Envisioning Rhinebeck:
The Comprehensive Plan

Published:
AboutTown, Winter 2010

Characterizing what you love about a place can be elusive. In the words of Justice Potter Stewart, it may be hard to describe, but you know it when you see it. The Rhinebeck Comprehensive Plan and its supporting revisions to the zoning, subdivision and wetlands laws, enacted almost a year ago on December 29, 2009, has attempted to describe and preseve the lovable aspects of our town.

The Plan’s adoption concluded eight years of public hearings and visioning sessions on snowy nights and Sunday afternoons, as well as hundreds of hours of work by town planners and board members. New York State encourages each local government to adopt such a “comprehensive plan,” and considers the involvement of its citizenry in the process to be essential. A comprehensive plan on its own has no legal clout, but as a blueprint for a town’s development and growth, it should provide a road map for the enactment of future zoning and subdivision laws. The pleas from owners of large tracts of land, residents of smaller hamlets, and those seeking affordable housing during the hearings made it clear just how important many of Rhinebeck’s citizens deem their comprehensive plan.

What was the vision that emerged at the end of this lengthy, collaborative process? Rhinebeck, declares the plan, gains its distinctive beauty from its community character and essential “ruralness,” defined in the Plan as a landscape of sparsely settled communities, compact village centers and hamlets existing alongside open space, farmland and woods.

The Comprehensive Plan Committee came together in 2002, motivated by a concern among local leaders that the town’s existing 1989 Comprehensive Plan and accompanying planning and zoning laws were inadequate to deal with the increasing pressures of development. Saveria (“Sally”) Mazzarella, President of the Winnakee Land Trust, was the natural person to chair the committee, having been involved in local planning for over 20 years.

The Committee began its work in 2002 by preparing a “build-out” analysis, examining potential growth in a community if development followed existing 1989 regulations, which essentially designated every unbuilt parcel as land for potential development. The results: Rhinebeck would eventually add some 3,408 private residences (essentially tripling its population); retail and other commercial space along Routes 9 and 9G would increase by nearly 200,000 square feet. The additional 3,400 septic disposal systems would generate 1.6 million gallons of sewage daily, while some 1,400 acres of new “impervious” surfaces (roads and driveways) needed to service the new homes communities would allow an additional 6,800 vehicles to make 34,000 more car trips daily on the major routes in and around town.

In other words, existing regulations did nothing to ensure the continuation of Rhinebeck’s essential rural and community character. Rather, they promoted typical suburban sprawl growth with its burdens on natural habitat and social infrastructure and its inevitable erosion of village centers and local enterprise in favor of mega-stores with distant headquarters.Westchester County, like Rhinebeck, had once been essentially rural. Yet between 1960 and 1985 New York City’s metropolitan area expanded its land area by over 65% even though the area’s population grew by only 8%.

The Comprehensive Plan Committee faced a daunting challenge. Luckily, they could draw on the strong vision and resolve of Sally Mazzarella, the assistance of Rhinebeck resident Ted Fink (President of GREENPLAN), and the new planning model of “smart growth” or “sustainable planning” that has gained wide acceptance in recent years as an antidote to post–World War II sprawl development. In the smart growth model, antiseptic “cookie-cutter” residential districts with large individual lots and commercial “strip” development are replaced with walkable, “mixed-use” neighborhoods that make use of or conform to existing infra-structure and land use, with planning values that foster local business and the preservation of environmentally sensitive areas and open space.

When I asked Ted Fink and Arthur (“Dod”) Crane (then a member of the Town Board) what they considered the most significant measures furthering the Plan’s objectives, both referred me to the “conservation subdivision regulations” enacted as part of the Zoning Law adopted along with the Plan last December. Conservation subdivisions represent a dramatic shift from traditional subdivisions, in which a builder lays out lots according to a uniform pattern using the maximum allowable acreage per lot and without regard to the land’s inherent natural or scenic resources. By contrast, conservation subdivisions require a consideration of environmental and cultural factors, from meadows and stonewalls to prime agricultural soil and scenic views. A developer may be allowed to build up to the full density of the particular district, but 80% of the subdivision must remain open space. On a 100-acre parcel in a 5-acre zoning district, for instance, the developer may be allowed to build up to 20 houses, but he must site them in accordance with the particular cultural and environmental values attending the property, and he typically must place them closer to each other, thus ensuring the 80 percent open space mandate

The Plan also noted that the area previously zoned for 5-acre lots (portions west of Route 9, home to Rhinebeck’s “river mansions”), created insufficient protection to these renowned scenic and historic districts, inviting eventual development up and down this historic roadway. So the new zoning law increased the lot size along the Hudson River from 5 to 20 acres (and from 3 to 5 acres east of Route 9). Affordable housing in less-developed areas was addressed through the implementation of measures allowing for the residential use of outbuildings and other “accessory” apartments on residential lots. Fink saw this both as a recognition of the needs of the community’s elderly and “work force” and a nod to a more agrarian time, in which clusters of farm workers frequently lived alongside families on large agricultural tracts.

The Route 9 corridor just north and Rhinecliff Road just west of Rhinebeck Village have been rezoned Neighborhood Residential and Village Gateway, enabling more dense development within walking distance of the village and taking advantage of existing water and sewer infrastructure. “Hamlet Infill”—greater concentration of residential housing in already densely populated enclaves such as Rock City and Sepasco, northwest of the Village—is also encouraged.

Areas zoned for business use (the Stop and Shop “mall” along Route 9; the intersection of 9 and 9G; and along 9G, to name a few), have been re-zoned to encourage small-scale, local businesses. And the zoning law tries to mitigate the potential negative impact of “big box” and other chain stores by restrictions on size (no stores in excess of 8000 square feet) and signage.

Dod Crane notes that the Plan represents a compromise between efforts to preserve the rural, pastoral quality of Rhinebeck and those to maintain its affordability and accommodate its growth. Rhinebeck’s Comprehensive Plan provides us with a picture of what is worth preserving, and map of where we want to go. Whether Rhinebeck is still the place we want to live in 20 years from now depends now as much on the efficacy of the laws supporting it as it does on the people whose voice it expresses.