying DuBois had made the FOIL demands without their okay.

Nothing was heard until early autumn when DuBois made a surprise move, asking for permission to file the Ag District application, a request that, at first, was turned down by his board of directors.

That rejection, however, was later reversed and the application reached the public hearing phase of the county legislature where the small but resolute contingent of Big Hollow residents made their opposition well known.

The group, in addition to saying the new building would be an eyesore, also said GCSW, over the years, had not been a good neighbor.

GCSW has long had a plants and materials nursery at basically the same spot, where they have piled large culverts used in their work and erected so-called “hoop houses where plantings are cultivated.

Lawmakers, in the rarest of rare decisions, turned down the application and nothing was heard about the matter until a fresh application showed up on the legislative agenda, two weeks ago, and was unanimously passed.

DuBois was praised by legislature chairman Patrick Linger who noted that DuBois, after being denied last year, had been, “asked to work with your neighbors and you absolutely did that, to my understanding.”

And in a subsequent phone interview, Windham town supervisor Thomas Hoyt, who also sits on the GCSW board of directors, said DuBois and GCSW had, “lived up to what they said they would do.”

GCSW reportedly cleaned up their existing site and crafted a new door for a barn on their property which formerly belonged to the Charbonneau family, re-carving a “C” and sunset into the door.

The gesture was appreciated by Patricia Charbonneau, one of the Big Hollow residents who had offered resistance to the project.

Charbonneau, however, said she was not aware GCSW had re-submitted its Ag District application and while not wishing to renew the fight, said it “was a joke to be let in,” touching on a touchy subject.

Hoyt said changes have been made in the Ag District approval process, whereby municipalities will be notified by the county when any entity attempts to gain admittance.

Applicants must fill out an Intake Form, describing the property they want to include in the district. The form is then sent to the town supervisor of the involved town, affording an opportunity for comment.

Hoyt further said the town of Windham has enacted, “revisions to our site plan law to better protect neighbors” impacted by any potential project.

“It wasn’t good, what happened last year,. We revised the law so that what happened doesn’t happen again,” Hoyt said.

Which is apparently “all well that ends well” but nobody has yet explained why GCSW so suddenly and urgently needed to join the Ag District.

Everything was fine and dandy until the building project was blocked by its own board of directors, ultimately revealing a split on that board, and now GCSW is in the Ag District…but why?

Ag Districts are set up to “promote agriculture and its high quality and diverse projects,” the State Agriculture and Markets website states.

While it is hard to see how GCSW fits into that definition, there is also a mission to “foster agricultural environmental stewardship,” an apparent connection referenced by DuBois in his latest presentation.

One advantage to being in an Ag District is getting tax exempt status, helping farmers stay in business, but GCSW is already tax exempt.

A second benefit is letting farmers bypass certain planning board review, making it easier for them to survive in a world that squeezes evermore tightly, leaving farmland encircled by residential development.

But as part of Windham’s revised site plan rules, GCSW will have to go in front of the planning board if the agency intends to build in Big Hollow.

“There is nothing on the horizon,” regarding the agency putting up a new building, Hoyt said, so the lingering deja vu’ question is…what just happened so that what happened before doesn’t happen again?