Whole Foods hearing set 

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Brighton officials have set a pair of meetings on the Whole Foods Plaza proposal, both dealing with key environmental review documents.

The Town Board will hold a public hearing on the supplemental draft environmental impact statement at 7 p.m. May 10. (The town has posted all the documents pertaining to the development, including the latest EIS, at http://www.townofbrighton.org/DocumentCenter/Index/359.)

And it’s holding a workshop at 6:30 p.m. May 2, so the developer can make a video presentation of traffic data for the project. Both meetings will be at Brighton Town Hall, 2300 Elmwood Avenue.

The Daniele Family Companies wants to build a Whole Foods grocery store on Monroe Avenue, where the former Mario’s restaurant building stands. It also wants to build a standalone Starbucks and a retail plaza.

The Town Board accepted the developer’s environmental statement, which includes a traffic study, during its meeting last week. That was necessary before the town could set a public hearing on the highly detailed document. That’s not to say that town officials accept the statement’s conclusions, just that they believe the document is complete enough to warrant public scrutiny.

The board rejected a previous submission from the developer because it felt that while the document offered lots of data, it didn’t provide enough explanation of it. This time around, the submission contained the sort of analysis and interpretation the board wanted, says Supervisor Bill Moehle.

Residents of adjacent neighborhoods have pushed back hard on the proposal, which they say is simply too intense for the site and will likely make existing congestion on Monroe Avenue worse.

The developer has included plans for a traffic signal at the plaza entrance, turning restrictions, and consolidating nearby businesses’ driveways. It claims these will better control traffic in the development’s corridor while minimizing any additional congestion.