Important Cape Vincent Zoning Board of Appeals Public Hearing Monday Oct 7th.

Today,  Monday Oct 7 at 6 pm at the town offices will be the ZBA public hearing on the town's zoning mess concerning an improperly permitted  solar project on the property of Mr. Roger Alexander that is impacting  the property of Mrs. Mary Grogan. This case has been going on since July 10th of this year when the planning board was mistakenly on the path to approve a solar use in the River District that was actually not allowed in that district.

Once they realized the mistake the entire zoning process on this matter became a fiasco of back peddling and  rationalizations and the only way they could figure to rectify and rationalize the situation was with a highly irregular distortion of the CV zoning regulations and attempt to permit the project grandfathered under the old law, which actually raised more problems.

Ironically some other interesting things surfaced as part of this fiasco, such as the planning board chairman at the time indicating we should not interpret our zoning so literally.  That alone is an astonishing statement.  If zoning laws are not taken literally, then there is no point, credibility, or consistency at all since any personality or group within the governmental zoning process over the years can simply apply the law as they personally see fit.  That simply leads to land use chaos and becomes completely arbitrary and irrational which in addition would not hold up legally. The law is the glue that keeps things consistent and should largely remove too many conflicting and arbitrary decisions from watering down the zoning process to the point of uselessness.

Mrs. Grogan BTW if you don't know already is also the Cape Vincent seasonal resident  who lives with the dangerous private illegal wind turbine looming over her house on County Rt. 7 for  the last four years.  That is due to a another  zoning fiasco by the previous town govt. that was never rectified by the current town govt. despite that fact the CV ZBA decided the turbine was illegal, and the NY courts upheld that decision. She is bringing the appeal before the ZBA on the solar issue.

It will be very interesting to see what happens tonight at the ZBA public hearing and what happens next.

In many ways the entire credibility  new CV zoning process and the officers who apply it rests on what may or may not happen tonight at the ZBA. 

And that is considering that we have rested the future and defense and the health, safety, and welfare of our community on larger critical issues like wind development on our new zoning law.