Saratoga City Center Authority won’t share other deck designs

At least four other designs exist for a controversial parking deck to serve the Saratoga Springs City Center, but none have been released by the authority overseeing the project — despite a request from one of the land-use boards now reviewing the proposal.

Susan Steer, a member of the Zoning Board of Appeals, requested during a meeting Monday the alternate designs reviewed by the City Center Authority last year before its board of directors settled on a design submitted by Bette & Cring Construction of Colonie and Envision Architects of Albany. But an attorney representing the project politely declined.

“Heretofore, we have declined to produce plans which were internal to the City Center Authority, so our position at the present time is, we will continue to decline that unless the authority changes that position,” attorney Matt Jones told board members as they wrapped up their review of the project Monday.

Jones explained that the other proposals simply didn’t meet the project criteria laid out by the authority and therefore weren’t viable. He said the authority wants to concentrate on the merits of its application before the city’s land-use board, not alternatives it wouldn’t consider building.

“There are all kinds of configurations you can draw in all different locations,” he said. “We don’t find it productive to debate endlessly alternatives which we deem don’t meet our project objectives.”

The authority is seeking a variance that would allow it to build a 70-foot-high, 483-spot parking deck on about 1.62 acres of city-owned property stretching between Maple and High Rock avenues. The anticipated shadow cast by the deck would periodically obscure a solar array built on the adjacent Mouzon House restaurant last summer, meaning the deck would be in violation of a zoning ordinance.

In seeking the variance Monday, the authority indicated it considered other alternatives, but couldn’t find one suitable to its needs. The authority outlined problems with five alternatives submitted to the city in September by Sustainable Saratoga, a not-for-profit advocacy organization that opposes the project as proposed.

Jones said “these are alternatives, but because they either don’t meet the project criteria or are not zoning compliant, we don’t consider them alternatives.”

The board is expected to decide on the variance during its next meeting on Feb. 9.

Both crucial to the project and limiting its site is a three-tiered bridge over Maple Avenue that would connect the parking deck to the City Center, allowing pedestrians access to the building without exposing them to the elements. City Center Authority President Mark Baker said the deck would all but eliminate the city’s parking deficit of about 265 spots. The new deck would add an additional 295 spaces of paid parking to 188 spots that exist there today.

Some on the board seemed unconvinced by the project as proposed. Steer, who was appointed to a seven-year term earlier this month, said some of the explanations offered by the authority seemed hollow.

“It just seems like they were throwing it out there and there wasn’t much to back it up or substantiate it,” she said during the review.

Jonathon Tingley, an attorney representing Mouzon House owners David and Diane Pedinotti, said the deck would cause 500 hours of shadows over the restaurant’s solar array every winter. He said that impact would virtually eliminate the effectiveness of the array, which saved them $582 in energy costs in December.

“[The authority] can find reasonable alternatives that are zoning compliant,” he said. “They just aren’t willing to do it because this is the project they want.” The Pedinottis also hired an environmental engineer, who said the deck will have a negative impact on the array. Mark Millspaugh of Sterling Environmental Engineering saw no analysis suggesting the authority has sought to mitigate the effects of the parking deck on its neighbor.

“There are means to reduce if not substantially mitigate the shadowing,” he said. “I don’t feel that’s been analyzed.”

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