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Planning magazine — December 2003 Whatever Happened to Ramapo? By Julienne Marshall Sprawling, ethnically and racially diverse, and teeming with villages, the Town of Ramapo, New York, about 30 miles northwest of New York City, is a mixture of parkland, suburban tracts, high-density enclaves, and bustling shopping centers, in different degrees of decay and renewal. Ramapo is also renowned among planners for its early growth management system — but the hopes and expectations of 1966 have bumped up against nearly four decades of political reality — and, in some spots, against unchecked growth. In this 89-square-mile corner of Rockland County, a few miles west of the Hudson River, an old battle over growth control holds some lessons for today. Ramapo ranges from the Palisades Interstate Park, which occupies one-third of its area in the west, to the long-established, semi-isolated village of Sloatsburg in hilly terrain in the extreme west, to the re-emergent village of Spring Valley, a traditional downtown center, in the east. In between, the unincorporated area of the town has shrunk from about 80 percent in the late 1960s to 30 percent today through the creation of several new villages. The original farmlands are mostly gone, doomed by the New York State Thruway and the Tappan Zee Bridge, which opened in 1955, and by the George Washington Bridge and the Palisades Interstate Parkway, which serve as conduits from Manhattan and New Jersey. There is railway service as well, making Ramapo a convenient bedroom community for New York City. Population growth has dipped at times, but never really stopped. More recently, the population has swelled with the addition of a wide ethnic mix — Hispanic, Indian, Pakistani, Vietnamese, Chinese, Polish, Russian, Israeli, Haitian, and Eastern European Hadisic Jews — making Ramapo "the most diverse community in Rockland County, without doubt," says Brian Brophy, the town's current director of building, planning, and zoning. Ramapo resonates because of Golden v. Ramapo, a 1972 case in which the Court of Appeals of New York (the state's highest court) marked the first time in the U.S. that a town was legally approved to control its own growth. At issue was a planned development system the town adopted in 1969 as a way to effectuate its 1966 master plan. In a new type of zoning district, "residential development use," a developer had to obtain a special permit indicating that municipal services, like fire houses and sewers, were readily available, with each facility assigned a point value. Fifteen points were needed to obtain a permit. In 1968, Ramapo had also adopted a capital improvements program indicating when improvements would be made over a period of 18 years. If they didn't want to wait for the infrastructure, developers could install the necessary services on their own — and a few of them did, according to John McAlevey, who was elected town supervisor in 1965. After challenges in the lower courts, the town won conclusively in the Court of Appeals. The concept of timing and sequential controls in planning was validated. Generally hailed as a landmark decision, Golden v. Ramapo put the town on the map, but the map of the town looked very different then, with large swaths of unincorporated land, compared to the checkerboard of villages occupying its territory today. What happened in the intervening years between the bold master plan of 1966 and the present day, when Ramapo's administration is struggling to put a comprehensive plan in place? Does the profusion of villages help contain sprawl, or reinforce it? Golden days There were only five villages in the town in 1965. John McAlevey and his team roared into office on the strength of a platform of controlled growth to help control escalating school taxes, brought on by the explosion in population in the two decades after World War II. Ramapo's population grew by 70 percent in the 1950s alone, jumping from 20,584 in 1950 to 35,064 a decade later. The master plan that was crafted for the town was instituted in 1966, and after three years of research, the managed growth program — with the 15-point system — was started in 1969. The Development Easement Acquisition Commission (DEACOM) had been created in 1967 to provide tax relief for landowners with developable property — in an effort to relieve them of the tax pressure that was forcing many of them to sell. A campaign flyer for a local election held in 1969 listed what had been accomplished in the late 1960s: a six-month moratorium on residential construction; adoption of a master plan and a new zoning ordinance to implement it; adoption of DEACOM; adoption of a mandatory density resolution providing open space in each development; creation of the Ramapo Department of Parks and Recreation and the Department of Public Works; adoption