Yolks and folks: Feud up on Forest Hill

Quigley said that while the portion of the property where the residence is located is designated R-30, the 13 acres in the back of the property falls into the less-stringent R-60 classification. That means activities prohibited under R-30, such as livestock and forestry, as permitted under R-60 with either a special permit or “as of right.”

Herb Hekler, a Forest Hill Drive resident, was the planning director for UlsterCounty for 36 years.

“The signs say it’s a farm stand,” he said. “Retail commercial sale of farm products; that’s the issue, and I defer to your attorney for interpretation.”

Quigley said he wasn’t sure Valenti’s enterprise was there yet.

“I don’t know if seven chickens constitutes the level of a commercial operation,” he said.

Ultimately, Ring said, the issue was primarily about a neighborhood whose character is changing and a town which hasn’t done enough to prevent that from happening.

“This is not a personal vendetta against a single family,” Ring said. “We have a neighborhood that was established with covenants, with standards of what you can and can’t do … You guys complain when you have people with high paying jobs move out of the neighborhood, but what do you expect when you don’t support neighborhoods as they were designed?”

As of press time there was still no determination by the town as to whether the animals on the property might be considered domestic. But according to Quigley, because of an application to the Ulster County made by Valenti to allow agricultural use on a portion of the property, that determination may not even be relevant by the end of next week.

“What that will do is allow certain activities to take place outside the purview of the [town] Planning Board from an agricultural point of view,” Quigley said. “The Agricultural Review Board is comprised of individuals who are full-time farmers of substance. They’re the farmers that have hundreds of acres under plow or for dairy purposes. In other words, they understand agricultural and they understand agriculture’s needs within the community. They will make their evaluation based upon the merits of the application. They will then make a recommendation to the Ulster County Legislature, which will vote on whether to grant the agricultural inclusion or deny it.”

Quigley said the review board is likely to make their recommendation during a meeting in New Paltz, which could then be decided upon by the county legislature this week. And in the end, Quigley said, the legislature has more authority on the issue than the town.

“We have a neighborhood that when it was created back in the early ‘60s, there were deed restrictions that were established for each one of the parcels within the neighborhood that limited non-conforming uses,” Quigley said. “I use ‘non-conforming’ not in the zoning sense, but in the sense that the people that were sold those properties had a certain expectation for quality of life. And that quality of life did not include agricultural purposes. The developer went to great lengths, and every homeowner up there went to great lengths, to protect their quality of life. Now we have individuals who move into the neighborhood, and through the passage of time the deed restrictions may or may not have expired prohibiting those uses. Nonetheless, these uses as prescribed in the deed are not enforceable by the town. In other words, they’re a contract between the buyer and the seller of the land and it doesn’t involve the municipality. So these people who move in, they have their own expectations of what they can use the land for. We now have a conflict amongst neighbors.”

And, at least until next week, that conflict is remain unsettled.

“These are some of the issues that create a great deal of angst within the town board,” Quigley said. “We believe in property rights and we also believe in the process of law. And this is one situation where the process of law has not been completed and we will have to wait to see what the outcome is.”