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On this page we will share letters-to-the-editor and public comments on the Kingston Waterfront development plan. | Summary of Concerns and Suggestions | Letter from Lowell Thing | Friends of Kingston Waterfront Summary of Concerns and Suggestions made at Community Forums in Economics
(The following letter appeared in mid-July, 2005 in the Daily Freeman and The Kingston Times.) Dear Editor: As a city resident, I look forward to new development in the City of Kingston, especially development that respects our City’s unique history and geography. I think most of us want to see the city grow in ways that, for example, enhance the city by providing well-paying jobs, provide a range of housing choices, create better and more interesting streets to walk and efficient ways to get around, and encourage and develop the lively cultural life we already have. Kingston is a vibrant city. We have a great many reasons to be here: the river, the mountains, the arts community, historic architecture (four historic districts), and much more. I think many of us believe that Kingston is going to grow and should grow at its own pace within the framework of its own vision of the future, not someone else’s. Experience in other cities that have successfully adapted to our changing economy suggest that success comes when it is based on a number of homegrown, individual ideas that collectively bring a community together. (For some examples, read Roberta Gratz’s “Cities Back from the Edge”.) The City of Kingston has been without a meaningful Master or Comprehensive Plan for several decades. The last one was done in 1961. A Comprehensive Plan is an opportunity for residents and thoughtful planners to envision how a city wants to grow. The present administration believes it would cost too much to do this kind of planning. To give ourselves credit, the City together with the community and professional planners did recently put together a Waterfront Development Plan (which unfortunately excluded the riverfront). That plan must have played some part in recently attracting a thoughtful developer, Robert Ianucci, to recently invest in the creekfront. If community planning was good for the creekfront, why not for the riverfront, mid-town, and uptown - the entire city? The mass, scale, and total inappropriateness of the new projects on the riverfront and uptown that are being championed on behalf of out-of-town developers cause me a great deal of concern as a taxpayer as well as a city resident. As a taxpayer, I’m especially concerned about the riverfront developments. I note that the main riverfront developer, AVR, after apparently listening to community concerns for a number of meetings and hearings, changed nothing in its final proposal. I’ll be looking for clear and convincing arguments from the Mayor and Economic Development Director (and not from the developer) that the cost of the infrastructure and new services to support 2,500 new housing units and perhaps 6,000 new residents in Kingston over the next few years won’t raise my taxes or, if they do, that other benefits will outweigh the additional tax burden. These benefits will need to outweigh the inevitable traffic congestion we’ll all be dealing with; the fact that the projects do not address the need for affordable housing; the bland, cookie-cutter monotony of the architecture. and that they are likely to become an ugly blight on our incredible and historic river landscape. I believe that it’s time that collectively our City and its representatives consider a moratorium on development while we determine what Kingston really wants and needs. We would simply be doing the planning and creating the vision that we should have done some time ago. With such a vision, the right developers would come. Lowell Thing Kingston, NY |
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