Commentary: In a game of apparent bait and switch, the Croton Board of Trustees approves 100 condominium units at Lot A.

Was there ever any doubt the developer would get exactly what it wanted?

Maria Slippen, at the height of her campaign for a trustee seat, comes out in favor of limiting the development at Lot A to 60 units.

Last September 20, when Maria Slippen was in the middle of her campaign for a seat on the Croton-on-Hudson Board of Trustees, she posted a short video on the Croton Democrats Facebook page. A public hearing on the proposal by WBP Development LLC to build 100 condominium units at the Lot A site and a private parcel next to it had just taken place two days earlier.

Slippen told viewers that she was on her way out of Croton to go to work, but had stopped briefly in front of Lot A to video her comments, which she delivered from inside her car. Slippen expressed her approval and enthusiasm for the project and what she said it would do for the village, but also put forward a very clear opinion on how large it should be.

“I think that a hundred units is too many,” Slippen said, “but 60 is just right.”

In making her statement, Slippen was not only echoing a recommendation by the Croton Planning Board the previous month—which had suggested that 60 to 80 units might be a better fit for the village—but clearly advocating the lower number.

But if Slippen or any other of the trustees continued to have any thoughts of giving the developer anything less than it had asked for in its original proposal, there was no evidence of that at last Wednesday’s Board of Trustees meeting. The Board approved, unanimously, both the negative SEQRA (NY State Environmental Quality Review Act) declaration and the special permit application for the project; in the latter resolution, the Board specifically approved a five story, 100 unit building.

That was also made clear in a statement the village published yesterday, December 20, which described the project in glowing terms and included quotes from a number of luminaries—none of whom, to our knowledge, currently live in Croton—enthusiastically endorsing the project. In that statement, which read more like a press release for the outside world rather than a document meant to inform Croton villagers, there was no ambiguity that the village Board had given WBP the number of units the developer clearly believed it needed to make the project sufficiently profitable.

At the Wednesday Board meeting, neither Mayor Brian Pugh nor any of the trustees—including trustee Nora Nicholson, whom many opponents of the project had come to think of as an “independent” voice on development issues in the village—provided any explanation for why recommendations for a lower number of units by its own member, Slippen, as well as the Planning Board, had been rejected.

The trustee who came the closest to commenting on this was Slippen herself, in a short, often halting statement.

“I do have a little bit of disappointment about some of the things along the way,” Slippen told her colleagues. “I think the impression that the Planning Board memo gave was an unrealistic one… It gave the impression to the public that there was more flexibility in the scope and size that there really is. I think some members of the Lot A Task Force gave some specific feedback about the size and scope that was not able to be incorporated.”

Slippen did not elaborate on just why there was not more “flexibility” in the scope and size of the project, and thus her statement leaves the impression—correct or not—that somehow the Board of Trustees had no choice but to grant the developer the 100 units it had asked for in the special permit application.

The other trustees, particularly Len Simon in a long statement that detailed 10 reasons he was in favor of approving the development, gave no clues either.

(Simon and the other trustees did, however, say a lot about the meticulous and careful process the village had gone through before approving the permit; more on that in a moment.)

Artist’s conception of Lot A development/ Arketekcher

To make matters worse, the final adopted resolution approving the special permit misrepresented, in our view, what the Planning Board had said about reducing the number of units from 100 down to 60-80.

“WHEREAS, on August 21, 2024 the Planning Board issued a memo to the Village Board in which it discussed the five goals and objectives set forth in §230-58 of the Village Code, and concluded that ‘the Planning Board thinks that this is a good location and design for the apartment building,’ but expressed concerns with the number of units based largely on concerns regarding traffic, parking, fiscal impacts and school children as the studies had not yet been provided; and”

The implication of this statement is that the Planning Board’s recommendation for 60 to 80 units was contingent on further studies being conducted, and that it might be fine with 100 units if the concerns were addressed. While the Planning Board did ask that a number of studies be conducted, its own statement at the very end of the memo was actually as follows:

“Overall, the Planning Board thinks that this is a good location and design for the apartment building, but the project (100 units), as proposed, is maybe too large for the Village when you factor in the potential increased traffic, increased number of school children, and concern that this proposed project, being all affordable, would not prioritize Croton residents. A smaller building with 60-80 units, both affordable and market rate, should be considered.”

In other words, in making its recommendation for 60-80 units, the Planning Board had already taken into account what it considered the likely affects of traffic, school kids, and so forth. The recommendation was not, as we read it, provisional.

