Two proposals currently under consideration by the Town of Ulster have caught the attention of your Editorial Team. While we do our best to know about everything going on in the greater Kingston metroplex, this pair of plans is particularly fascinating to us as they highlight a lot of different and occasionally oppositional dynamics we deal with in our happy little part of Planet Earth.

They are adjacent to each other, in the part of town behind Adams Fairacre Farms on Route 9W. One is a 298-unit market-rate residential housing complex that would sit on a 69-acre parcel that itself is adjacent to an already-approved 100-room hotel project. The other would be a “solar farm” of panels that would sit on a 26-acre parcel.

At first blush, this seems like good news. In an area where any kind of housing is all too scarce, almost 300 new units is not an insignificant addition. In a world where climate change is threatening to bring disastrous consequences, anything that generates much-needed electricity without using fossil fuels is an important part of reducing our carbon footprint.

Not so fast, say opponents, led by the local watchdog group Town of Ulster Citizens. A recent spinoff of KingstonCitizens.org, ToUC has brought a new voice for smarter development that the Town of Ulster, long the county’s commercial and industrial center, hasn’t consistently had in the past. They’re currently circulating a petition in opposition to both the housing and the solar farms, arguing that that almost-entirely wooded ridge behind Adams would be devastated by the deforestation the projects would require. Nesting bald eagles in that woodland would also be deprived of their habitat. “If all of these projects go forward, the ridge behind Adams will be destroyed and traffic on 9W will be snarled for miles,” ToUC states on their website.

As the eternal question goes, what price progress? Is the loss of about a hundred acres of forest justified by what the projects would provide? Are ToUC’s objections reasonable or is this just another case of one of Ulster County’s undeniably true passions, NIMBYism, rearing its obstructionist head?

Opinions will vary on this; they always do. But from our perspective, this is one case where the end may well justify the means. Route 9W traffic sucks, and probably always will suck, so we have a hard time seeing where something like 500 cars are added to the neighborhood would make it that much worse. We look forward to the day when local mass transit is so pervasive and efficient that Town of Ulster residents have a real-life alternative to driving cars, but let’s face it, that day is far in the future. While it’s up for debate whether adding more market-rate housing really does all that much to increase affordable housing, and it’s reasonable to assume that many of those units will be occupied by newcomers to our awesome county, at least some of them will be rented out to locals, making the places they moved from available to others. And one great thing about trees is that they grow back. A reasonable karma-balancing would be to require the developers to re-forest as much as they can on the site, and pay for it to be done elsewhere like, oh, we don’t know, maybe iPark 87? (Apologies to the eagles, for whom we feel the most sorry in this equation, but it will very likely be easier for them to find a new nesting spot than it is for humans to find housing they can afford around here.) As for the solar panels, we have for years thought it is high time that we in Ulster became part of the clean-energy solution and stop foisting off projects in this category to other communities. After all, we use electricity too and should shoulder some of the burden of generating it.

We have seen for years a pattern in this community where a very vocal, but not very large numbers-wise, minority has had an outsized dampening effect on development, sometimes for the better but sometimes for the worse. While we support people having input into decisions that affect their lives, we also support decision-makers considering proportion, keeping in mind the greater good and remembering that the right thing isn’t always what people who show up at town meetings say it is.