Housing Discussion Resumes at Bedford Planning Board

BEDFORD, N.Y. - A contentious cluster-housing project in Katonah, on the Planning Board docket since 2006, was tentatively expected to resume hearing from the developers and neighboring residents this week.

Familiar issues like traffic and drainage, mainstays of public hearings since at least 2011, remained open questions after an Oct. 28 hearing that ran for more than two hours.

A continuation of last month’s public hearing, which filled town hall to near-capacity, is penciled-in for the Nov. 12 meeting. Deirdre Courtney-Batson, the longtime Planning Board chair, warned that the scheduling was tentative but added, “The worst that will happen if you show up and we’ve taken it off the agenda is that you’ve made an unnecessary trip.”

The housing proposal would cluster 22 new homes on part of about 26 thickly wooded acres, bounded by Harris Road, Westview Drive, Sunset Avenue and New Street. The site had been home of the Bailey Hall School, a vocational institution for boys, and once included a school building, residence, summer cottages, workshops and a barn, all structures that have now been razed. 

The land lies north of Harris Road and south of New Street, bordering the property of numerous Katonah residents, many of whom were on hand for the Oct. 28 hearing.

At that hearing, familiar faces asked familiar questions, heard at hearings many years in the past. Some queries updated to reflect conditions today. These homeowners encircle the site of the proposed conservation subdivision, and they voiced concerns about traffic, water runoff, noise, blasting and myriad other details of the project.

At hearing’s end, Courtney-Batson reminded residents still in the hall that the Bailey Hall project could help provide badly needed housing for Bedford. 

“There is a housing crisis,” she noted. And while town officials are working to address the problem, Courtney-Batson said, “if we don’t figure out ways to do it ourselves, other people will find ways to force us to do it.”