Developer Downsizes Route 9D Plan

Fishkill project would use Beacon water, schools A developer has scaled down a plan to build hundreds of apartments on Route 9D just north of Beacon, which the Fishkill Town Board earlier rejected. On Sept. 10, Fishkill Development LLC submitted an application to the Planning Board to build Riverview Market & Lofts on 50 acres bounded by Route 9D, Hudson View Drive and North Lockey Woods, South Half Moon and North Half Moon roads. Hudson View Park Co. owns the property and in 2017 proposed a 463-unit complex called Rolling Hills. Riverview Market would consist of 142 townhouses and condos. According to David Niemotko, the project architect, the complex would have 3,500-square-foot and 2,372-square-foot townhouses with three bedrooms and two-story flats with a 2,100-square-foot, two-bedroom condo on each floor. Each unit would have a garage. Fishkill Development would also construct seven buildings on Route 9D with a combined 91,000 square feet of commercial and retail space. The largest, 53,000 square feet, is eyed as a grocery store, and there would be spaces for restaurants or a coffee shop, said Joe Modaferri, the project's engineer. Beacon would supply water, and children who live in the complex would attend the Beacon City School District. Because the site encircles property owned by Fishkill, the project needs the Town Board to approve easements, Modaferri said. Anthony Brozier, the Planning Board's vice chair, said he appreciated that the plan had fewer housing units than Rolling Hills. But he said a grocery store on 9D would draw shoppers from both directions. "You're going to have people trying to make lefts out, lefts in," he said. "I got heartburn looking at this thing right now." Fishkill Development's proposal comes nine months after New York's highest court sided with the town in a yearslong dispute triggered by a newly elected Town Board ending the review of a rezoning request for Rolling Hills. The state Court of Appeals on Dec. 18 affirmed two decisions in which judges dismissed a lawsuit filed by Hudson View Park Co. against Supervisor Ozzy Albra and the Town Board, which voted in April 2020 to end its review. Hudson View Park Co. argued that a 2017 agreement approved by a previous Town Board obligated Albra and the new members to continue the review. The agreement said Fishkill would not end its review "until it reaches a final determination on the merits in its legislative judgment regarding the best interests of the town based upon empirical data and other objective factual bases." The developer, which sought reimbursement for $1 million it says was spent during the application and review process, failed to sway the Court of Appeals, which joined the lower courts in ruling that the so-called "term-limits" doctrine "prohibits one municipal body from contractually binding its successors." The decision "clearly stated that the will of the people was what democracy was all about," said Albra, who campaigned against the project during his successful run for supervisor in 2019. "The people chose to vote for me to stop the project, and that is exactly what happened." Hudson View Park Co.'s plan included 30 buildings with 68 affordable housing units and 24,000 square feet of retail. During a Planning Board hearing in 2019, an attorney for the project described it as "a walkable community with open space and neighborhood-scale retail/commercial space."