of a six-year capital public works program; and adoption of the final growth control legislation, linking housing construction to the availability of municipal services and facilities. In an interview this August, former Supervisor McAlevey recalled Ramapo's controlled growth program."The moral underpinning of the anti-sprawl program, the thing which persuaded the courts one, that it was not an exclusionary program, and two, that it was not an unconstitutional deprivation of property without compensation (a "taking" under the Fifth Amendment of the federal Constitution), were the capital improvement program and DEACOM," he said. What fought sprawl, he added, was "protection against premature subdivision, i.e., subdivisions which leapfrog developable areas in favor of cheaper outlying acreage, hence distorting logical development." In other words, McAlevey said, "our Ramapo program was predicated on the assumption of full build-out of the town according to its master plan within a span of 18 years." There was considerable opposition to the proposed 300 units of public housing, and only 200 were actually built, McAlevey recalls. He said there were also some attacks on the lack of multi-family housing, but the villages of Suffern and Spring Valley already had zoning in place for that, and the intention was to focus multi-family housing in those areas. Village voices Another sticking point was a town law, adopted in 1967, that prevented the incorporation of additional villages in the unincorporated portions of the town unless the town approved of them. At that time, state law required only 300 people to create a village and at least three square miles, McAlevey recalls. "A builder could buy himself a village. We figured this [town law] could be a deterrent." The rationale, he says, is that "we had a right to protect the integrity of the sophisticated planning work we took so much time to install — to prevent sprawl." Still, McAlevey says, the town expected the law to be nullified — and in 1982, it was. The New York Court of Appeals overturned the provision in the law requiring town board approval. During the 15 years that the law was in effect, not a single new village was incorporated in Ramapo. After the law was overturned in court in 1982, the number of villages doubled, from six to 12, by 1991. McAlevey left office in 1973. He says his successor as supervisor, Morton Baron, stopped building under the capital program because of the fiscal crunch that affected the whole nation in the mid-1970s. The cost of government borrowing was high in those days, McAlevey says, but he unsuccessfully urged the capital program be continued anyway because expensive bonds could have been redeemed and rolled over at lower rates when the crisis was over. Once the decision was made not to build, "the town had no choice but to start giving variances to builders when requested," McAlevey says. Manuel S. Emanuel, AICP, the consultant to Ramapo when McAlevey was supervisor, says that the thrust of the master plan was to maintain the town in a rural setting. The general intent was to confine density to areas bordering the villages — the six in existence at that time (the late 1960s) were Spring Valley, Suffern, Sloatsburg, Hillburn, Pomona, and New Square — and to allow development in stages. "The original vision was that we'd have an opportunity to control growth in the town area. Village creation diluted the process," Emanuel says. Timing was a problem, too. Not all the funding for capital improvements was in place when the fiscal crisis of the 1970s occurred, and Ramapo was trying to control growth by itself, without any cooperation from surrounding towns. Growth control would have been more successful if it had been done regionally, Emanuel adds. "But there wasn't a universal vision," he says. "The county's master plan had no teeth, also no comprehensive housing policy." Without zoning powers, "the system breaks down," he adds. When the town administration changed in the 1970s, Emanuel adds, it simply eliminated the mechanism for establishing points, so for all practical purposes, the only thing left was conventional zoning. According to records in the Town Clerk's office, by 1984 both DEACOM and the 15-point-plan zoning ordinance had been repealed. In court In November 2002, the Government Law Center of the Albany Law School and the Land Use Law Center at the Pace University School of Law organized a conference to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Golden v. Ramapo. Speaking at Pace, attorney Robert Freilich, AICP, said the New York Appeals Court's decision marked "the first time that any court in the U.S. had upheld the concept of restricting development in metropolitan areas through comprehensive planning or zoning without compensation." In a phone interview this summer, Freilich added that Golden v. Ramapo formed the