Niskayuna comprehensive plan effort gets push

PHOTOGRAPHER: Steven Cook

Niskayuna’s Comprehensive Plan Committee is doubling its efforts to get a new 10-year road map for the town complete in 2013.

The committee had met once a month since it was appointed last year. Starting in October, it’s meeting twice a month.

The goal is to have the town’s comprehensive plan updated next year, Town Supervisor Joe Landry said this week.

“Our old one expires next year, so therefore we’d like to have one adopted next year,” he said, “so that it’s a 10-year plan for the future.”

The plan looks at everything, Landry said, from recreational facilities in the town to bike trails and development and zoning.

The plan is also to look at ways to improve access to the Mohawk River and look at the interplay between residential and commercial areas of the town.

The committee met Tuesday night at Town Hall. The next meeting is scheduled for Oct. 16 in the Schaefer Meeting Room at Town Hall.

The main topic at Tuesday night’s meeting was the State Street corridor in town, with committee members throwing out possibilities on what the town could do to improve that area over the next decade.

Suggestions there ranged from encouraging combined parking areas to increasing plantings along the stretch and getting utilities underground. No formal recommendations were made by the committee.

Committee member Leslie Gold urged realistic goals.

“To me, it’s not so much what we want to see, but what we might be able to achieve,” Gold said of the State Street suggestions, “because we’re dealing with an area that’s already built.”

The committee’s last meeting dealt with traffic and transportation issues, as well as parks space versus open space, according to meeting minutes.

The committee was appointed by the Town Board in March 2011 and has been meeting since. Members are volunteers, some have planing and zoning backgrounds and others are just town residents. The town historian is also a member of the committee.

Landry said this week that he expects the committee to make presentations to the Town Board early next year on various parts of the plan, seeking input from the board and others.

Once the plan is complete, he said it will be used as a guide going forward.

“It’s not a document that gets put in a drawer,” Landry said. “We have it around town. We know what they recommended and we try to achieve some of the goals throughout the 10-year period.”