After months of pushback from residents who raised environmental and traffic concerns, a proposal to repurpose a former aerospace site in Shokan for warehouse use is advancing toward approval. The Olive Planning Board said Wednesday that the project’s most contentious issue —truck traffic—appears to have been addressed.
KSE Suppliers, a wholesale linen provider based in Hillburn, N.Y., plans to convert a 100,000-square-foot building at 167 DuBois Road into a storage and distribution hub. Residents had argued that developing the 149-acre site, partly contaminated by its former occupant Ametek Rotron, would bring too many trucks to a residential area and endanger children.
At a sparsely attended meeting, KSE presented a review by the Ulster County Planning Board and an independent traffic study. Both downplayed the impact of trucks on the neighborhood.
The proposed facility would generate “approximately 70 trips, 11 of which would be trucks,” wrote Stephan A. Maffia, the consulting engineer who authored the traffic study. “In my opinion, the low volume of traffic associated with the proposed use would not result in a negative impact on traffic flows.”
Maffia recommended adding road signage, and KSE officials said they would work with town and county leaders to install it.
The county supported the project but advised capping truck traffic. “The county recommends that a maximum of 10 trucks be specified in the final approval and that amendments to increase the volume of truck traffic would require an additional special permit,” the county’s review said.
Neither report addressed environmental concerns. Ametek Rotron used trichloroethane and freon at the site for two decades to build cooling systems for the aerospace and defense industries. Those chemicals put the property on the state’s Registry of Inactive Hazardous Waste Disposal Sites. It was downgraded from a Class 2 to a Class 4 site in 2003 after cleanup, but the state Department of Environmental Conservation still lists it under “site management” to monitor residual contamination.
In August, Planning Board Chair Stephen Dibbell and Nathan Reisman, KSE’s director of purchasing, said Ametek remains responsible for cleanup. Dibbell said KSE’s plan would not interfere with remediation and that any future subdivision would require Planning Board approval.
No residents spoke at Wednesday’s meeting, a sharp contrast with earlier hearings. Dibbell said the board would delay a vote until Oct. 7 to “give the public a chance to look at the new material,” but he suggested the proposal’s biggest obstacle had been resolved.
“The trucks are not an issue at this point,” he said.
Jim Rich is a reporter for The Overlook. You can reach him at jim@theoverlooknews.com.