Wadsworth campaign finally discloses

The Will Wadsworth campaign committee finally filed its required 32-day pre-General Election financial disclosure form yesterday, 12 days late. The report was due on Friday October 5 and was supposed to report on all activity up to Oct. 1.

The report shows that the Wadsworth campaign had raised a total of $10,210 as of the cut-off date. Major contributors include the candidate’s father Austin Wadsworth with $1,000 and Assemblyman Dan Burling’s campaign committee with $500.

On the expense side, the committee reported spending only $3,152, leaving a balance on hand of $7,057. The report, however, does not show any payments made for campaign signs, which have been much in evidence in recent days or expenses made before the caucus, which included at least one mailing. Under state law, the committee and the candidate are required to disclose all contributions and expenditures for the entire campaign.

The signs were seen at the candidate’s fundraiser at Sweet Briar in September and it would be very unusual for political sign makers to extend credit. The major item on the expense list was $2,605 to a catering firm for the fundraiser, however, there is no payment shown for the use of the Sweet Briar facility itself.

Will is, of course, a partner in the company that operates Sweet Briar Celebrations, but the facility is owned by Barry Caplan. There are no contributions listed in cash or in kind from Barry. The full report can be found on the NYS Board of Elections web site here.

Sneak preview!

Starting in this week’s edition of the LC News, I will be running a series of print ads under the heading “Straight talk on the issues.” The first ad is titled “Development in Geneseo (Part 1): Preserving our investment.”

It discusses the history of the Gateway District and the Geneseo Empire Zone, and why I believe the PDD law represents a threat to future non-retail development in Geneseo. As a Happy Trails campaign blog reader, I am offering you a sneak preview of the new ad here!

Simply click on the new button on my campaign web site that says “My ads” and you will see a list of the available ads. At present there is only one, but in future weeks you will be able to get a sneak preview of the ads every Tuesday on my site.

There’s got to be some advantage to being an early adopter!

The American Autobahn

Interstate highways are wonderful inventions. There is nothing like them when you need to take a 900 mile round trip in two days, as I did this week to take my son E.T. to college orientation in Springfield, Ohio.

The road from here to Springfield uses six Interstates, I-390, 90, 271, 71, 270 and finally I-70. If you travel exclusively by Interstate you could probably make the 450 mile trip in seven hours, but of course you would risk losing your mind to white line fever.

The highlight of my return trip was getting lost trying to find my way back to I-270 after dinner in Dublin, Ohio and traveling on state highwas for about 50 miles. What a relief to motor through beautiful countryside and small villages at a more leisurely pace.

Of course, most Americans don’t have much leisure time and that is why we have Interstates, although they were originally built for military purposes after Eisenhower saw how effective Hitler’s Autobahn was in moving men and material.

The dark side of Interstates is the ugly commercial zones that tend to spring up like mushroom around major exits. Since the business plan here is to attract the dazed motorist’s attention while they are hurtling along at 70 miles an hour, it is necessary to have very large and very tall signs.

At some interchanges I passed there were dozens of large signs hoisted up to a hundred feet in the air. Unfortunately this is the mindset that many developers seem to carry forward, even when they are not near an interstate highway.

Recently the developers of a proposed Applebees restaurant in Geneseo told the Town Planning Board that they would need to have seven signs including one on a 30 foot pylon by Rt. 20A or they might not be able to build here. That’s funny because the Applebees we ate at in Dublin, Ohio had just one sign in the front and no signs by the road and yet they didn’t seem to be lacking for business.

Just down the road in Dublin is a Lowes like none I have ever seen before. It is totally constructed of brick and has none of the garish blue roofs and large signs that Newman insists is necessary to do business here.

Informed sources, say that former Planning Board Chairman John Zmich will show photos of that Lowes and others he has seen in his travels at the next meeting of the Planning Board on July 9. That should make for an interesting show!

Note: A lively debate has sprung up in the comments on my report on the proposed shadow developments near the Super Wal-Mart. This may be why this site has set record traffic number for the last three days (and four of the last five).

In the shadows

Last night I attended the Village Planning Board meeting. The main item was a proposal to build yet another strip mall in the shadow of the Super Wal-Mart. This is the third or fourth such proposal in the last year, I’ve lost track.

An engineer from APD was dispatched to test the waters with a proposal for a 10,400 square foot building that is intended to house 6 or 7 small retail business. The location is the one acre lot that Wal-Mart had originally planned to put a gas station on.

