Quick Note: This is the first installment of a three-part series examining Walworth’s Blue Heron development controversy. Once upon a time, I served on a planning and zoning board. It was a fascinating experience. And after receiving a lot of emails about this particular project — I wanted to share some thoughts.
For almost a year, I’ve been watching Walworth Town Board and Planning Board meetings with a lot of interest.
There’s a development controversy unfolding around the Blue Heron golf course that could be turned, at least in part, into a housing development. But there’s also a specific line of logic that keeps coming up at public meetings and online.
It goes a little like this: Walworth should declare a townwide moratorium on development, stop the current process, and remove the people associated with it.
Before getting into why that’s a seriously flawed idea, I want to make something clear.
I’m not here to debate the merits of this particular development or whether taking a golf course and turning it into housing is a good idea.
In fact, as someone who’s said more times than I can remember that Blue Heron was my favorite golf course in the region, I don’t love seeing the property go by way of housing. That’s a challenging thing for me to admit because I also spend a great deal of time advocating for more housing across Upstate New York.
As I’ve said before in this column, two things can be true at once.
I can believe we desperately need more housing and still be disappointed that a particular property won’t be a golf course anymore. I can also recognize that Walworth has a lot of developable land and that this certainly isn’t the only place where housing could be built.
There are other properties. There are other possibilities. There are legitimate questions about traffic, drainage, density, infrastructure and whether a proposal like this fits the long-term vision of the community.
But property owners have rights, too.
If a proposed development is permitted under the town’s zoning, satisfies the applicable standards and completes the legally required review process, simply denying it because residents don’t like it isn’t necessarily an option.
At least not without creating legal exposure for the community — and, ultimately, taxpayers.
That part of the discussion has been basically absent.
A development moratorium isn’t inherently illegal. It’s also a good idea sometimes.
Municipalities use moratoriums often enough that the lay person knows they exist, even if they don’t necessarily follow local politics. A well-constructed moratorium can give a town time to update its comprehensive plan, rewrite zoning regulations, study infrastructure limitations or address a specific problem that existing law doesn’t adequately handle.
But a moratorium is a planning tool. It’s not an emergency veto.
It has to have a legitimate public purpose, a reasonable duration, proper adoption procedures, and a definite expiration date. The town also has to identify what work will be completed while development is paused.
A municipality can’t simply stop development and spend the next year wandering through an undefined “review.” The purpose of a moratorium is to preserve the status quo while officials complete a specific planning task.
That leads to the question Walworth would have to answer:
What specific defect exists in the town’s comprehensive plan, zoning law, subdivision regulations, road standards, drainage requirements, water capacity or development-review process — and what exactly would the town accomplish while development is frozen?
That question can’t be answered with, “People are angry about this project.”
Maybe the town’s road standards don’t adequately account for the cumulative traffic generated by multiple subdivisions. Maybe the zoning map no longer aligns with the comprehensive plan. Maybe drainage regulations fail to address some downstream impact. Maybe water or sewer capacity is uncertain.
Those could be legitimate reasons for action.
A moratorium covering major subdivisions in a particular district while the town updates road-capacity or drainage standards is easily defensible. However, a townwide prohibition on development adopted because residents oppose one application would be much harder to justify.
It’d also punish property owners and businesses with no connection to this project. A blanket moratorium would delay new homes, small subdivisions, commercial projects, business expansions, and other proposals that fully comply with the town’s rules.
That’s a lot of collateral damage to create over one project.
There’s also a practical problem: A moratorium may not accomplish what opponents believe it would accomplish.
Moratoriums operate prospectively. They can pause certain pending applications or prevent new ones from advancing, depending on how the local law is written. They don’t automatically erase approvals that have already been granted.
The exact answer depends on where the project stands, which approvals have been issued, what conditions remain outstanding and whether the applicant has acquired vested rights. But the idea that the Town Board can declare a moratorium and simply force the entire process back to the beginning isn’t realistic. Especially since a moratorium cannot be drafted and adopted overnight.
The legal risk grows if the public record shows the moratorium was designed to target a particular property owner, which would almost certainly be the case here.
New York generally allows municipalities to change land-use rules while applications are pending. But courts have recognized exceptions when officials engage in bad-faith delay, manipulate administrative procedures, or interfere with an application to prevent an approval that otherwise would’ve been required under existing law.
I can’t emphasize enough how much that matters here, because a pattern has most-definitely been established.
If officials were to say the town is adopting a moratorium to stop this particular project, those words could become part of a court record. The same is true if officials openly discuss delaying an application until the rules can be rewritten against it. Given what has been said at meetings to date, it wouldn’t be hard to connect these dots.
The likely challenge could come through an Article 78 or a related lawsuit claiming that the town acted arbitrarily, unlawfully, or beyond its authority.
Those things can become expensive very quickly.
Especially if the town loses.
That bill wouldn’t be paid by the people demanding a moratorium at meetings or online. It’d be paid by Walworth taxpayers.
The people raising concerns about development have every right to do so. They should ask hard questions about roads, drainage, density, infrastructure and community character.
But a townwide moratorium isn’t a magic wand, and it shouldn’t be treated like one.
A legitimate moratorium starts with an identified planning problem and ends with a completed planning solution. It can’t start with, “We don’t like this project,” and end with, “Let’s stop everything until we figure out how to kill it.”
This is the first part of a three-part series. I’ll link to the other two parts below when they’re live on Substack. But, if you want to receive them by email as soon as they’re published — drop your address below — it’s totally free!
