In a letter to MyRye.com, Glen Oaks Drive resident and former Rye City Democratic Committee Chair Shari Punyon says she is unsure about the plans for the expansion of The Osborn Home on Theall Road. She calls for a better timed public hearing, access to meeting minutes and recordings of the Planning Commission meetings so residents have more visibility to any plan approval process. The Planning Commission has a public hearing on The Osborn plans this Tuesday.
I don’t know if I support the Osborn Expansion. Unfortunately, this is not because I’ve weighed all the available information, and have not been able to come to a conclusion. It is because the required information is not available.
There are plans online, including (after I searched) a traffic analysis specifically focused on peak-hours traffic around the school, and a statement that they “don’t anticipate” rock chipping. This is good, but I don’t know enough to know if all due diligence has been completed, nor do I have the extensive time to do that research myself.
What I don’t see is even one set of Planning Commission meeting minutes or video related to the Osborn. The meetings all took place at the very end of the school year, or over the summer, when many of the most concerned citizens, and those who will be most impacted (the school community) were away or distracted, so attendance and attention was probably light.
The last set of meeting minutes currently online (as of 3 days before the public hearing) are from May 13th. As the first meeting related to the proposed update was on June 10th, with three additional meetings taking place over the summer, I have no way of learning what questions were asked and answered, or anything else about what was raised at those meetings. I wrote to the commission on July 16th asking about the missing minutes, but never received a reply. I wrote again this morning, but don’t anticipate the minutes being posted on Monday, and even if they were, that would be a lot to go through the day before the hearing.
I am not clear about the plans for the campus, other than some site drawings. For example, they talk about an additional 128 units for independent living, all of whom will likely have cars, and removal of 20 assisted living beds, few of whom likely have cars. They also don’t talk about additional staff to attend to so many new units (who will likely will be arriving in the early morning). So the traffic analysis that there will be minimal impact is interesting. However, I don’t know what questions were already asked, so I don’t simply repeat them. They also don’t talk about whether all new units will be in addition to the existing units, or any existing units will be decommissioned. I know that residents own their units, so it is likely that all new units will be additional, and no changes will be made to the existing structures, but it is not clear, and I also don’t know if that question has been asked.
In addition, the public hearing is now scheduled against the first Board of Education meeting of the new year, with a new Superintendent of Schools, forcing the most potentially impacted parties – the parents of Osborn school, to choose which important event to attend.
Given the lack of information, and the conflict for interested parties, I suggest the hearing be postponed – or this be the first in a series of public hearings, with this hearing recorded, and full minutes of all commission meetings related to this topic posted before the next hearing.
