Tempers flare up at Greenport Planning Board Meeting

Town of Greenport, NY, August 26, 2026 — Last night's Planning Board meeting at Greenport's town hall turned into a surprisingly testy affair as both applicants and Planning Board members raised their voices in frustration on several occasions. The ordinarily mild-mannered Planning Board engineer Ray Jurkowski found himself at the center of most of these kerfuffles although not always for faults of his own.

Early into the meeting, AnimalKind, proposing to build a new feline rescue center at 4401 Route 23, right across Columbia-Greene Community College, disagreed with Jurkowski who asserted that written approval by Columbia County Department of Health for the septic installation was required. The applicant cited from emails they had received from the Department of Health which stated that their approval was not needed to get the approval from the Greenport Planning Board and continued that they "are not going to stand in between you and the County Health Department".

As neither side was willing to cede ground, Planning Board chair Ed Stiffler proposed to grant approval conditioned on the Health Department providing a letter that no permit was required. This seemed to satisfy both belligerents and conditional approval was granted by unanimous vote.

Wellness Hub

During the workshop immediately preceding the Planning Board meeting, chair Ed Stiffler already predicted that the Wellness Hub developers were going to push for a full SEQRA review that evening and that turned out to be true.

The applicants were present in full force and brought their big guns: Cheryl Roberts, Executive Director of the Greenburger Center for Justice, Kevin O'Connor, CEO of RUPCO, and Jen Crawford, President of Crawford & Associates and engineer for the Wellness Hub project.

When the Wellness Hub applicants were called up, Crawford spent a good five minutes enumerating in order all the documents they had provided to the Planning Board since February 23. Ray Jurkowski acknowledged that these documents had indeed been received but noted that some of the most recent documents were not submitted as hard copies. In the ensuing exchange, both sides conceded that they weren't quite sure what had happened to those.

Eventually, Terresa M. Bakner, attorney for the applicant, took the floor and laid out their objective: "From our perspective, what we want to do for this very important project is having clear path to get to a SEQRA determination". She went on and stated that "it was identified in this community that there was a substantial need for this type of housing".

Not everyone present in the audience that evening would unconditionally agree with this assessment as most of the Wellness Hub's inhabitants would likely not be Greenport residents.

The Wellness Hub initially came out of Hudson when then-mayor Kamal Johnson reached out to Francis Greenburger in the wake of the George Floyd murder in 2020 to discuss the creation of a plan that could help address the mental health crisis.

This plan became the Wellness Hub which was to be built not in Hudson but in Greenport. One explanation for this can be found in Greenport's lack of zoning which makes any development considerably easier than in neighboring Hudson. Another likely reason was that Paul Colarusso donated the land for the Wellness Hub site.

Bakner continued and explained that a SEQRA negative declaration—i.e. an official determination by the Planning Board that a proposed project will not have significant impacts on the environment—was a prerequisite to successful grant applications.

Cheryl Roberts from the Greenburger Center for Justice added that "we have $43M in grants that have been applied for and they can't be considered applications unless SEQRA is done. We were hoping it was going to be done tonight. Clearly, that's not happening".

It Briefly Heated Up

A rare event at a Greenport Planning Board meeting unfolded when RUTCO CEO Kevin O'Connor tried to interrupt Ray Jurkowski for which he got sternly reprimanded by Planning Board chair Ed Stiffler:

Wait your turn!

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Tempers calmed down again quickly and at the end of all the bickering, it was agreed that the Wellness Hub applicants will give a comprehensive presentation during the next Planning Boarding meeting in September outlining which parts of the site plan application will be owned and maintained by the Town. After that presentation, a SEQRA determination would be made.

Despite the brief flare-up of drama that evening, the Wellness Hub application still appears on track. While not every Greenport resident may be unconditionally backing this project, the Greenport Planning Board has generally been supportive and its main concerns continue to revolve around the town's known Achilles heels: water and wastewater.