As Michael Sweeton looked back on nearly 22 years at the helm of Orange County’s largest town, he said his most far-reaching legacy lay in both land preservation and economic development.
Warwick’s farmland preservation program, which took off with one-time bond money and successfully morphed into a self-sustaining fund, has protected 4,500 acres of productive soil from development.
It is one of the largest land preservation efforts undertaken by a local municipality in New York State, and, to this day, farming remains the biggest business sector in town.
“It gives me some satisfaction that grandchildren of existing residents will see the same landscape that we see today, and that’s not happening in a lot of places,” Mr. Sweeton told The Epoch Times in his office on Oct. 13. “And I argue that it doesn’t prevent development and that it promotes responsible development.”
His other significant achievement is turning a former state prison campus into the town’s first industrial park over a 10-year effort, a rare feat given most other closed prisons still sit vacant and lifeless.
He attributed both feats to a forward-looking mindset, shared by fellow residents and the town board, old-fashioned stubbornness in the face of obstacles, and a strong desire to see his community better off.
“I consider myself lucky to have been raised in Warwick, and I feel like the community itself shaped me,” Mr. Sweeton said, adding that town residents not only filled the void left by the absence of male figures in his childhood but also instilled in him a deep sense of civic responsibilities.
A willingness to compromise and a lack of concern for receiving credit were also significant factors, he added.
Land Preservation: From Bond to Tax
A former greenhouse business owner, Mr. Sweeton ran for Warwick supervisor in 2001 and came into office at a time when the town’s long-brewing preservation movement hit a roadblock.Just the year before, voters had passed a referendum to allow the town to issue a $9.5 million bond for the specific purpose of buying development rights of farmland and other crucial open spaces.
The concept of purchasing development rights—a relatively novel preservation tool at the time in Orange County and even New Year State—was introduced to Warwick by a coalition of forward-looking residents concerned with the development craze since the 1980s.
However, a simultaneous effort in the early 2000s to rewrite the zoning law to allow fewer houses to be built on the same number of acres upset farmers, who took it as a direct attack on their land value.
“Suddenly, the people who had land, the farmers, were not interested in selling their development rights to the town because they were mad at the proposed zoning changes,” he said.
To the credit of the town board, he said, they adopted the cluster zoning concept in 2002, which allows building houses on smaller adjacent slots only if the rest is preserved as open space.
That, along with a policy change by the town board to bear almost all development right transaction costs except for seller’s attorney fees, gradually warmed up the farmer group.
One of the largest farms in town, Brady Farm, decided to sell its development right to the town, and “once Brady came in, the flood gates opened, and we had farm after farm,” Mr. Sweeton said.
Aside from farmland, the preservation bond money also helped retain open spaces for recreational use, such as the beloved Thomas Morahan Waterfront Park in the Village of Greenwood Lake, which helped win over an important ally in the next saga of the preservation movement in town, he said.
Soon, the forward-thinking town governing body wondered how to sustain the preservation effort beyond the $9.5 million bond, and they hit upon another novel concept: real estate transfer tax.
The tax, which at the time was only in practice on Long Island of all New York State, according to the town board’s research, kicks in on the buyer’s side whenever certain pieces of land are sold, and once collected, it can only be used for land preservation purposes.
Once settled on the idea, the town board got the support of a coalition of citizens, drafted up a local law based on those of Long Island towns, and got it introduced into the state legislature.
That was in 2003, and the bill failed to advance out of committees; the following year, the town board reduced the transfer tax rate from 2 percent to 0.75 percent, but the bill died again.
“I was stubborn, and I said, ‘I am not ready to give up yet,’” Mr. Sweeton said.
In 2005, in part thanks to the efforts by then-Assemblywoman Ann Rabbitt, a Greenwood Lake resident who saw the public benefits of land preservation firsthand, the bill was introduced again, passed both chambers and signed by former Gov. George Pataki into law, he said.
Next year, Warwick voters approved the new tax through a local referendum.
To this date, the community preservation fund has amassed $16 million from real estate transactions, about half of which has been spent to preserve nearly 2,000 acres of farmland and another nearly 200 acres of open space, including the former Kutz Camp.
During the process, the town was also able to leverage its funds to obtain matching state and federal grants of over $14 million, almost tripling its own purchasing power.
Redeveloping an Old State Prison
When Mr. Sweeton got wind of the news from a correctional officer that Mid-Orange Correctional Facility in the town would soon be closed, he got together with then-town attorney John Hicks to brainstorm possible solutions for preserving the 730-acre property.“Typically, what the state does when it closes a facility is to board it up, shut the door, and put it on the website for whoever wants to buy it, and its track record of selling and redeveloping these properties is almost zero,” Mr. Sweeton recalled his concerns at the time.
Prisons are inherently challenging to redevelop because they are typically located in remote areas and built on rugged terrains; their unique building structures are also difficult to repurpose.
However, for Mr. Sweeton, the property is in the heart of the community and too valuable to be left vacant, and his board agreed to his idea to buy it from the state.
Negotiations with Albany were full of twists and turns, said Mr. Sweeton. “At one point, I just thought to myself, ‘I am ready to just forget it,’ but again, you take a breath, and you move forward.”
The town stuck it through, and a final agreement said that the part for public use could be bought for $1 and the other part for commercial development for about $3 million.
At this time, local entrepreneur Bob Schluter stepped up to loan the purchasing money at a favorable interest rate to the town, which formed a local development corporation to close the sale with the state in early 2013 and redevelop the property into the town’s first-ever business park.
Then, Orange County Industrial Development Agency (IDA) also stepped in with more than $3 million to lay down infrastructure, such as water and sewage systems, on several sites to get them shovel-ready.
Sales gradually came through, though at a pace slower than Mr. Sweeton’s expectations. First, a large parcel was sold to a Sports Complex developer, and then another lot to a farm brewery.
Things got moving a little faster when the town hit upon the idea of developing a “hemp cluster” at the park comprised of businesses engaged in the medical marijuana industry, he said.
However, as several businesses were in the process of developing sites, COVID-19 hit, and everything ground to a halt following the shutdown policy.
“That was a very hard time. I had sleepless nights,” Mr. Sweeton said. “But to the credit of developers, contractors, and IDA and their willingness to be patient, we got through the tough periods.”
Today, all former prison parcels acquired by the local development corporation for commercial redevelopment were sold and in various stages of development, according to Mr. Sweeton.
With the sale proceeds, the town paid back the loan from Mr. Schluter and reimbursed IDA for most of its infrastructure investments, with about $500,000 remaining in the balance.
“When the prison closed, we lost about 450 prison guards,” Mr. Sweeton said. “Now we have regained probably 200 jobs, and we will regain the rest when Green Thumb Industries comes online.
“It is a transformation from a shuttered state facility into an economic engine for the town, a thing that most others failed to do,” he added.