basis for every growth management system in the U.S., including those in San Diego, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon. Eventually, "the town went to hell in a handbasket," Freilich said, "but that has nothing to do with the legacy of Ramapo." Now a partner in Freilich, Leitner & Carlisle of Kansas City, Missouri, Freilich was the town attorney for Ramapo when the 1966 master plan was adopted. Another important player was Richard May, FAICP , who developed an earlier growth management program for Clarkstown with the late planning law expert Norman Williams. May served as director of planning for Rockland County, which encompasses Ramapo and Clarkstown plus three other towns, from 1953 to 1958. After working overseas for many years, he returned to Rockland County and has been a keen observer of the Town of Ramapo recently. May's plan for Clarkstown used "progressive" zoning" as a way to stop leapfrogging development. May thinks Ramapo's master plan of the 1960s was "well and professionally done," and that the national significance of Golden v. Ramapo is "monumental" in that it was upheld by the courts, a recognition that growth control was a problem. Pace Institute attorney John Nolon concurs. "Ramapo's land use devices and the courts' sanction of them are credited with accelerating the incipient growth management movement and setting the stage for smart growth," he wrote in the Winter 2003 issue of The Urban Lawyer. Not everyone applauded the Ramapo system. Attorney Milton Shapiro, a local property owner and one of the plaintiffs in Golden v. Ramapo, says the area's builders' association challenged the 15-point plan. "If you assume all the dire circumstances that were set forth in the preamble to the zoning ordinance — like the roads were horrendous, the schools inadequate — then it was a terrible, emergency circumstance. You had to allow it. But Ramapo was no different from anywhere else." Even ardent supporters of the original Ramapo plan don't see much of an impact today because the plan was so short lived. McAlevey says the program basically stopped when funding for the capital program fell apart in the mid-1970s. Lack of enforcement of the existing zoning laws, the ease of forming a village in New York State, and some residents' fears that the town could not protect the zoning that was already in place led to Ramapo's fragmentation, he adds. Flash forward By 1991 Ramapo had 12 villages instead of six, and today there are at least five more on the drawing board, although New York State law requires 500 people and five square miles for village incorporation. The area of the unincorporated town had dwindled to 30 percent by 1991, when the village of Airmont was incorporated. At 89 square miles, Ramapo is the largest of Rockland County's five towns, and, according to the 2000 Census, comprises over a third of its population (108,905 out of 286,753 people). While Rockland County's population grew by eight percent between 1990 and 2000, Ramapo grew by 16 percent. "My sense is that sprawl has predominated," says James Cymore, Rockland County Commissioner of Planning. Perhaps if the points program had prevailed, "growth would have been concentrated around that infrastructure, and would have left those other areas green," he adds. Then again, the Ramapo development pattern "is no different from other towns that didn't have the points program," he notes. Law and demographics New York State law requires the county to review any zoning or development proposals within 500 feet of town or village boundaries, or any municipal building, county or state parks, roads, streams, county or state facilities, highway garages. The number of requests for zoning changes rose in the early 1990s, says Arlene Miller, the county's deputy planning commissioner. As a result, the county started disapproving the requests, saying the town had to make changes comprehensively. However, its disapproval was not binding on the town. "The villages were all formed because of a loss of confidence in the capacity of the town government to adequately protect their neighborhoods against an influx of non-conformists who disdained the constraints of the town zoning ordinance," McAlevey says. "But no villages formed as a result of the Ramapo master plan." What many refer to as the "Balkanization" of Ramapo has had some deleterious effects, says Cymore. "Certain things transcend village and town boundaries — a county road system, county streams. A road could pass through five or six municipalities. For county planning and facilities, it's getting harder to make the improvements. Regional planning projects and drainage and road improvements are much more difficult." Robert Frankel, the mayor of one of the newer villages, Wesley Hills, says there was an enormous upheaval in demographics when poor people started moving to Ramapo from New York