Self-Storage Proposed on Land Zoned for Houses, on Plans From 2018

The concept plan for this project is dated June 15, 2018. The county reviewed it then. It is back, and county staff note the plans in the current referral are the same.

Barram LLC proposes to build a self-storage facility of 31,838 square feet across six buildings on a 2.66 acre parcel off Crego Road in the Town of Van Buren. The Onondaga County Planning Board reviewed it on August 5 as case Z-26-190. The referring board is the Town of Van Buren Planning Board.

The parcel is zoned Low Density Residential, R-40.

Storage units in a residential district

That zoning is the first thing to sit with. R-40 is a residential district, and in most town codes the 40 refers to a minimum lot size of 40,000 square feet, roughly an acre, per house.

A district written to put one house on an acre is being asked to accommodate six commercial buildings and an asphalt yard on 2.66 acres.

Self-storage occupies an awkward place in zoning. It generates almost no traffic compared with retail, produces no noise to speak of, needs no water or sewer for occupants, and closes at night. On those measures it is a gentler neighbor than most commercial uses.

But it is unambiguously commercial, it is mostly pavement and metal, and once built it is difficult to convert to anything else. A storage facility is a fifty-year land use decision made on a two-acre parcel.

The county file does not record a rezoning request, so the mechanism by which a commercial use lands in a residential district is a question for the town. That is the single most useful thing a resident could ask at the local hearing.

The layout

Per the concept site plan, the six buildings are arranged in two groups.

Three sit at the front of the site, parallel to Crego Road, in rows. The other three sit in the rear, slightly offset portion of the parcel, running perpendicular to Crego Road. Asphalt separates the buildings, and an asphalt access road serves them.

Chain-link fencing runs along the front of the site and at the northern end of the developed area.

Street trees are proposed for the Crego Road frontage, which is the one softening element in the plan.

The driveway belongs to somebody else

The access arrangement is unusual enough to be the second question worth asking.

The site connects to Crego Road, a local road, by way of an existing private road along the northern boundary of the property. That private road belongs to National Grid.

Per a topographic survey dated February 3, 2003, a 50 foot wide easement to Niagara Mohawk runs along the northern parcel boundary, adjacent to that private access road. The site also abuts National Grid parcels to the north and to the west at the rear.

So the entire viability of the project depends on continued use of a road owned by a utility, alongside a utility easement, on a parcel bordered by utility land on two sides.

The county wrote two modifications, and both address exactly this.

The first requires the municipality to ensure proper review and approvals are in place for any construction or permanent structures within what the board called the substantial National Grid easement.

The second advises the town to ensure appropriate access and maintenance agreements are in place for the shared access roads.

Read plainly: before Van Buren approves this, it should confirm in writing that the applicant may use the road and may build near the easement, and that somebody is responsible for maintaining a road that several parties depend on.

Eight years is a long time for a site plan

The re-emergence of an unchanged 2018 plan raises a fair question about whether the design still fits current conditions.

Stormwater standards, landscaping expectations and the surrounding land uses can all shift in eight years. So can the applicant’s own assumptions about demand.

County staff note the environmental assessment form is current, dated July 23, 2026, and states that 2.66 acres would be disturbed, with stormwater mitigated by what the applicant describes as a perimeter infiltration system including a retention pond.

But the site design itself, the arrangement of the six buildings and the pavement between them, dates from 2018.

The county’s own comment gestures at this. Alongside the two modifications, the board encouraged the applicant to reduce paved surface and install trees and plantings wherever possible, to reduce stormwater, protect stormwater quality and improve the appearance of the site.

That is county planning language for: this is a lot of asphalt, and you could do better.

What is around it

County staff describe the parcel as vacant, sitting just east of Interstate 690 at the edge of a commercial node around the Downer Street and Crego Road intersection.

Several nearby parcels are enrolled in New York State Agricultural District 3 and appear to contain active farmland.

That combination is the classic edge condition. A commercial cluster at an interchange, farmland enrolled in a state agricultural district nearby, residential zoning on the parcel itself, and a proposal that fits none of those three categories cleanly.

