The construction of a new place to buy cannabis, a plant that has been called “trees” on the black market, has resulted in the unauthorized killing of many trees of the traditional kind.

Lyle Nolan, who oversees planning and code enforcement from the New Paltz town hall trailers on Clearwater Road, described the situation as “sort of a nightmare.”

According to Nolan, when the developers of the Farmers Choice cannabis dispensary secured approval for building the new structure, the plans they submitted called for disturbing .94 acres of land. Once the disturbance hits a full acre, that triggers a requirement for a storm water pollution prevention plan, because the amount and quality of the runoff will otherwise be significantly affected.

When a project looks to be close to that critical threshold, minimizing the amount of expected disturbance is a common development trick to avoid the extra time and cost of preparing such a plan. Longtime town engineer, David Clouser, once took a developer’s engineer to task for submitting plans showing disturbance of around .95 acres, saying “shame on you” during a public meeting. Clouser was likely anticipating an issue like this one, in which what’s projected on paper is exceeded in reality.

This use was approved three years ago, and at the time planning board member Amanda Gotto expressed skepticism about its scale, particularly the 35 proposed parking spots. Now the town’s supervisor, Gotto at the time said, “What I don’t want to see is that a year from now when all the hoopla has died down and this becomes more like regular customers that you don’t have just a big paved thing that’s taking the trees down.” Now, it’s clear that more trees were sentenced to death than even Gotto and other planning board members at the time anticipated.

According to Nolan, a prior supervisor of the building department authorized site preparation work ahead of the issuance of the building permit. That’s not untoward or unusual practice. However, that preparation seems not to be have undertaken with the care needed to work within the extremely narrow margin of error provided by projecting .94 acres of disturbance and that amount was exceeded.

“Stopping the project dead” is now within the purview of town officials, Nolan said, but it “could be another year of looking like hell if we did that.” The alternatives for allowing work to proceed were either to get a prevention plan prepared and submitted, or do “they have to pull back into the allowed area and mitigate” what was destroyed. Work was temporarily stopped to work out a solution, but Nolan okayed the carpenters on site to continue in order to finish their work before the weather turns too cold.

Nolan believes that what caused the violation was switching contractors during the process. Presumably, not all the new people were brought up to speed on the expectations under the project approval.

After careful consultation among authorities and the licensed professionals who were responsible for ensuring that the rules were followed, a memorandum of understanding was agreed to that will allow for the continued construction of the pole barn that will house the massive operation, which will include 3,000 square feet of retail space, 2,000 for storage and another 2,000 on the second floor for storage.

“The goal is to mitigate what’s damaged and replace the trees,” Nolan said, but the new trees won’t be planted until landscaping is added, after construction and paving is complete.

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