Abrupt halt to hearing catches crowd off guard
A planned public hearing on the application for a steel and concrete fabricating facility on state Route 28 was shut down before it even started when town officials said the audience size exceeded the meeting room’s 150-person capacity.
The declaration in the Kingston Town Hall meeting room was made Monday evening after those attending were screened with a metal-detecting wand, required to sign in, and allowed to sit on the floor of the room after all the chairs were occupied.
Before the cancellation was announced, the Planning Board conducted other business with the same roughly 160 people in the room and granted conditional approval of a solar energy project.
At 7:30 p.m., nearly 20 minutes after the solar
matter was settled, board attorney Richard Golden stood up and announced that the proposal by 850 Route 28 LLC would not be heard and that another meeting would be scheduled in a larger facility.
“The law requires that this meeting be closed because there’s not enough room for everybody to hear and sit,” Golden said.
“There will be a new publication of a notice of a next meeting for this particular application,” Golden said. “It will be scheduled [in] a venue that can accommodate all the people that want to come to hear and listen to it.”
Kristin O’Neill, assistant director of the state Committee on Open Government, said Tuesday that the law governing the location of meetings requires the session to be conducted within the municipality. It could wind up back at the Town Hall if that proves to be the largest space available.
O’Neill said the law requires boards to make “all reasonable efforts to ensure that meetings are held in an appropriate facility which can adequately accommodate members of the public who wish to attend such meetings.”
The town Planning Board on Tuesday appeared to be out of compliance with opinions by the Committee on Open Government when it required meeting attendees to sign in. The committee has said do not have to identify themselves to attend public meetings.
The crowd at Monday’s meeting was about the same size as the one that attended a public hearing in the same room on June 17. At that meeting, there were complaints about cramped conditions in the room, but there was no board discussion about canceling the session.
The sudden shutdown of Monday’s meeting came as a surprise to both opponents and supports of the 850 Route 28 proposal. Opponents brought volumes of material to cite as the basis for their objections, and they were preparing to speak at the meeting; members of the 850 Route 28 team brought a thick binder of materials and a large map of the property.
Dan LeFever, a consultant for the applicant, lamented the delay caused by the meeting’s postponement.
“It costs a lot of money every month to be sitting on a property that’s not making any money,” he said..
The property currently is being used by 850 Route 28 owner Thomas Auringer as a storage site for large equipment used by 2-4 Kieffer Lane/U.S. Crane, which he operates in the town of Ulster. Auringer did not receive approval for the storage at the Route 28 site, but town of Kingston officials concluded it was allowed because the previous property owner of the property had such permission.