The Clarence Town Board voted Wednesday evening to clarify the town zoning code’s definition of how density in multi-family residential developments can be calculated. But it was not without some dissent.
“Is that a clarification or a change?” developer David Huck asked Councilman Bernard J. Kolber, who proposed the measure, when he spoke during the public comment period.
“We passed an interpretation of the law,” Kolber said.
“It seems to me,” Huck said, “that you’re changing it. With all the attention it got at the last hearing and to slide through things here, that seems very deceptive to me. ... It’s an important topic for a lot of people and here it’s just been blown through.”
Kolber said after the meeting that the code’s multi-family maximum of eight dwelling units per acre had become a point of contention. If developers had a 10-acre tract and made eight acres of it commercial, he said, they felt they should be able to build up to 80 housing units on the remaining two acres.
“The Planning Board told us, ‘We can’t interpret this. This law is too ambiguous.’ So we’re saying that it’s eight units per acre [on the residential part of the parcel],” he said.
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