Archive: Around Town

Councilwoman Kathy Miller told the Lansing Town board last week that the Lansing Town Center project as been selected for a special recognition award in this year's A-Time-to-Build awards.  The project was developed by Holt Architects and Trowbridge & Wolf Landscape Architects in conjunction with the Lansing Town Center Committee.  The plan lays out ideas for turning the area around the Lansing Town Hall and the land across the street from the town ball fields into a village-like town center.

While there has been talk about a town center for many years, the project heated up two years ago with the formation of a Town center Committee, which is chaired by Miller.  The committee and architects solicited ideas from residents in a series of public meetings last year that yielded a number of drawings showing possible configurations of a mixed use area that will include residential, business, and recreational areas, plus a possible town green, sidewalks, street lights, and sewer service.  The drawings were shared at another public meeting in April 2010.

Since then the Town Center idea has been jump-started by the Lansing Trailways Committee, which opened a walking trail across the street from the ballfields last January.  At the same time construction began on the Lansing Market, a new supermarket that is scheduled to open at the top of North Triphammer Road in late summer.

Town officials are in final negotiations with New York State to release the 140 acre parcel across from the ballfields from deed restrictions that limit its use to recreation and community building use.  Once the final purchase is completed the Town will be free to develop the land according to some version of the plan that came out of the Town Center project.


At the same time Supervisor Scott Pinney has been moving a new sewer plan forward that could bring a number of benefits to the town.  The obvious benefit to a sewer stretching from the Lansing Central School campus to the youth incarceration residence on Auburn Road is that denser development will be possible in the Town Center, making the plan more viable.  A small shopping center, and housing that could include apartments, townhouses, and/or smaller-lot affordable housing would be made possible by the availability of a sewer.

In addition, a sewer would solve an increasing problem of aging septic systems faced by the school district, and would fulfill an agreement the Town made years ago with the Watchtower Society, which owns Kingdom Farm across the street from the youth incarceration center.


In the mid to late '90s the Society considered building a community there to print the Jehovah's Witnesses' Watchtower publication that would include residences as well as the printing facilities.  At that time they entered into an agreement with the Town to contribute $1.5 million to a sewer project in exchange for an agreed upon amount of sewer capacity to the property, when the project came to pass.  Later the decision was made to locate the facility elsewhere  In May of 2007 the Watchtower Society asked the Town Planning Board to rezone parts of the property to allow them to sell to developers who could create what amounted to a village that included a possible shopping center, businesses, elderly housing, and apartments in the southern portion stepping up to increasingly larger lots for stand-alone homes in the north.

At that meeting a few alternative scenarios were shown to the Planning Board, which declined to change the zoning on the grounds that there was no actual building project at that time.  Watchtower Society's Daniel Rice told the board that the society intended to fulfill the agreement to pay the Town in the hope that sewer would make the land more salable.

When a major sewer project failed later that year the status of the agreement was uncertain.  Pinney says that the new sewer project, with a stand-alone treatment plant and limited service area, will be much less expensive than the failed project would have been.  Last month he told the Town Board that the project gives the Town leverage to hold Watchtower to the agreement.  If that happens the sewer will become even more affordable, which will benefit the Town Center as well as the Watchtower land's salability.

Miller plans to visit DOT officials in Syracuse this Spring to find out what it will take to get permission to put sidewalks on 34B, which is a State road.  She says she would like to run a sidewalk from the Triphammer Road intersection where Xtramart, Crossroads Bar & Grill, and Lansing Market supermarket are located all the way to the East Shore Drive intersection at the Rogue's Harbor Inn.  She is also researching street lights for the area.

The awards are presented by First Niagara to draw attention to the top projects  in Central New York, Mohawk Valley, the Finger Lakes, Greater Binghamton, and the North Country.  The Hangar Theatre renovation project is also among the finalists this year.  The architects will be given the special recognition award at a luncheon in Liverpool on May 5th, which Miller says she will attend.  The project is also scheduled be featured in today's issue of Central New York Business Journal.

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