A public hearing is not required for approval of a 76-unit expansion of the Country Meadows housing community at 5121 Clinton Street Road, Batavia, but since some residents of Stringham Drive might be concerned about it, the Town of Batavia Planning Board agreed at Tuesday's meeting to hold a hearing.
A public hearing requires notification to neighboring residents and gives them an opportunity to express concerns or ask questions.
The hearing will be at 7 p.m., July 19 at the Batavia Town Hall.
Country Meadows is operated by Rochester MHP Portfolio LLC and owner Jeffrey Cook. It currently contains 174 manufactured homes.
Stringham Drive is immediately to the south of the 75-acre parcel.
Engineer Glenn F. Thornton presented the development plans to the board on Tuesday and said steps are being taken to address any potential concerns of Stringham Drive residents.
He said there is an additional 50 feet of separation between the new home lots and the property lines of Stringham Drive homes.
"It's heavily vegetated over there (along the southern boundary of the development), so we're proposing to leave all of the vegetation in place to kind of screen the two properties from each other," Thornton said.
The new lots will be slightly more spacious than the existing lots, he said. The current lots are about four to an acre, he said. The new lots will be 2.5 per acre.
Much of the reason for the larger lots are the constraints imposed by the geography and infrastructure of the area being developed. There needs to be proper stormwater drainage and there is an existing "fairly wide" town sanitary sewer easement through the property.
"I think everything we're proposing is within the 6,000 square foot minimum lot size," Thornton said. "The separations between the homes, the setbacks from the property lines, I believe everything is code compliant, so we're not looking for any variances."
Much of the discussion Tuesday was about stormwater drainage. The plan includes a swale, already a natural feature of the property, to drain water into a retention pond so it can be slowly drained into the town's stormwater drainage system, as well as berms to help channel runoff.
The new development will not increase runoff on Stringham Drive, Thornton said.
"Stringham Drive's drainage is coming our way actually," Thornton said. "We're actually capturing the runoff from Stringham Drive that's coming out on our property and routing it around our home sites, trying to get it up into this swale (pointing to an architectural drawing) up in here. Really, anything within the development area we have to capture and route into our stormwater management areas. So anything we have is going into those areas where we'll mitigate the flow to existing conditions as it leaves the property."
There are currently three driveways serving the development.
Planning documents submitted by Thornton's firm state there will not be a significant increase in traffic as a result of the additional pre-manufactured homes. It states there will be 275 additional vehicle trips daily, with 19 additional trips during the peak morning hour and 42 during the peak afternoon hour, and most of those trips through the property's western driveway.
That driveway can easily accommodate the additional traffic, the report states.
Photo: Glenn Thornton. Photo by Howard Owens.
