POUGHKEEPSIE – A real estate company, a theater owner, and a private citizen are suing the City of Poughkeepsie’s planning board and a developer over a proposed large-scale mixed-use development in the city. The lawsuit was filed in the Dutchess County Supreme Court last week.
All three of the petitioners are represented by attorney Colby Creedon, who also serves on the city’s Industrial Development Agency.
Petitioner Kirchner Realty owns the former Up-To-Date department store building and recently received approval to redevelop the building at 278-288 Main Street into a mixed-use location with commercial space and apartments. They are seeking to prevent the construction of the project known as the Wallace Campus project.
The Wallace project is spearheaded by a New York City developer, known as Wallace Campus Manager LLC, that is also named in the suit.
The plan calls for the demolition, conversion, and new construction, of properties located at 319, 325, 327-329, and 331 Main Street. If built as planned, it would be a mixed-use development with 214 dwelling units and commercial uses, including 6,416 square feet of retail, a daycare facility, a community recreation facility with a climbing wall, and publicly accessible open space on the site.
The Chance Theater and the attached bar formerly known as “The Nuddy” and city resident Zachary Bethea are joining Kirchner in trying to stop the project. All three petitioners claim that the project exacerbates the existing socioeconomic imbalance in the City of Poughkeepsie and will create an additional burden on city agencies including the police and fire departments.
The petitioners, through their attorney, allege that “The project continues the pattern of clustering subsidized housing, and attracting new resource-dependent poverty-stricken residents to the City of Poughkeepsie, an already above-average poor community, with high unemployment, struggling schools, and struggling economy that is losing businesses.”
Creedon claims that the Wallace application to the planning board and the board’s review was “fraught from the beginning – the application included false, misleading information and unsubstantiated claims about the project meeting the needs of the city.”
The lawsuit seeks to have the court require the planning board to vacate their decision to approve the development and also force the developer to complete an environmental impact statement.
