Thank you to all of you who came out Saturday, March 8, to the Cold Spring Firehouse to ask your questions about the Butterfield project. It is important to me to hear your questions and to be able to provide you with answers. At this standing-room only meeting, my team of consultants and I answered questions about the review process to date and the overall project.
We will be posting these questions from the meeting with their answers to our website. For those of you who gave us written questions, we will also be posting those to the website with our answers. Please visit our website butterfieldcoldspring.com/ for more information or to contact us.
Now, what is next? Back to the Village Board to discuss recommendations by the Planning Board and to set a public hearing on the zoning so the Village Board may vote on the matter. Once the zoning change is approved, we will begin the site plan review process with the Planning Board while working on architectural drawings. In addition, we will start working on tenants such as the U.S. post office, Putnam County and others.
As this process continues, I hope you will continue to contact me with any questions or concerns. I look forward to working with the community to build a better Cold Spring.
Paul Guillaro
I’m glad to see Mr. Guillaro acknowledge that progress is being made. I’m also glad to see him clarify that he doesn’t yet have any tenants.
“We will start working on tenants such as the U.S. post office, Putnam County and others.”
Not a single entity has even begun to budget to take space at Butterfield.
As the village goes forward with public discussion of Butterfield I hope the public and our decision makers will remember what Mr. Guillaro is saying here. There’s no guarantee of a senior center, post office or shared government facilities. Those very expensive choices have not been made yet and are nearly completely out of the village’s control.
When the new village board starts working on Butterfield I hope it will require guarantees that the village is not left with a budget deficit and higher taxes should Mr. Guillaro’s hopes for tenants not come together.
We are all looking forward to a better Cold Spring. The next village board must seek guarantees that make that happen.
I’m also glad that Mr. Guillaro is reaching out to Cold Spring residents by holding informational meetings and launching a website with information about the Butterfield project. However, after scouring the entire website, I cannot find a copy of the latest site plan that I can look at to get a sense of the scale of this development. The picture on the home page is misleading showing scattered buildings on a flat plain and shrubbery in the road. There is also no indication as to which road I’m looking at — 9D or Paulding.
I have emailed Mr. Guillaro on three separate occasions, responding to the invitation to “Contact Us!” I asked him to include a copy of the latest site plan that is shown on an easel in photos of the meeting on the website so residents could visualize what he proposed. To date, I have received no response and there has been no addition to the website.
There are plenty of us who live in the village and also run businesses here. Hence, we are very busy attending to our businesses on Saturdays. It would be very helpful if Mr. Guillaro would hold another informational meeting some evening so that we could attend too. Not only will this development impact my neighborhood, but the proposed retail segment will have an effect on Main Street merchants. I hope Mr. Guillaro is open to hearing our response to his plans as well.