In case you are not familar, the lot is tucked up against the hill leading up to Volunter Road on the east (or right) side of the Wal-Mart parking lot. In fact, the proposed building is tucked so closely into the hill that the developer is requesting a 15 foot reduction in the rear setback requirement from 25 feet to 10 feet.

The board was less than enthusiastic about that, but noted it was up to the Zoning Board of Appeals to make that call. They suggested that, if that was a dealbreaker, the developer should go to the ZBA first before wasting any time dealing with other concerns rasied by the planning board.

Among those other concerns was a complete lack of sidewalks to make the development pedestrian-friendly. Engineers and developers seem to assume that everyone will be driving to their new strip malls. That may not be such a good assumption if the price of gas continues to rise!

It was also clear that the board in general was less than enthusiastic about this proliferation of new strip malls (the Spectrum Group recently proposed a 35,000 square foot one on the other side of the Super Wal-Mart), but that their hands are tied by the existing C-2 zoning.

About the only thing they can do is enforce the existing codes as strictly as possible and try to make the building a little less unsightly. I am confident that the board will try to do this, but not because anyone is paying much attention. I was the only civilian at the meeting, as I am at many local meetings. The people who serve on these boards labor in the shadows.

Note: This is the first Village Planning Board meeting I have attended since Matt Griffo assumed the chair. Since I criticized his comments at the Master Plan hearing sharply in a previous post, I would like to say that I thought he did a nice job handling this matter.

A tale of two meetings

I had a conflict last night. I had to choose between the Geneseo Town Board and the Livingston County Planning Board meetings. The same thing happened last month and I made the wrong choice by attending the Town Board, so I was determined not to let that happen again.

After comparing the agendas, however, I discovered that I could safely put in an appearance at the town board for the first half hour and still make it back for the crucial part of the county meeting, the discussion of the Village of Geneseo’s Master Plan.

At the historic first meeting at the SNF, I heard the board discuss borrowing $150,000 to build a new bathroom at Long Point Park. After living with an admittedly sub-standard facility for many years, this has suddenly become an emergency in this election year.

The board approved the bonding, and said that if no one files a permissive referendum against the project in the next 30 days, they will move forward at their July meeting (28 days from now). The facility is so costly because it was decided at a previous meeting that it needed to be heated so that it can be open year-round to service the occasional ice fisherman. Hey, they vote too!

Please pardon my cynicism, you get that way when you watch this board in action for too long. There’s nothing wrong with having a nicer restroom at the park, but the haste with which the board is acting right now has the smell of political panic.

With three of the five board seats up this fall, the incumbents have to have something to run on besides killing the master plan, divorcing from the village and pressuring the planning board. That is no doubt the reason that the they have also embraced the YMCA proposal like a drowning sailor grabbing a life preserver.

The other big announcement last night was that the town will loan one of its spare offices in the new facility to the Y organizing committee. Again, there is nothing wrong with trying to get a Y started locally, but the timing of our officials in bringing this issue to the forefront right now is highly questionable.

Speaking of politics, the County Planning Board had rejected the village’s proposed new Master Plan on a 14-2 vote last month. Last night there was much better attendance of the 26-plus member board (one rep for each of the 17 towns and 9 villages in the county, plus a few alternates who can vote when a full board is not present.)

The board had been requested by the village to clarify the reasons for that rejection. Chairman Tim Brindusi started the discussion by stating that the board was not going to reconsider its decision and that it was not going to allow public comments.

That was too bad, because three village board members and original Master Plan Chair Patti Lavigne were in attendance, and if dialogue were ever needed, it is desperately needed between the village and the county right now.

The board discussed the issue at length without adding much light to their previous decision. Some new voices, absent at last month’s meeting, were heard including Geneseo businessman Barry Caplan who represents Leicester, and Lima farmer Dennis Neenan. They both spoke out against the county dictating to the village, but it was obviously not going to be enough to turn the tide.

In the end, the board voted to send the village a laundry list of suggestions for “improving” the plan, but there was nothing very specific. What the county really objects to are size limitations for retail buildings that could eventually zone out Big Box stores, but they refused to take on that language directly.

What’s ironic is that many members expressed concern about the state of their own town’s economies, and yet they didn’t seem to be able to see the connection to the growing concentration of Big Retail in Geneseo. If public comments had been allowed, I would have tried to make the point that the Smart Growth movement in Geneseo is trying to do our neighbors a favor by helping preserve their Main Streets as well.