Seeks to annul approval for Route 9 project
The Revolutionary War is over, but a preservation group is continuing its battle over a hotel and retail project planned for Route 9 on a part of a historic site used in the late 18th century as a supply depot for the Continental Army.
Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot and two of its members, Brenda and William McEwing, filed a lawsuit on June 27 in which they asked a state judge to nullify the Fishkill Planning Board’s approval of Continental Commons.
The lawsuit names the town, its building inspector, the Planning Board, the Planning Board chair and GLD3 LLC and Snook-9 Realty, development companies owned by Domenico Broccoli.
As proposed, Continental Commons would combine a 90-room hotel with a restaurant, visitors’ center and a replica barracks that would house a museum devoted to the history of the Fishkill Supply Depot. Established under Gen. George Washington, the 74-acre Revolutionary War encampment stretched from Philipstown to the Village of Fishkill and parts of what is now Beacon.
The 10.5-acre site, which contains a Speedway gas station owned by Broccoli and a burial site that Friends of Fishkill Supply Depot say may contain the remains of war dead, is across Route 9 from Dutchess Mall and across Snook Road from the Van Wyck Homestead, a former headquarters for the supply depot and current home of the Fishkill Historical Society.
The plaintiffs contend that the final site plan signed by the Planning Board chair in April is invalid because the developers failed to fulfill two conditions from the preliminary approval in December 2023 — a work permit from the state Department of Transportation and a letter confirming required excavation.
They also claim the site plan and a special-use permit issued to the project have expired because the developer failed to meet a deadline to apply for building permits within a year of site-plan approval. The Planning Board granted the developer multiple 90-day extensions, the most recent of which expired June 12.
Among the exhibits submitted with the lawsuit is a May email from the state Department of Transportation, in response to a Freedom of Information Law request, stating that the agency had yet to issue a final work permit. According to the lawsuit, the plaintiffs have made multiple requests to the Planning Board under the Freedom of Information Law for evidence that the conditions of the preliminary approval have been satisfied.
Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot and the McEwings also appealed a state judge’s decision in 2020 to reject their attempt to overturn the Planning Board’s determination that Continental Commons would not have a “significant adverse impact” on the environment or historical resources. Judge Maria Rosa said she did not have the power to “substitute her judgment for that of the agency.” The appeal, filed in May 2021, is still active.
Broccoli has also gone to court. In March, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit he filed accusing members and supporters of Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot of conspiring to “devalue” the property so they could buy it for “pennies on the dollar.”
That same month, Broccoli alleged in a lawsuit that statements made in 2023 by Louise Daniele, a former member of the Fishkill Town Board, caused him “reputational harm, substantial emotional distress and humiliation and damage to his key business relationship.”
In a motion filed May 8, Daniele denied that she defamed Broccoli when she said that Board Member John Forman should recuse himself from votes involving Continental Commons because he rented office space from Broccoli’s cousin and the developer donated to Forman’s 2012 state Assembly campaign. In June, Daniele filed a motion to dismiss the case.