City in the 1970s. "We've tried to preserve a suburban lifestyle," Frankel says. "We formed Wesley Hills because we thought we could do a better job with the existing rules of the Town of Ramapo. They couldn't keep their eye on everything." Many of Ramapo's villages are not equipped to take on all the responsibilities of a local government, May says. Road maintenance, sewers, parks, recreation, police and fire protection, and welfare are provided by the town and county. "The Ramapo story is the continuing struggle for land occupancy and development control," he adds. Plan ahead? A new plan has been in the works in Ramapo since 2001 — and may be adopted within the next six months, according to local officials. It became a legal necessity after the town lost a lawsuit brought by the West Branch Conservation Association, a local land trust. West Branch opposed a downzoning that would have converted 30 acres of farmland to a shopping center with a 60,000-square-foot building in the northeastern part of town. West Branch opposed the development because of its potential effects on the area's watershed. In agreeing with the plaintiffs, the court noted that the rezoning was not enacted "as part of a well-considered and comprehensive plan." Christopher St. Lawrence, Ramapo's current supervisor, says the goal of the new comprehensive plan will be to preserve open space, protect the watershed, preserve existing neighborhoods, and revitalize the area in and around the hamlet of Monsey. Some 200 acres in Wesley Hills will become parkland. "The master plan is a balancing act," St. Lawrence says. "We recognize how much people cherish their neighborhoods and want to preserve them. The Monsey area is one of most vibrant communities in Rockland County." Critical environmental areas in the Torne Valley will be established, there will be a formal architectural review process, and an historic preservation local law will be established. "We realized the existing plan was no longer reflecting Ramapo," adds Brian Brophy. "Everybody recognized that to do a master plan was going to be painful." One goal, he notes, is to provide different kinds of housing — to reflect the needs of various ethnic groups within the town. Other concerns are safeguarding the town's water supply, and maintaining infrastructure and roads. Some of the most heated discussions have focused on those issues. Martus Granirer is co-chair of the open space committee working with the town; he sees a real chance to adopt what he calls "resource accountable planning." "How much water, or energy, or any resource can we allocate to this town? Let's keep development under this capacity," Granirer suggests. And, in what sounds like a bit of deja vu, he also says he would like to see controlled growth. "It would give everyone time to figure out what to do next, so the town is not caught in a development crunch," he says. Attorney Doris Ullman, who works for some of the villages, says the mayors worry the infrastructure isn't there to support the proposed growth. "For the first time I can remember, [the mayors] are all speaking as one voice. They are concerned about the lack or ability of services to take care of people." There are some flash points, like the intersection of Routes 306 and 59, where multi-family zoning is being planned, and the Patrick Farm, which had originally been scheduled for planned residential development, but is now limited to single-family home construction on one-acre lots or larger. "We believe the town should provide for a balanced housing stock, a range of housing opportunities," says David Stolman, AICP, a planner for Frederick P. Clark Associates, of Rye, New York, who is working on the comprehensive plan. "To exclude multi-family development would not be consistent with achieving that goal." Multi-family housing is just as contentious an issue today as it was in the 1960s. So, too, is environmental protection. Today, though, multi-family housing still is not mandated by state law, whereas environmental quality reviews are. Those reviews go part of the way to ensuring that development doesn't outpace infrastructure, says Stolman. The new plan is still a work in progress. But even if all the differences are ironed out, can sprawl be contained in such a small area? Some are skeptical about that prospect — simply because of the history of the Ramapo villages. "The villages were formed in a futile effort to do what they perceived the town was not doing," says John McAlevey. "Once incorporated, however, villages do not go away." Julienne Marshall is a freelance writer in Rockland County, New York.
On the Web Pace University School of Law Land Use Law Center: www.law.pace.edu/landuse/index.html The Urban Lawyer: www.abanet.org/statelocal/urbanlawyer/home.html Town of Ramapo: www.ramapo.org Reading | ||
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