Newburgh approves revised Overlook Farms plan, adds pickleball courts

The Town of Newburgh Planning Board approved a revised site plan for Overlook Farms, keeping the 203-unit Morris Drive project on track while tightening several site details that had drawn scrutiny during years of review.

The amended plan covers 5417 Route 9W in the R-3/B zone and still calls for 15 buildings, including 23 senior-housing units, a clubhouse with a pool, an outdoor sports area and 25,000 square feet of retail space. The biggest design changes are modest but visible on the ground: the clubhouse will shrink from 5,085 square feet to 4,150 square feet, the parking lot will be redesigned as a drive-through loop instead of a dead end, and two tennis courts will become pickleball courts.

Those revisions do not alter the project’s basic residential layout, which suggests the board was willing to move the long-running proposal forward without reopening the core plan. But the approval also came with added oversight. The town engineer recommended, and the board accepted, a preconstruction meeting before any clearing or grading begins so staff can address drainage, access, safety and construction sequencing before heavy work starts.

The planning board’s vote matters beyond the property line. A development of this size will add traffic to Morris Drive and Route 9W, where residents already raised concerns at a public hearing on July 7, 2022. It will also add pressure on town services and on the broader civic network that absorbs new housing, from roads and stormwater systems to school capacity and emergency access. Earlier review materials also show how large the infrastructure footprint is: the project includes an on-site sewage treatment facility and was tied to a proposed discharge of 43,000 gallons a day of treated sanitary wastewater to a subtributary of Lattintown Creek.

The amended application is still being treated as the same Project No. 19-23 that won preliminary and conditional final site plan approval, along with Architectural Review Board approval, in February 2023. At that stage, the plan called for 203 multifamily apartments in 20 structures on 32.71 acres of former farmland and included a retail component with no tenant identified. The current revisions add four EV charging stations, while town reviewers also want a revised stormwater pollution prevention plan, an update on construction sequencing for the residential and commercial pieces and a SEQRA consistency analysis comparing the original environmental review with the amended plan.

For Newburgh, the vote shows the town is still letting housing move ahead on the east side of Route 9W, but not without keeping a hand on the details that determine how the project will function once the first crews arrive.