WILMINGTON — The Wilmington Town Council this past Tuesday evening approved funding for an engineering site plan review for six new housing units along state Route 86 and set a date for a public hearing on reinstating the Zoning Board of Appeals.

The board also pushed reviewing a resolution governing the short-term vacation rental cap exemption process and Supervisor Favor Smith set a new financial report standard for future board meetings.

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ZBA

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The board set a public hearing on reinstating the Zoning Board of Appeals for its next regular meeting, which is on Aug. 13.

The ZBA was dissolved in 2016 because it did not have enough members to continue to function as a board. Wilmington currently has a combined planning and zoning board, but the reinstatement of a separate ZBA is “vital” to the separation of powers in local government, Smith wrote in an email on Friday.

“ZBAs get to hear cases from those upset with decisions from the codes department and the planning board,” he wrote. “Having the same planning board put on a different hat to review someone’s complaint about its own decision doesn’t work well. That only leaves starting a lawsuit.”

Councilor Tim Follos said on Tuesday that the board’s progress on bringing back the ZBA was “very positive.”

“Definitely, I think we’re all in agreement on 99 — if not 100% — of this,” he said.

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Housing

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The town closed on a more than nine-acre plot of land along state Route 86 on Nov. 28 of last year, paving the way for a housing development built in partnership with Adirondack Roots, formerly known as the Housing Assistance Program of Essex County.

The land was purchased for $90,000 from June and Paul Coarding and Clayton Walton using a $123,112 grant the town received from the Northern Border Regional Commission in 2019. The town used another $9,000 from the grant to cover engineering costs to test the soil, Smith said. The money was granted to Wilmington to buy a property where it could install a decentralized sewer system, but the commission eventually approved the reallocation of the funds toward a housing development.

On Tuesday, the town council voted unanimously to use the remaining funds — which total $24,000 — to go toward creating site plan review materials.

“Originally, the town had promised the (NBRC) that they would use it toward site plan work — actual physical work,” Smith said. “We’d rather use the money for actual drawings and site plan engineering so (Adirondack Roots) could keep moving forward with their permitting process.”

The NBRC approved this change of fund usage. The grant is a reimbursement grant, which means that Wilmington will initially pay for the work out of town funds and the NBRC will reimburse the town’s expenditures.

Smith, who sits on the Essex County Board of Supervisors’ Low and Moderate Income Housing Development Task Force, said that with projects like this, Wilmington is on the right trajectory with housing.

“I think Wilmington should be congratulated for taking a step in that kind of direction for this type of housing,” Smith said.

Adirondack Roots is slated to build six apartments in three townhouses on the land with a $1.3 million grant the organization received from the New York state Division of Housing and Community Renewal’s Small Rental Development Initiative this past October.

The six units will not take up all of the lot, which is located on state Route 86, across from the former Wilderness Inn, and backs up to the West Branch of the AuSable River.

Some of the lot will remain untouched due to its proximity to the AuSable River, while the rest will remain potentially developable.

Follos said he’d be interested in creating public trails and river access on the remaining land, and the board agreed to continue discussion about potential uses for that land at a later date.

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STR exemptions

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The board took no concrete action on its STR exemption resolution Tuesday but did provide an STR update and scheduled a review of the exemption language for its next work session.

Last month, the board passed amendments to its short-term vacation rental law following 14 months of debate. The new law capped the number of STRs in Wilmington at 150, mandated STR inspections every other year and reduced the term of STR permits to one year.

While the law passed in its entirety at that meeting, the board opted to vote on it item by item due to internal disagreements on some components of the law. Follos and Councilor Laura Dreissigacker Hooker voted against the clause that allowed for exemptions to be made to the STR cap in cases of hardship, while Smith said later he would not have voted for the cap unless there was an exemption mechanism in place. Councilor Darin Forbes ultimately voted against the cap and for the exemption mechanism.

As of Tuesday, 146 active STRs were registered in Wilmington, one more than last month.

“We haven’t reached the cap yet, and we haven’t had anybody applying immediately, so this is not necessarily urgent,” Smith said.

Follos and Smith disagreed at Tuesday’s meeting about the nature of the STR cap — Smith believes the cap is a moratorium, and therefore an exemption mechanism was legally necessary, while Follos believes the cap is not a moratorium and there is no exemption necessary.

“Several towns, including our neighbors to the south (North Elba), they have caps without exemption processes. They’re just hard caps,” Follos said.

“To me, it’s not just the legal part,” Smith said. “It’s also the better thing to do. It’s fair.”

He added that the resolution the board is working on regarding the exemption process will help the board “decide cases fairly and consistently.”

Financial reports

In light of the recommendations that the state Comptroller’s office made to the town of Keene following its audit of the town’s financial procedures, Smith said Wilmington would also be adjusting its procedures by requiring the supervisor to deliver a monthly financial report to the board.

“Each month, I’ll be giving you a financial report as they suggested Keene should do. We’ll be starting to do that in August,” he said. “(We’ll) get into a routine here with it, and then we’ll be able to produce that for the public and it’ll be part of the record.”