As we reported this morning, the special permit application for a proposed apartment complex at 425 South Riverside Avenue, across from ShopRite, is scheduled for its first consideration at the Planning Board’s July 28 meeting. However, at last evening’s Board of Trustees meeting, Village Manager Bryan Healy indicated that the application would not be made public until the board’s agenda went out on July 24.
We and others have been attempting to convince Healy to release it sooner in the public interest, and there are indications that he had decided to do so after a meeting this afternoon with the Village Attorney, the Village Engineer, and the Village Planner.
However, at some point today, the AI driven site croton.news jumped the gun and put the purported agenda for the July 28 meeting, including earlier versions of the numerous documents in the special permit application, online with full access.
The croton.news site includes a disclaimer that since it is AI driven, the accuracy of information on its pages cannot be assured until each post has been factchecked. We are told by Healy this afternoon that in fact the documents included do not represent the final versions—and so we would caution villagers to keep that in mind. Healy also told us that he is investigating the leak, but had not come to any conclusions he could share with us as we went to press with this story.
(The croton.news post was also republished by the EverythingCroton blog, which regularly includes a caution that this is an AI driven site and that readers should do “due diligence” on what is published there.)
We have written before about the chronic inaccuracies of the croton.news site, and included comment from its editor, Matthew Broudy, about why he continues to publish it despite serious errors that sometimes take many days to correct. Nevertheless, the site’s post about 425 South Riverside Avenue is now widely circulating in the village, and so we are alerting readers who might not realize that the documents have been updated in the actual final application.
(We have written to Broudy to get his comments and will update this post if we hear back from him.)
Nevertheless, there are certain details that seem unlikely to have been revised in the final version. The draft application envisions the same 49 apartment units in three stories that the developers discussed back in late 2024 when they first began talking to neighbors about the project, and the basic architect’s concept for the building, reproduced above, seems unlikely to have been modified.
We expect that village officials will be putting the entire package on the Projects/Initiatives page very soon, and we will update this report once they have done so. We will also report any developments in the Village Manager’s investigation of how the application was leaked.
Update: We have now heard from Matt Broudy who explains his perspective on how this all came about. Please read it on this new post about the situation.
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Healy's comment does at least implicitly affirm that what got posted is an *actual* version of the permit application materials, not something that the AI hallucinated from whole cloth, yes?
It's going to be interesting during Blaze, that's for sure.