Pace Expansion Passes First Regulatory Hurdle

Mount Pleasant’s Planning Board finished defining Monday the issues it will consider in assessing how Pace University’s expansion will affect the environment.

While it left open an opportunity for written comment, the board effectively set down the scope of a required draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) after a town hall public hearing Monday. There was no public comment at the hearing but the board voted to allow written statements for another 10 days.

Andrew V. Tung, an architect with the White Plains firm Divney Tung Schwalbe, led the board through consideration of topics included in the 15-page DEIS outline. They include the project's impact on surrounding ecology, its effect on land use and utilities, and the strain, if any, it could put on traffic and services like police and fire.

Board member Joan Lederman, a volunteer EMT-I/ firefighter with the , asked that the statement consider how many police, fire and emergency service calls the campus now generates.

Tung presented a brief recap of the university’s expansion plans, now at an early milepost of a regulatory path likely to take a year and a half to traverse. Plans include selling the school’s 35-acre Briarcliff Manor campus—the former Briarcliff College, which has housing, administrative buildings and athletic facilities—and building three new residence halls on the university’s 200-acre Pleasantville site.

The new dorms’ 1,400 beds would provide housing for all of the school’s Westchester undergraduates, Tung said, bringinging onto the Pleasantville campus not only the Briarcliff students but also those now living in hotel rooms. Beyond the dorms, the school also looks to:

CARVE OUT additional office space by expanding Marks Hall and converting North Hall, now a dorm, to administrative functions;

CREATE a new entrance drive leading to a welcome center and parking;

RECONFIGURE parking, placing it near the campus perimeter and away from the core; and,

RELOCATE the animal shelters and paddock of the Environmental Center and add a nature walk near the Goldstein Health and Fitness Center.

The planning board has named itself lead agency on the project, which is expected to cost between $100 million and $150 million. It still must undergo an extensive regulatory review before the first shovels can begin turning earth. The board will now complete the draft environmental impact statement, but it must then use it to create a final document as well as approve specific site plans—all subject to public hearings—before giving a green light to the school’s expansion plans. Even under the most optimistic forecasts for completion—the fall of 2015—most of today’s freshmen would not see the fully realized new Pace before they graduate.

Board member George Pappas, an adjunct professor of foreign languages at Pace, recused himself and left his seat for the duration of the expansion discussion.

Gas Station’s Store Gets a Hearing

The board voted to schedule a public hearing on plans to convert a Kensico Road service station into a fuel-stop/convenience-store combination.

The Citgo station at the corner of busy Franklin Avenue would eliminate two service bays, replacing them with the convenience store. The onetime garage’s big overhead doors would become a front window and store entrance, under plans presented Steven Basini of Petruccelli Engineering in Valhalla.

In addition to the store, he said, the building would be painted and refinished and a canopy added to shelter drivers filling their cars. The date for the public hearing has not been set.

In a second gas-station/convenience store combo, also a Petruccelli project, the board sent to the zoning board of appeals an application for site-plan approval and special-use permit by New Age Petroleum Co. for 376 Bradhurst Ave. in Hawthorne.