Proposed Development at Winston Farm Threatens the Rural Nature of Our Region
Known for hosting the 25th anniversary of the Woodstock Festival in 1994, the Winston Farm property in Saugerties, New York, dates back to the time of construction of the Ashokan Reservoir. Over the years, the site has been proposed for use as a community college, a casino, a landfill and incinerator and a high-tech business park with none of those plans receiving a welcoming reception from the local community. The latest plan for Winston Farm is headed toward a similar fate.
The Developers, Saugerties Farms, LLC are seeking to create a Planned Development District (PPD) that would rezone the 840-acre Winston Farm site, thus allowing a mega-development project. Last week, Saugerties Farms, LLC presented a Draft Generic Environmental Impact Statement (DGEIS) that describes their “Sponsor’s Preferred Plan” of 799 housing units with a combination of townhouses and apartments, plus 250,000 square-feet of commercial space, a 150-room boutique hotel, a conference center with an additional 250 hotel rooms, a 5,000-seat enclosed concert venue, a 100-cabin campground, and around 250,000 square-feet of laboratory or light industrial buildings. The DGEIS also addresses potentially larger projects in a “reasonable worst case scenario.”
The community has expressed many concerns about the potential adverse impacts from such a proposal to the quality of life in Saugerties and surrounding towns and villages including Woodstock, Catskill, Palenville and Hunter. Among the concerns are the loss of habitat (Winston Farm is Designated by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s Hudson River Estuaries Program as a Significant Biodiversity Area) that would be devastating to the ecosystems, wildlife, and plants of Winston Farm and the surrounding region. Two regionally important large meadows would be impacted, impairing their potential to support rare grasslandbreeding birds and wintering raptors. Clear cutting and fragmentation of forests have farreaching climate impacts, and traffic gridlock on country roads threatens the clean air our region is known for. Potential contamination from stormwater runoff and treated sewage wastewater will empty into the Beaver Kill which feeds into the Kaaterskill Creek, a Class B trout spawning stream that flows through the Village of Catskill and from there into the Hudson River. Winston Farm is on the headlands of the recharge zone for the Beaverkill Aquifer and lies within the Aquifer Protection Overlay District, the last place that one would choose for massive development. Even if the supply of water from one or two large wells near the site is adequate for such intensive development, the DGEIS does not mandate a central water supply. A central wastewater plant is contemplated … but also not required as part of the PPD. There are no provisions for contiguous open space.
The developers promise economic benefits to the local economy, but residents have already articulated the bad trade-offs that could come from vastly increased traffic to the area during concerts for 5,000 people compared with either a more modest development, as allowed under the current zoning, or sale of the site for land conservation and designation as a State Park, an option that has been proposed to the developers but that has been left on the table, as they continue to press ahead with the proposed zoning change.
The Town Board of Saugerties, as lead agency, is now charged with evaluating whether the DGEIS is complete in terms of scope and content, with a 45-day clock ticking. If the Board requires revisions to the document, a shorter time-clock kicks in upon delivery of the next draft. When the Board accepts a version of the DGEIS as ready for public review, New York State’s Environmental Review Act (SEQRA) requires the Board to post a Notice of Completion and to accept public comment on that document; the Board can also hold one or more public hearings to help determine what revisions it will make before issuing a Final Generic Environmental Impact Statement (FGEIS).
The public can participate at this stage both by expressing views on the proposed PPD and DGEIS and by supporting organizations like Beautiful Saugerties and Catskill Mountainkeeper that will be submitting comments to the Town Board about deficiencies in the DGEIS. The community in Saugerties is rallying to protect the beloved Winston Farm site, yet again! For more information watch Catskill Mountiankeeper’s short film What’s at Stake at Winston Farm.
UPDATE:
Ulster Planning Official Called Winston Farm Design Goals `Woefully Short’ in July
"Three months after Ulster County officials criticized the latest plan to develop Winston Farm as “woefully short on design goals and standards to support these goals,” the project’s developers have not yet responded publicly to the county’s concerns.
The criticism came in a July 25 letter to the Saugerties Town Board from the Ulster County Planning Department, the contents of which weren’t made public at the time. The letter, which has been reviewed by The Overlook, says the project’s Draft Generic Environmental Impact Statement (DGEIS) lacked an open space analysis, standards for affordable housing, mixed-use development and mapping.
The site’s developers are “firmly in the, ‘figuring out what they are trying to do’ stage,” Ulster County Planner Robert Leibowitz said in an interview on Tuesday. “There are a couple of hoops they need to jump through before they finish up.”
To read more, please click on this link.
Sierra Club Speech to Saugerties Town Board Opposition to Blanket Zoning Change and Deficient Environmental Review (June 18, 2025)
Good evening, members of the Saugerties Town Board. I speak to you tonight as a representative of the Sierra Club, an organization whose mission is to practice and promote the responsible use of the earth's ecosystems and resources, to educate and enlist humanity to protect and restore the quality of the natural and human environment, and to use all lawful means to carry out these objectives.
We are here today to express our strong opposition to the proposed blanket zoning change that would allow permissive overdevelopment of sensitive environmental resources at Winston Farm. This proposal represents exactly the kind of short-sighted planning that the Sierra Club has fought against for over 130 years.
The developers behind this proposal are attempting to push through a Planned Development District zoning change using a Draft Generic Environmental Impact Statement that is fundamentally flawed and inadequate. This DGEIS lacks essential details about location, physical dimensions, timing, and operations—details that are absolutely necessary for any meaningful environmental impact assessment. How can we, as stewards of our natural heritage, make informed decisions about protecting our environment when we don't even know what we're protecting it from?
More troubling still, this DGEIS repeatedly refuses to assess environmental impacts or propose mitigation measures. Instead, it hides behind the convenient excuse that "no site-specific development is currently proposed." This is environmental review by sleight of hand—asking for approval while refusing to reveal what they plan to do with that approval.
What we're witnessing here is a textbook case of improper segmentation—a tactic designed to circumvent meaningful environmental review. The developers want to gain approval now based on vague, non-committal plans, while deferring real environmental analysis to smaller-scale evaluations that will inevitably receive less public scrutiny and oversight. This approach fragments what should be a comprehensive environmental review into bite-sized pieces that obscure the cumulative impact on our natural resources.
Let's be clear about what this means: they want to lock in approval now and deal with the environmental consequences later—when public input is minimized, when alternatives are no longer viable, and when it's too late to stop projects that could irreparably harm our sensitive ecosystems.
The Sierra Club has seen this playbook before in communities across the nation. Once blanket zoning changes are approved based on inadequate environmental review, developers gain tremendous leverage. Future site-specific proposals become much harder to challenge because the fundamental land use decision has already been made. Environmental protection becomes an afterthought rather than a foundational consideration.
Saugerties has been blessed with remarkable natural resources—our forests, wetlands, waterways, and wildlife corridors that define the character of our community and support both ecological health and our local economy through sustainable tourism and recreation. These resources deserve better than a rubber-stamp approval process that prioritizes developer convenience over environmental protection.
We urge this Board to reject this inadequate zoning proposal and demand a comprehensive environmental review that actually reviews environmental impacts. Require detailed project descriptions, thorough impact assessments, and concrete mitigation measures before any zoning changes are considered. Our community and our environment deserve nothing less than full transparency and rigorous analysis.
The choice before you tonight is clear: will you stand with responsible development that respects our natural heritage, or will you enable a process that treats environmental protection as an inconvenient obstacle to be circumvented? We trust you will choose the path that protects the Saugerties we all love for current residents and future generations.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Susan Paynter, Conservation Chair, Sierra Club’s Mid-Hudson Group
