Sarah Taddeo

@sjtaddeo

The Webster town board acted on a documentation sticking point related to a local tomato greenhouse proposal at a special board meeting Thursday.

The board granted Intergrow Greenhouses, a tomato producer that proposed building 75 acres of greenhouses on an approximately 114-acre parcel in town, permission to act outside certain stipulations of a conservation easement on the property.

Intergrow wants to build on land at the corner of Salt and State Roads in Webster — the parcel has been owned by the Schreiber family for years and is now under contract to be sold to Intergrow, should the greenhouse proposal go through.

The 2005 easement prohibits housing development on about 394 acres of land in the area, including this parcel, but allows for agricultural development. But neighbors have expressed concern that the greenhouse proposal doesn’t fit under the easement, saying that the facility seems more like a factory and less like a farming operation.

Intergrow representatives have argued that the proposal falls within the easement's terms, but a sticking point in the document’s requirements sent Intergrow representatives and neighbors to the town board Thursday.

At issue was an easement clause that says buildings can only be erected on designated "Farmstead Reservation Areas" and on up to 5 percent of land outside those areas on the property.

This allowable building space totals about 15 acres on the parcel in question, said Intergrow co-owner Dirk Biemans — much less than the approximately 75 acres the company wants to use to build greenhouses.

The town granted the company permission to build outside those areas, after considering whether allowing more building space would violate the purposes of the easement or jeopardize the parcel’s agricultural viability or soils.

“I don’t see how (the project) violates the primary or secondary purposes of the easement,” said board member William Abbott. “It doesn’t impair the potential for long-term agricultural use of the property.”

The primary purpose of the easement is essentially to keep the land for agriculture, forestry, and the production of food and livestock, and to protect the land’s soils and prevent any use that would impede the area’s agricultural viability, according to the easement.

Some residents at the meeting felt the town board didn’t take a close enough look at the project as it relates to this criteria, and were concerned about whether the land could be farmed again if Intergrow were to move elsewhere in the future.

Topsoil on the property will be removed for the construction of the greenhouses, and the soil stuck under the greenhouse roofs could start to decay, said Penfield resident Chuck Lang, who lives about two miles from the proposed building site.

“It won’t be the same soil — it takes years to build that up again,” he said.

Also, the easement states that soil on a large portion of the easement’s total 394 acres is classified as “Prime Farmland Soils” or “Soils of Statewide Significance,” as defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service.

The town board isn’t completing its full duty of digging into the plan’s details before moving forward with this step of the project, said Lang — “We all feel the town board has done people a great injustice,” he said.

The project would eventually bring about 150 jobs to Webster, said Biemans. While there were other options for development sites in the area, this one was relatively flat and had the right utilities, such as gas lines, needed for the facility’s operation, he said.

The proposal will now go back to the town planning board, which is considering site plan approval for the project. The proposal is next scheduled to come up for discussion at 7 p.m. Oct. 4, at a planning board meeting at Webster Town Hall, 1000 Ridge Road.

STADDEO@Gannett.com