So what has happened here? We had hoped, and sometimes even assumed, that after months of the Board hearing from large numbers of Croton residents about their reservations about the Lot A project, and after an election campaign in which almost 1400 voters expressed their unhappiness with what they saw as overly rapid development in the village, that the Board would take these concerns into account in its final approval of the project. While we were never naive enough to think that the project could be stopped, we thought that perhaps some kind of acknowledgement of widespread public concern would be made, and in a tangible way.

But any such notions have turned out to be naive. Those who said, from the very beginning, that WBP would be given exactly what it wanted—and perhaps even more units if it asks for them later, as Regan Development Corporation was granted with Maple Commons—turned out to be correct. It is hard to conclude that the past several months of deliberations by the Board of Trustees were more than a charade, especially during an election campaign that caught them by surprise, to make it look as though they were paying attention to the public when actually they were not.

John Bainlardi, VP of WBP Development, was a regular fixture at all Board meetings about the Lot A project.

But the current trustees who made this decision, who were of course democratically elected, have now made what many in Croton will see as a power play to override any and all opposition to this and possibly future projects. At the very least, there has been no spirit of compromise in this process.

We cannot leave it there without making some criticisms of the opposition movement. As effective as Voice of Croton candidates were in putting development issues on the map and providing many villagers with a way to express their opposition to what some see as the “urbanization” of Croton, the opposition was not able to effectively counter the detailed studies that the Board relied upon to allay fears of negative consequences from the development of Lot A.

These studies, conducted by the developer and verified by the village’s consultant, AKRF, minimized concerns about traffic, numbers of school children, noise emanating from the railyard, sewer and water pressure issues, police and fire access, and so forth. Opponents of the Lot A project criticized AKRF and its conclusions repeatedly in public comments to the Board and in the public hearings—Voice of Croton candidate Gary Eisinger delivered a blistering critique of the company at Wednesday’s Board meeting—but, perhaps understandably, the opponents produced no professional studies of their own.

We say understandably, because all of the studies, including AKRF’s consultancy, were paid for by the developer, who had the money to fund them. Normal citizens do not usually have access to such funds, which, for a developer, are just a small part of doing business.

Voice of Croton candidate (and Croton Yacht Club commodore) Gary Eisinger spoke often at Board meetings in opposition to Lot A and other developments.

We also do not think that opponents of expanded development in Croton were sufficiently coherent or articulate on the question of alternative solutions to the very real housing crisis in the county, state, and nation. While nods were sometimes given to the insistence by housing advocates that affordable housing had to be built, the failure to tackle this issue made these opponents very vulnerable to accusations of NIMBYism, in a village where the majority of residents are liberal Democrats who feel required to give at least lip service to such goals.

(We have written recently about signs of hypocrisy on that side of Croton’s political spectrum as well; it is also important to point out that most of the Voice of Croton campaign staff, and many of the villagers who voted for them, were also Democrats.)

Yet while citizen activists in Croton were not able to stop Lot A, there is no question in our view that public pressure, including the election campaign itself, was largely responsible for the Board’s earlier decision to tell the investors at 1 Half Moon Bay Drive (“the so-called Finkelstein tire property”) to go back to the drawing board with its proposed development of 280 units.

It is not difficult to imagine that the investors who want to develop 1HMB have been watching and waiting in the wings to see what would happen with Lot A before coming back with a new proposal. When they do, activists will have another shot at influencing the future of our village.

It is also not difficult to imagine that Voice of Croton, or some other newly formed group, having shown an impressive ability to mobilize public opinion in the village, will go on to challenge Mayor Pugh and the two trustees (Nora Nicholson and Cara Politi) whose seats will be up for re-election this coming year (should they decide to run for additional terms.)

This time, presumably, they will be likely to have their names printed on the actual ballot, and voters will not have to write them into tiny boxes—as nearly 1400 still managed to do last November, a historical record for this village and probably many others.

Donald Trump will not be on the ballot in 2025, so the often claimed advantage of a November (rather than March) election to Democratic Party candidates will probably not be as great this time around. And of course there are still more developments in the works next year, such as the tentative plans to build 49 units at 425 South Riverside Avenue, across from ShopRite, along with other projects that are either currently in the works or likely to come our way in the New Year.

(Indeed, developers and realtors, we know from our sources, are keeping a very close watch on “developments” in our village. There is money to be made here, and they are circling, for better or for worse.)

But while it’s hard to predict the future, for Croton and for Crotonites, the year 2025 promises to be an interesting one, in many different ways.

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