YORKTOWN, N.Y.—The Yorktown Town Board voted to approve the hiring of Gregory Dietrich Preservation Consulting on an on-call agreement to assist the town in the adaptive reuse process for the Field Home mansion located at 2302 Catherine Street in Cortlandt Manor.
Supervisor Ed Lachterman said the property has some historic value in its construction. He noted that this would be at no cost to the town, and paid by Toll Brothers.
“It helps us to hone down and get a better result out of it for adaptive reuse of a 100-plus-year-old building,” he said at the Oct. 22 Town Board meeting.
According to Lachterman, if a good adaptive reuse plan isn’t found, the Field Home will be “lost.”
“It has some pretty good history,” he said. “We would like to really get the best bang for the buck when this RFP goes out.”
Councilwoman Susan Siegel, who the week prior asked for the resolution to be tabled because she had not yet seen the proposal, voted in opposition. She said that with minor edits, the request for proposal (RFP) draft from the Planning Department was acceptable. She believes involving Dietrich may delay the project.
“Delay could mean the loss of upwards to a million dollars to the town,” she said during the meeting. “We don’t want to risk losing the money, because if the town doesn’t come up with some idea for it, Toll Brothers already told us they will just go ahead and sell the property on their own.”
Lachterman said d the town would not be losing $1 million if it took over the building and then sold it.
"We would be risking having that liability on our hands and possibly not being able to do anything with it,” he said.
Director of Planning John Tegeder said the historic resource consulting firm will offer knowledge.
“The value of Gregory Dietrich is his knowledge of the players in the historic preservation world, which will include investors that do that kind of work, will include developers and contractors that do that kind of work, it will include preservation architects,” Tegeder said, adding that he hopes Dietrich "will assist in getting the words in this RFP to resonate with the people that do this kind of work and that he will be able to assist us in getting to the right people.”
Tegeder stressed that the effort is to preserve the town’s history.
“It’s not just to make the dollar on it either,” he said.
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