Cedar Corners, Congers.

What is being proposed

Cedar Corners is an application to merge sixteen tax lots in Congers into three, and to build on all three. The land is 41.13 acres on the west side of NYS Route 303, zoned CO, COS and LS, backing onto the CSX railroad, with an existing shopping center and existing homes alongside it. The County files it at 299 North Route 303. The applicant is Vanta Developers, a Brooklyn-based industrial and multifamily developer.

That is 561,520 square feet of warehouse and office space between Lots 1 and 3, and 72 loading berths on Lot 1 alone. For scale, a single loading berth is a tractor-trailer bay.

The plan has already changed once

The trucks

Nobody has published a daily truck count for this site, and that is worth saying plainly rather than filling the gap with a guess. What the record does establish is the capacity. Lot 1 alone is designed with 72 loading berths. A loading berth is a tractor-trailer bay, so the building is built to have seventy-two trailers at it at once. Across the three lots the plan provides 627 parking spaces.

The applicant's own traffic study, as reported when the Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement came out, projects roughly 194 vehicle trips in the weekday morning peak hour and 206 in the weekday evening peak hour. Those are all vehicles, not trucks. The intersection expected to take the heaviest project traffic is the site entrance at Route 303 and Meola Road, where the plan adds a northbound left-turn lane and a signal.

Two things make the diesel question sharper here than it would be elsewhere. New York State maps this stretch of Route 303 as a Disadvantaged Community under the Climate Act, which calls for a heavier analysis of pollution burdens; the developer's position is that the designation does not substantively apply to this site. And the developer's air quality conclusion rests partly on the assumption that state and federal rules will clean up truck fleets over time. New York's Zero Emission Vehicle rule for trucks cannot be enforced until 2029, and electric and hydrogen medium and heavy duty trucks are currently under one percent of New York truck registrations.

Is it a 24-hour operation?

Unknown, because the applicant has not said. It has declined to disclose who the tenants would be for any of the buildings, or their hours. In 2024 the developer described the likely users of the large warehouses as interstate trucking companies, and the smaller building as space for up to twenty-eight users such as electricians, carpenters and plumbers. Neither description is a commitment about hours.

That silence is itself the point. A town cannot weigh noise, idling or traffic at three in the morning against a tenant nobody will name.

The trees

The project's own Tree Preservation Plan counts 2,409 trees on the site today. 794 of them, about a third, would remain. That is 1,615 trees removed. A later revision proposes planting 603 replacement trees, hardwood and softwood, which is roughly one new tree for every 2.7 taken down. A newly planted tree takes somewhere between twenty and forty years to offset the carbon lost with a mature one.

In land rather than trunks, the plan clears 27.6 acres of forest and puts 24.6 acres of the 41 under buildings and pavement. The site carries 5.56 acres of wetlands. New York State designates it a significant natural community of oak and tulip forest, part of a contiguous 175-acre wildlife habitat. The developer's ecologist argues the site is a functionally isolated woodland and wetland fragment rather than a mapped corridor, and that no further study is needed.

The tax breaks

Separately from the Planning Board, the project has asked the County of Rockland Industrial Development Agency for financial assistance. The applicant there is GK Congers LLC. The Agency held the public hearing required by Article 18-A of the General Municipal Law on October 21, 2025, and its notice sets out exactly what was requested.

The two fixed exemptions come to $9,025,000 between them, before anything is decided about property taxes.

Two things follow from that. The sales tax exemption alone is over five million dollars of state and local revenue foregone, and it is foregone on a project whose tenants have not been named. And the property tax piece is not the County's to decide alone: when an applicant takes IDA benefits, the affected taxing jurisdictions, Clarkstown among them, choose whether to enter a payment in lieu of taxes agreement. That decision belongs to people Clarkstown residents elect.

Where it stands

Cedar Corners is the rare Clarkstown application big enough to require a full Environmental Impact Statement rather than the short-form review most projects get. The Planning Board made its determination on the draft scope for a Draft Environmental Impact Statement in March 2024. It held the public hearing and review of the DEIS on May 6, 2026, and a further public hearing and review of a Supplemental DEIS on July 29, 2026.

It is also before the County. The Rockland County Planning Board carries Cedar Corners on its September 10, 2026 agenda as a SEQRA update, under file number SEQRA-26-0009. County review of this kind is required under the General Municipal Law, and what the County says carries weight: when a county planning board recommends disapproval, the local board needs a supermajority to approve anyway.

The Town's own Planning Department records list Cedar Corners with its status set to SEQRA and with no zoning district and no lot size recorded at all, which is why the acreage and districts on this page come from the Planning Board's agendas instead.

This page reflects the public record as of September 11, 2026.

Where Eugene stands

Eugene Bondar's point about Cedar Corners is that the Town is not obliged to approve it, and that the density being proposed is reason enough not to.

He has argued that a project generating tractor-trailer traffic on Route 303 cannot be assessed apart from everything else the Town has approved along that corridor, and that the Town should be publishing what is pending in a form residents can actually find. That is what these pages are for.