The latest plans for Winston Farm include 799 residential units, a shopping center and other facilities.

The latest Winston Farms plans were unveiled during a Saugerties City Council meeting last week, with developers saying their 840-acre project addresses concerns raised since the first draft plans were filed nearly three years ago. Some members of the public said they disagreed.

The Draft Generic Environmental Impact Statement (DGEIS) titled “An Opportunity for Transformative Development in Partnership with the Saugerties Community” was reviewed during the City Council meeting held Wednesday, Aug. 14. The 25-page summary document describes the project as a mixed-use development of “live, work, play with job creation, housing opportunities, smart growth potential, and tourism.”

The project, developers say, will generate an expected economic benefit of $55,088,971 in employee earnings from new jobs, $4,465,383 in tourism industry employee earnings, and $3,099,563 in new household expenditures. The document also estimates approximately $457,469,231 in construction expenditures associated with the development and an increase of an estimated 125,925 new tourists each year, which equates to $13,851,750 per year.

“This will create thousands of jobs and provide the city, Saugerties (Central) School District and the fire district with consistent tax revenue year after year, which will help keep taxes low and fund the municipal services that Saugerties residents rely on every day,” the DGEIS states.

The current proposal includes 799 residential units with a combination of townhomes and apartments, serving an estimated 1,746 residents. The plan for the 840-acre project also includes 250,000 square feet of commercial space, a 150-room boutique hotel, a conference center with another 250 hotel rooms, a 5,000-seat indoor performance space, a 100-cabin campground and about 250,000 square feet of laboratory or light industrial space.

Changes to previous concepts include eliminating a planned water park, removing an outdoor adventure park and hiking trails from the wooded areas, converting a proposed amphitheater into an indoor performing arts center and relocating roads to avoid wetlands.

The plan also reaffirms the developers’ stated commitment to open space. It also claims it will be self-sufficient, with two wells producing a combined 270 gallons of water per minute, meaning, they believe, they won’t have to connect the development to city water supplies.

“Winston Farm is committed to smart growth,” the DGEIS summary reads. “That includes ‘green, sustainable building techniques and water-saving technology.’”

The summary added that the final plans will be consistent with the City of Saugerties’ Climate Action Plan.

The property is currently owned by three local residents and businessmen, Tony Montano, John Mullen and Randy Richers, who purchased it in July 2020 for $4 million. City Supervisor Fred Costello said that’s a contrast to the problems the city of Kingston has had with real estate investor and developer Neil Bender.

“You’ll see them drinking coffee,” Costello said. “They’re not hiding from the community by asking lawyers to represent them.”

Resident Lauren Ruberg, who supported the plans at the city council meeting, expressed approval.

“It’s not just locals,” Ruberg said. “We’re talking about generations. We have their parents here, they’re here, their kids are here, their grandkids are here. They already provide services to our community through businesses that provide jobs to people in our community.”

But other speakers questioned what the development would do to the local environment without careful consideration. Catskill Mountainkeeper project manager Kate Hagerman said Winston Farm “is more than just a place for developers to exploit for profit.”

“Given that this major development will occur on the headlands of a 7,000-acre aquifer, … the city (should) comply with the Winston Farm High-Tech Feasibility Study and Master Plan, which calls for leaving 73 percent of the open space undeveloped.”

Hagerman said the ecosystems currently on the property “are hard to quantify in dollars and cents, but they translate into clean water quality and natural landscapes that we all enjoy, as well as habitat for rare, threatened and endangered species. All of that will be lost if this project, as presented today, is not subjected to careful and rigorous consideration.”

Local resident Sarah Lesher agrees.

“I also share the concerns of many people about the loss of a sacred site and the impossibility of recovering it,” Lesher said.

Winston Farm is perhaps best known both in Saugerties and beyond as the site of Woodstock ’94, held in August 1994 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the original Woodstock Festival. However, plans that ultimately did not materialize included a community college, a casino, a landfill and incinerator, and a high-tech business park.

The developers emphasized that the current DGEIS is not a land development plan, but merely the next conceptual step in what they hope to ultimately build at Winston Farm. Supervisor Costello said the city will take into account the opinions of all interested parties as the project progresses, however diverse they may be.

“I think there’s a spectrum of perspectives on this project,” Costello said. “I think a lot of people would like to see nothing happen and everything stay the way it is. And then the other extreme is we do nothing, and if it’s not this group of developers, another group of developers are taking advantage of the current zoning rights that reflect a ’60s-style zoning with a couple of strip malls in front and apartment buildings in the back, and I think that’s a terrible idea. And then there’s everything in between.”

Costello added that he understands what conservationists mean about the Winston Farm development and hopes a way can be found to continue the project while maintaining those ideals.

“There’s a lot of expression of protection for open space and concern about potential impacts to water,” he said. “Those are valid concerns, and I think we share them. We’ll rely on the data and the studies, including the DGEIS.”