The Agricultural District enrollment matters procedurally as well. Proximity to protected farmland is one of the triggers that brings an application to county review, and it obliges a local board to weigh effects on neighboring farm operations.

Why self-storage keeps appearing on parcels like this

Storage facilities cluster on a specific kind of land, and once you know the pattern you see it everywhere.

They want cheap ground near enough to housing that customers will drive to it, but not ground valuable enough for retail. They do not need visibility, foot traffic, a signalized entrance or sewer service. They do not care about being at the back of a lot behind a utility easement.

That makes leftover parcels attractive: awkward shapes, edge-of-node locations, land next to a highway or a power corridor, sites that would be hard to develop for anything requiring frontage or utilities.

This parcel fits every item on that list. Vacant, 2.66 acres, at the edge of a commercial node, next to an interstate, bordered by utility land, reached over somebody else’s road.

Which is exactly why the zoning question matters. Land that is hard to develop tends to stay open, and open land in a residential district is doing a job even when nobody is building on it. A storage facility is one of the few uses that can make marginal land pay, and that is both the argument for it and the reason to think carefully before approving it.

What a town actually gets

For Van Buren the ledger is short and fairly clear.

On the plus side, a vacant parcel starts generating commercial assessment. Storage produces essentially no demand on schools, minimal traffic, and no burden on water or sewer. There is no realistic scenario in which it strains municipal services.

On the other side, the town converts residentially zoned land to a commercial use that will not change for decades, adds roughly two and a half acres of buildings and asphalt near farmland enrolled in a state agricultural district, and does it on a design drawn in 2018.

Neither column is dramatic. That is the honest character of this application: a modest project with modest benefits and modest costs, whose main significance is the precedent of putting commercial storage in an R-40 district.

Precedents are how zoning maps change without anyone deciding to change them.

The stormwater detail worth asking about

One technical item deserves a direct question at the town level.

The assessment form says stormwater will be handled by a perimeter infiltration system including a retention pond. Infiltration means water soaking into the ground rather than running off, and it depends entirely on the soil beneath the system being permeable enough to accept it.

On a site that will be substantially covered in buildings and asphalt, sized for 2.66 acres of disturbance, whether the underlying soils actually infiltrate is not a detail. It is the difference between a system that works and one that ponds.

The county did not evaluate that, because soil suitability is an engineering question for the town’s review rather than an inter-community impact. A town engineer will have soil data or can require it.

That is the third question, alongside the zoning and the road agreement, and it is the one most likely to matter after everyone has stopped paying attention.

What the county did and did not decide

The board recommended modifications rather than issuing a clean no-impact finding. The motion was made by Kevin Casserino and seconded by Don Radke.

A recommended modification does not block the project. It raises the voting threshold for a local board that wants to approve without addressing it, which is the only leverage the county has.

Notably, the county did not object to storage units on residentially zoned land. Its jurisdiction under General Municipal Law Section 239 covers inter-community and county-wide implications: roads, utilities, drainage, farmland. Whether a commercial use belongs in an R-40 district is a purely local judgment, and Van Buren makes it alone.

The board’s comments in the earlier 2018 review are worth noting for what carried forward. Then, it advised that any site providing drinking water must also provide a legal means of accommodating wastewater, and encouraged the town to ensure an appropriate sewage disposal system is available on site. It also encouraged access and maintenance agreements for shared roads.

Eight years later, the shared-road advice came back as a formal modification. The water and wastewater point did not reappear in the same form, which is worth a question at the town level given that the site remains unserved.

What happens next

The decision belongs to the Town of Van Buren Planning Board.

Three questions are already written into the county file, and any resident can raise them without needing to master the code.

How is a commercial storage facility being permitted in a Low Density Residential district. What written agreement exists allowing use of, and construction near, National Grid’s road and easement. And given eight years and a county comment asking for less pavement and more planting, is this the same plan or an updated one.

CNY Signal has separately reported on a proposal to bring roughly 304 housing units to Crego Road in the same town, and on an industrial building proposed off Interstate Island Road. Van Buren is absorbing several kinds of growth at once this season, each landing on the same municipal staff.

The county’s August 5 minutes, including the resolution, both modifications and the full staff report described here, are posted by the Onondaga County Department of Planning.