https://patch.com/new-york/nyack/discussion-continue-controversial-piermont-apartments-proposal
Discussion To Continue On Controversial Piermont Apartments Proposal
The hearing before the Planning Board was continued to May 13.
Lanning Taliaferro, Patch Staff
Posted Wed, Apr 24, 2024 at 11:48 am ET
Updated Wed, Apr 24, 2024 at 11:50 am ET
A three-story, 14-unit apartment building is proposed for the vacant lot on Piermont Avenue (top left). (Google Maps)
PIERMONT, NY — The village Planning Board will again take up the controversial proposal for a 3-story, 14-unit apartment building in central Piermont on May 13.
Many Piermont residents are fiercely opposed.
“The last-presented architectural plan and artist rendering with Village official complicity was for a hideous 14-unit residential behemoth that will augment flooding, gridlock traffic, and permanently destroy the aesthetic beauty that once was Piermont”, resident John J. Tormey III told Patch.
The Rockland County Business Journal reported that residents at the Planning Board meeting April 8 gasped when a representative for the developer showed a rendering of the plan for the vacant lot across from Village Hall. “The proposal by Piermont Developers LLC showed a modern, boxy brick-and-Hardie plank multi-family building more commonly seen in urbanized downtowns like White Plains”, Editor Tina Traster wrote.
The RCBJ reported that attorney Lee Lefkowitz of Steinmetz-Zarin pointed out the developers had been working with the village since 2021 on a multi-family proposal for the “long-blighted lot” at 447-477 Piermont Ave.
Village officials amended the zoning code in 2023 to allow a multi-family project with no set-backs to proceed with a special permit.
Tormey has created a blog called “Unhand Piermont!” which is devoted to not only the rejection of the plan but to uncovering what he calls the “sketchy” developers and alleged village wrong-doing:
https://unhandpiermont.blogspot.com
The meeting May 13 begins at 7 p.m. in the meeting room at Village Hall.
“The public officials of the Village of Piermont, with developer collaboration, are doing everything possible to conceal from Village residents, who the developer is, and what if any environmental remediation will be done on the site at 447-477 Piermont Avenue. Meanwhile, the developer New Jersey LLC will be building over what is a known former Sunoco Gasoline Station on the site – by the Village government’s own admission,” he said. “Moreover, the last on-record individual identified as Owner, Manager, and Member of the developer New Jersey LLC, was crushed by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection less than a decade ago, for failing to remediate an underground gasoline tank at an old gasoline station in Bergenfield when he was ordered to do so, and then running out of money and pathetically pleading poverty to the NJDEP. History repeats itself”.
The hearing before the Planning Board was continued to May 13.
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