Letters to the editor
A monstrosity in our midst
The fact that the Winston Farm developers are local is irrelevant. The objections to their project would be the same if they were high rollers from NYC or anywhere else. And the objections are paramount!
We’re only recent Saugertiesians, we bought our property in 1982; we recently donated 75 acres to the Woodstock Conservancy, appraised at $320,000 to be forever wild. Winston Farm should not be allowed to be turned into a monstrosity in our midst. The investors should scale down the project for a lesser profit and/or take a tax deduction to recoup some of their investment; public access should be a requirement.
Meyer Rothberg
Saugerties
Business as usual, or a choice to survive?
It’s a hard truth, that some people still don’t get: We cannot go on as we have been doing. We cannot continue to build, pave, destroy natural habitats and deplete aquifers in the name of growth, development and profit, because it’s destroying the very fabric of the Earth on which we depend for life.
The Winston Farm is a tiny corner of the Earth, but it’s a perfect microcosm of the challenge that we all face. The developers want their profit, the town board its potential tax base. It’s the American Way! But we all have to be honest: growth and profit at what cost?
Saugerties is already choking on traffic. Its aquifers are strained and always in danger of becoming contaminated. People need housing, while houses stand empty, because it’s not profitable to rehab them.
Now we are faced with a proposal to build 133 single-family homes, 115 townhouses, 800 condo/apartment units, a campground with 157 cabins and RV sites, 425,000 square feet of commercial retail space, a 150-room hotel, a conference center with 300 more hotel rooms, a 5000-person amphitheater and 375,000 square feet of lab or light-industrial space on what is now pristine woodland and open fields.
In other words, another whole town. Want to destroy the quality of life in Saugerties? This will do it.
There is already plenty of land in Saugerties zoned for commercial development and potentially available for housing projects. We already have a large conference hotel in the village. We don’t need a single inch of Winston Farm to have those things.
I read that last year the Open Space Institute offered $10 million to purchase the property to build a state park. That would have been a $6 million profit over what it cost the developers to purchase it, but that wasn’t enough for them.
What a relief it would be, to have that precious place finally protected as a state park!
I ask the town board to refuse this proposed catastrophic overdevelopment, for the good of the whole region and all the life that it holds.
Susan J Murphy
Saugerties
Traffic trouble from Winston Farm
The potential increase in traffic resulting from the latest Winston Farm proposal would impact our entire region and make crowded roads impassable. The two-lane section of 212 between Woodstock and Saugerties would become one long traffic jam.
The developers have proposed a plan that would create 799 housing units. They anticipate the buildout would result in 1,746 new residents. Plans also include developing 250,000 square feet of commercial space, a 150-room boutique hotel, a conference center with 250 hotel rooms, an enclosed performance venue with 5,000 seats and a campground with 100 cabins.
Let’s just look at the impact of a 5,000 seat performance venue and forget about the hotels, houses, cabins and convention center. Bethel Woods, another farm that once hosted a Woodstock festival, is a great example of what happens to a community when an enormous music venue is built. Several TripAdvisor reviewers describe traffic caused by the Bethel Woods venue, “It takes an hour to get out of the parking lot. You have to feel for the people who live in this town that have to deal with this traffic every time there is an event here.”
The developers provided a traffic impact study. The only problem is that the study was conducted in the middle of the winter and includes data from December and January 2023. In some parts of our region the summer population is double that of the winter population. The developer offers zero traffic data analyzing the impact on the summer tourism season and the only solution the developers offer is to install traffic lights.
Please get involved in efforts to modify this monstrosity by reading more about what’s at stake on the citizens’ website https://beautifulsaugerties.com and help us preserve what we love about our communities.
Susan Paynter
Woodstock
