A project that requires Montgomery Village Board approval before the planning board can make its final determination received a green light last week.
The village board approved a proposal by Zafir LLC to add a 13,300 square-foot addition to its warehouse at 330 Dunn Road, near the Orange County Airport. According to village code, the village board must also give its approval to any commercial project greater than 4,000 square feet.
The property owners are Brian and Monroe Zafir. The existing building on the site is a 8,400 sq ft building that currently is used to manufacture food-grade liquid totes. In his presentation before the village planning board last August, Engineer Tom Olley said the business had grown significantly since Zafir received a patent in 2018. They are proposing a 13,300 sq ft addition to the site. It would be a separate building that would be located to the north of the existing building, further away from Dunn Road, further away from 211 and it would be a building that would be approximately one foot lower in height than what is there now. The dimensions of the building are 80’x160’ and the existing building is 70’x120’.
Talk of the existing building, however, brought back some unpleasant memories for some Montgomery residents. The original approval in 2016 called for a height of 23 feet, but when construction finally began two years later, the pole-barn structure that went up in a matter of days was found to be 32 feet in height. Though still within the village code, it was higher than the height provided in the site plan.
The planning board revised the project in 2018, adopting an amended site plan that included red aviation lights required by the Federal Aviation Administration.
At last week’s village board meeting, resident Don Berger complained that the village had been taken advantage of by the developer and of “serious errors” by the village in granting a prior approval.
“I heard twice is the its within the village code,” Berger said. “Who cares? They have plans, they go by those plans.”
Trustee Mike Hembury agreed, adding that people are still “pissed off’ that the extra 10 feet were put there.
“You got to go by what the people say in that neighborhood,” Hembury said. “They don’t want to extend it.”
But when Mayor Steve Brescia made the motion to accept the project as submitted, it passed by a 4-1 vote.
Hembury cast the lone dissenting vote.