Archive: Opinions

When a three-color traffic light is installed at the corner of Triphammer Road and State Route 34B it will literally double the number of traffic lights in the unincorporated portion of the Town of Lansing.  Recent reductions on Triphammer Road and East Shore Drive have amounted to an 18.18% drop in the speed limit.  Statistically Lansing is becoming more urban.

Of course we know there won't be any skyscrapers in town any time soon. In fact, the major effort most likely to come to completion in the very near future is acceptance of the Agriculture & Farmland Protection Plan.  Lansing's farming community has done a wonderful job of creating a document that will protect agriculture in the Town for many years to come.

It is great for Lansing that the town government is willing to invest the effort to figure out how to preserve the town's rich farming heritage.  Aside from the fact that it is a $20 million industry that uses almost a third of the Town's land area, the rural character of Lansing is obviously a major piece of what attracts people to live here.  When people tell you why they want to move here, the number one thing is the school system, followed by Lansing's attractive, rural character.

With all the development on Warren Road and a major building project coming to North Triphammer Road, that is important.  Over time southern Lansing will become suburban.  The Village of Lansing is arguably already suburban.  Whether a Town Center is constructed in South Lansing or creeps northward from the Village, suburbaness is coming to the Town.

The problem is... the more a town is successful in attracting new residents and developments and businesses that bring new tax revenue, the more its existing character is crowded out. The more successful, the less successful.  Unless you plan.  Big thinking, not small thinking.

This is why I favor a central town center.  The main purpose has always been stated as planning denser development to avoid sprawl elsewhere in the town.  With no clear town center plan, sprawl is happening.  The developments around Warren Road aren't really worrying, because that's where development happens, and it is a logical extension of the airport business and technology park.  But the Cayuga Farms development on Triphammer, south of Asbury Road is worrying because it is just being plopped down wherever in the Town, not because of conscious municipal planning, but because it happens to be where someone owns enough land to build it.

I am not criticizing our Planning Board (or the Cayuga Farms developers, for that matter), but I am also not saying that their participation in approving such projects is the same as municipal planning.  Their scope is much narrower than that.  They can't tell developers where they can develop -- only whether they can develop exactly this or that in a given location based on zoning.

The existing comprehensive plan talks about a town center, sewer,  and where denser development should happen, but I am not sure that anyone paid a whole lot of attention to it during that iteration's lifetime.  A new comprehensive plan will talk about some of these things, and others, like increasing tourism, but it will be nothing more than insomnia reading unless it also includes some kind of action plan for making its goals happen.

That's what the Ag plan does do.  The number one item it recommends is the formation of an advisory committee to make recommendations to the Town Board to bring the plan's concepts to fruition, including a possible Ag zone that would protect that third of the Town.

As for the other two thirds, far be it for me to say that a town center is the end-all, be-all solution to protecting Lansing's character.  But something has to be, or that character will be very different, no matter how much residents want it to remain the same.  Just letting it happen will be the ruin of what makes Lansing attractive.

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