The $25 million Hartford Financial Services Group building, the centerpiece
of the New Hartford Business Park, isn’t located within the boundaries initially
set out by the town for the park.
That means approval of the building
should have been outside the jurisdiction of the special town panel that
performed the planning review, town officials say.
Yet the panel issued
waivers and performed reviews since 2006 that otherwise would have been done in
public under the purview of the town Planning Board, town documents show.
And now town officials are disagreeing about who should have known about
the issue.
“I think we probably just reviewed it because the plans came
in saying The Hartford was located within the business park, and we just treated
it that way,” said town engineer John Meagher, who is on the committee.
He said he was not aware when The Hartford building was approved that it
didn’t sit within the zoning district, and that maps he’d seen at the time
didn’t make the situation clear.
The committee that approved the building
was created by a town law in 1999 to oversee planning matters in the New
Hartford Business Park. Its meetings were not open to the public and no official
minutes exist of its deliberations on The Hartford project.
A map
included with the 1999 town law shows The Hartford site is not in the special
zoning district, town officials say.
Planning Board Chairman Jerome
Donovan expressed concern over the situation, but also spoke of pressures to
streamline the planning process for The Hartford, which was considering leaving
its existing New Hartford offices in 2006 and perhaps taking close to 600 jobs
out of the region. The building remains the sole occupant of the business
park.
“I think what you have here is a situation where the town was
attempting to prevent a major employer from relocating elsewhere,” Donovan said.
“There was a series of issues that had stringent time constraints, and a
judgment was made.”
Donovan was not on the committee when The Hartford
was being reviewed. It consists of the Planning Board chairman, the town
planner, the town engineer, the town highway superintendent and the town codes
officer.
Former Planning Board Chairman Joseph Yagey, who served from
the early 1990s to the end of 2006, said he had no idea The Hartford was outside
the boundaries.
“I’m hearing this for the first time, and it surprises
the hell out of me,” said Yagey, who left the Planning Board just as The
Hartford project was coming into focus. “My first reaction is, ‘where was staff
on this?’”
His successor, Hans Arnold, who served in that post in 2007
and 2008 when most of The Hartford project was done, said the same and
criticized the town staff on the panel.
“I think town staff should be
doing (an) analysis of whether things are a good idea and not a good idea,” he
said.
But town planner Kurt Schwenzfeier said the issue shouldn’t come
as a surprise. He said he realized the problem in the second half of 2008, after
the panel had made key approvals for The Hartford building.
“I told them,
and those people are not the only ones I told,” he said. “Pretty much everyone
knows.”
University at Buffalo Law School professor Rick Su, who read the
town code at the request of the O-D, said the situation is
problematic.
“Nothing in the code that I read grants the panel of the
Business Park District any power to grant waivers or exceptions to zoning
regulations outside of the district,” he said.
Both Schwenzfeier and
Donovan said the land The Hartford sits on is appropriately zoned for that type
of construction. A key question for The Hartford, however, is whether the
waivers granted by the panel are valid.
Lawrence Adler, the man behind
the business park, said he was unaware of the issue.
“I’m getting hit with
this for the first time,” he said. “I would have thought that somebody would
have raised that.”
Representatives of The Hartford Financial Services
Group declined to comment on the record for this story. Calls to
Minneapolis-based Ryan Cos., which helped develop the site, were not returned.
Earle Reed, who has been town supervisor since 2006, said he was not
aware of the problem.
“I didn’t know what the district’s parameters
were,” Reed said. “All I know was it was $20 million in jobs, and we had to keep
the jobs here.”
Reached Friday, town Councilwoman Christine Krupa said
she joined the Town Board after The Hartford project was well under way.
“We need to look at the whole park as its concept exists today and
remedy the situation so that it’s done correctly,” she said.
Town Board
members David Reynolds, Rich Woodland and Robert Payne could not be
reached.
How it happened
The panel was created at
a time when the town expected to purchase the land and develop the business park
itself.
That never happened, and in September 2006, when private
developer Adler presented the Planning Board with his plan to create a business
park in the same location, it was a different shape than the initial park
footprint.
The Hartford is in a part of Adler’s park that was not in the
original layout. Despite that, the Planning Board never dealt with the plans
again.
Instead, approvals shifted to the special town
committee.
The genesis of the business park helped contribute to the
confusion. Schwenzfeier supplied the O-D with no fewer than six maps of the
business park, each with slightly different boundaries.
Schwenzfeier
said he told the Planning Board at a Jan 23, 2006, meeting that there were two
separate zoning districts in Adler’s proposed business park — this was before
The Hartford ever came into the picture.
He said that when The Hartford
project began in earnest, he didn’t realize it wasn’t in the section overseen by
the panel.
“Things got moving so quickly, it was just assumed,” he said.
During that period, he signed off on six waivers for the project.
He said
it wasn’t until sometime in mid-2008 that he discovered the mistake.
“At
that point, the building was complete to a certain extent,” he said, indicating
it was too late in the game to bring all the plans back to the Planning Board
for approval.
Codes officer Joseph Booth said he discovered the error
last autumn when he was working on permitting signs for the project. Booth had
not been on the project when it began, having been promoted after former codes
officer Gerald Back left the position.
He said he alerted others on the
panel, including Arnold, town attorney Gerald Green and even members of the Town
Board.
“The discovery was pretty embarrassing, to be honest,” he
said.
This past week, the special committee decided its meetings would be
open to the public henceforth.
