The City of Kingston adopted a new comprehensive plan on April 5, 2016, a vision and guide which replaces our old 1961 Comprehensive Plan. This new plan is called Kingston 2025. Active members of the community made sure to get the public's input into the Kingston 2025 plan, but the consultants didn't do much to facilitate this. Though, of course, public input should have been the primary focus of developing a document about the goals of the City, the budget was small, $50,000 for the Comp. Plan and $50,000 for the zoning work to follow, both done by Shuster-Turner Associates. Daniel Shuster was the primary consultant for both comprehensive plans (1961 and 2025).

 

The 1961 Comprehensive plan was put together to get funding for Urban Renewal, the project that destroyed many architecturally significant buildings in the City and designed segregation into our City planning. You can learn more about the devastation urban renewal had on our City through the great work of the Lost Rondout Project.

After Kingston 2025 was adopted, a committee to produce a new zoning code (the rules that support the goals of the plan) was formed. The committee (also facilitated Dan Shuster) met sporadically over the course of approximately a year, held some informational sessions and public forums (though public input was not reflected in any changes), and submitted “Proposed Comprehensive Amendments” to the City before Shuster-Turner's contract concluded on December 31, 2017. That proposed zoning document only covers a fraction of what the comprehensive plan called for, and it's the same kind of problematic zoning code that we have already, which is a use based code (AKA Euclidian). Uses are separated, and there are many restrictions as to what can be done or built. Accessibility, inclusion, and efficiency suffer. And, used based codes don't even get a predictable result. Much sprawl results, and cars are prioritized over housing. There is a better way. See this page for an overview of Form-Based Codes: https://formbasedcodes.org/definition/ . Also see , https://transect.org/transect.html for the way form-based codes designate zones.

​

Around that time, Mayor Noble stated that there was much rezoning work still to be done, and announced that a new group would be assembled to continue the job. In February 2019, a newly formed Zoning Task Force began to meet. After careful consideration of the comprehensive plan and many other supporting documents the Zoning Task Force thought it best to abandon the existing zoning code in its entirety. An RFP a request for proposals (RFP) was developed to seek a consultant qualified to take on the monumental task of helping us design a framework for our City to move forward as a collaborative community, addressing the challenges our City is facing and designing a land use planning framework that supports all the members of our community, promotes inclusive sustainable growth and preserves the fantastic architecture and character that makes our city unique. In the RFP the Zoning Task Force outlined a number of community goals to give the respondents an idea of the direction we envision the City to take while requiring them to perform a significant amount of community outreach to ensure that the result of this project includes the views of all our community members, especially those that have been overlooked and not heard in the past. In the search for qualified planners to rewrite Kingston's zoning code as a form-based code four proposals were submitted, after careful consideration the task force chose Dover Kohl and Partners.

Here is Dover, Kohl and Partners proposal for the crafting of a new code for Kingston:
https://www.kingston-ny.gov/filestorage/8399/10476/15081/RFP_DK&P-_Fee_Proposal_(full).pdf

Just before the state of emergency was declared, the Common Council Finance and Audit Committee voted unanimously in favor of funding the work of Dover, Kohl and Partners. However, before the resolution could be voted on at the April 2020 Common Council meeting, we were facing the pandemic, so it was sent back to committee. Since then, bidding wars on homes have become the norm, the Planning Board has seen multiple lot line adjustment requests and the Common Council has been asked to consider many band-aid style and site specific zoning code changes.

​

In early 2021 this ad-hoc group of concerned citizens with the help of Common Council Alderman at large Andrea Shaut and First ward Council member Jeffrey Ventura Morell began a campaign of public outreach and information sharing with the goal to move the process forward. We pushed to get the issue back on the agenda of the common council and got the project fully funded in April 2021 with a nearly unanimous vote.

​

In early September 2021 Mayor Noble signed the contract with Dover Kohl & Partners allowing this process to officially start with City support. Our group has hit the ground running helping to assemble community groups to become stakeholders and reaching out to the community at large to educate, inform and collect feedback. This website was put together in late September to provide a platform for information and help collect that feedback.

If we want to have a city built by many hands, for strength and resiliency, equitably as we grow, we need to replace our overly complicated zoning code with one that allows all neighborhoods to grow incrementally from the bottom up. This process is how we are doing that.

​

​