MANAGEMENT ALTERNATIVES

During the course of its work, the Master Plan Committee preliminarily examined the various techniques available to the Town to guide the location, character and quality of future development. In general, these techniques were determined to fall within the following four categories:

• Ownership of fee or lesser interest in land, including easements and rights-of-way;
• Regulation, including the traditional practices of the control of the use of land and structures through zoning and the control of land parcellization through subdivision regulations;
• Taxation, such as the incentives offered in New York State for the preservation of certain productive farmland and forestlands; and
• Investment, through the addition of capital improvements such as roads, water, sewers, and the like.

The Master Plan Committee learned that the municipal application of these techniques is generally governed by State enabling legislation, particularly in the area of land use regulation where the community�s land use and development objectives must be carefully balanced with private property rights and other constitutional guarantees. Within these limitations, the Master Plan Committee identified a number of innovative mechanisms that New York State municipalities have increasingly employed in recent years to complement traditional zoning ordinances and land subdivision regulations and briefly described these measures in its August 1990 "Working Paper: Master Plan Implementation Techniques ¨ Glossary of Terms". Excerpts from the Glossary appear in the Appendices of this Master Plan Committee Report.