Those who make the rules should follow them

I have lived in Brighton for 40 years. For a significant portion of that time I served on the town’s Planning Board, reviewing applications from residents and businesses seeking approval for everything from a modest addition to a major commercial development. The process is not always fast, and it is not always easy. But it exists for a reason: to ensure that projects affecting the community are examined transparently, that neighbors have an opportunity to be heard, and that decision makers can weigh costs and benefits before commitments are made that are difficult to undo.

I believed in that process when I participated in it. I still believe in it. And that is precisely why I am troubled by what I have been watching unfold in Brighton over the past year—not with a resident applying for a permit, but with two of our public institutions spending tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer money while largely avoiding the kind of public scrutiny we require of everyone else.

I want to talk about the Brighton Central School District’s athletic field project and the town of Brighton’s Phase 2 improvements to the Town Hall campus. Let me be precise about what each institution is and is not required to do, because the picture is more nuanced than a simple exemption.

The town chose to exempt this project from Planning Board site plan review (as permitted under NYS Town Law § 274-a). The school district operates differently; BCSD capital projects are reviewed and approved by the state Education Department to ensure that school capital projects meet programmatic and safety standards. The process is not designed to ensure that Brighton neighbors are informed, that the project fits the community’s vision for its public spaces, or that the people who live closest to a construction site have any meaningful voice before the plans are locked.

That gap between state process adequacy and local transparency is where both projects have failed the community.

The standard we apply to our neighbors should be the standard we apply to ourselves. When our public institutions exempt themselves from the transparency they demand of everyone else, they are making a decision about whether they think the public deserves to be informed.

The school district project

In February 2024, Brighton voters approved a $22 million capital bond. The district’s superintendent has frequently cited the vote as implying 87 percent approval of the voters. That figure has been repeatedly invoked as definitive evidence that the project has the community’s blessing. I want to examine that claim carefully, because I think it has been doing work it cannot legitimately do.

School bond elections in New York are low turnout by design and by habit. This one was no exception. Of the 805 votes cast, 703 (or 87%) supported the referendum. While the number of eligible voters in the district not known, the total population is reported by the district to be 28,460. That means the total number of residents who affirmatively approved this project (703) was but a tiny fraction of eligible voters and substantially smaller than even the number of students currently enrolled in Brighton’s schools (3,400). The superintendent’s 87% of those voting is mathematically accurate. As a measure of community mandate and as a reason to stop engaging, stop explaining, and stop listening, it is a merely fiction.

The vote was legitimate, conducted lawfully and the result stands. (A more reliable gauge of community support might have resulted if the school election was held at the same time and place as a general election, although that is beyond the scope of this essay.) What I am arguing is that a district proposing to spend $22 million on a project with significant visual, environmental, and community impact had an obligation that extended well beyond winning a low-turnout ballot question. That obligation was to keep the community fully and continuously informed about what was being designed and bid for construction.

It did not work out that way. Between the bond vote and construction, the project scope had grown substantially. The final plans included a large stormwater management pond and the removal of mature trees, neither featured in the bond materials residents voted on. These are not minor refinements. A stormwater pond and the loss of mature trees are visible, permanent changes to the character of a public campus. The neighbors who live adjacent to the high school and the students who access those fields on foot from surrounding streets had no opportunity to react before the plans were locked. The contamination discovered when construction began in January, from a century-old brick manufacturing site, is a serious and costly complication, but it is a separate problem from the one I am focused on here.

When community members did begin showing up to school board meetings, to its credit the district held sessions and let residents speak. But here is what made those meetings something other than engagement: When residents pressed for modifications to address features they were seeing for the first time, the district’s answer was consistent and final. The state education approvals were complete. The contracts were in place. Nothing could be changed.

This is not engagement. It is notification delivered after the fact, dressed up as consultation. Holding a public meeting at which you have already decided that nothing the public says will affect the outcome is not a gesture of transparency. It is a way of being seen to listen while having no intention of hearing. If the community’s input cannot change anything, the community is not being invited to participate, it is being managed.

The problem is not that the state education review happened. The problem is that the district treated state review as a substitute for local engagement. Albany’s approval tells you that the project meets state standards. It does not tell you whether Brighton’s neighbors were informed, whether students who walk to school from adjacent streets were considered, or whether the community that owns this campus had any real voice in how it would be changed. Those questions required a different kind of process, and that process never happened.

The Town Hall project

The Town Hall campus tells a related story, and in some ways a more frustrating one, because the failure here is not a technical oversight. It is a deliberate choice. The town is currently planning Phase 2 of improvements to the Town Hall campus—site work that will shape how residents, employees, visitors, and the surrounding neighborhood experience that space for years to come. Phase 3, which will include playground upgrades, pool improvements, and a new splash pad, is still to come.

The Phase 2 plans prioritize vehicle access and parking over the safety and comfort of pedestrians and cyclists. They add parking capacity that has never been justified through any demand analysis. Brighton’s own comprehensive plan, Envision Brighton 2028, articulates a clear community vision for walkable, pedestrian-friendly public spaces. The Phase 2 plans appear to move in the opposite direction on the town’s own campus. Residents have not had the opportunity to be persuaded, or to raise these concerns formally, or to hear the town’s reasoning, because the town has not held any public engagement on Phase 2. Not a community meeting. Not a presentation. Not a public comment period. Nothing.

Town staff presented the plans to the Planning Board back in July 2024. The Planning Board responded with multiple letters of concern about the design, the inconsistency with town study recommendations and the lack of public input. Over the past 20 months the Planning Board has commented, presented alternative design ideas and pleaded with the town. All to no avail.

Let that sit for a moment. The town of Brighton requires property owners proposing a structure to notify abutting neighbors and present to the Planning Board. It requires a business expanding its parking lot to conduct a traffic study and demonstrate that the expansion is warranted. It requires an applicant proposing changes to a site near a wetland to coordinate with the Department of Environmental Conservation. These are not unreasonable requirements. They reflect a genuine public interest in how land is used and how changes affect the people who live nearby.

The town is exempt from its own Planning Board review, but why would the town treat that exemption as a license to skip public engagement entirely on a project that will affect every resident who uses the Town Hall campus, the library, the police and courts, the pool, the recreation fields, trail connections and the playground? These are among the most heavily used public spaces in Brighton. The decision about how to configure them deserves more than town staff and design consultants working in isolation.

The pattern I am describing, across both the school district and the town, is not a legal one. Both institutions are operating within the letter of their exemptions. The problem is the attitude those exemptions have enabled—a belief that public process is something you impose on residents and businesses, not something you owe them. A belief that low voter turnout confers a mandate to stop listening. A belief that moving quickly is more important than moving transparently.

I have spent enough time in public life to know that most of the people making these decisions are not acting in bad faith. They are busy, they are under pressure, and the path of least resistance is to keep moving. But the cumulative effect of these choices—the unannounced stormwater pond, the undisclosed tree removal, the soil that should have been tested, the parking lot that has never been justified, the public engagement that never happened—is a community that feels managed rather than respected. Brighton deserves better than that. And frankly, our public institutions are capable of better than that.

What I am asking for is not complicated. I am asking the town to hold at least one public meeting on Phase 2 before any further commitments are made; a genuine opportunity for residents to see the plans, ask questions, and offer feedback. I am asking the school district to treat the 87 percent figure as the beginning of its accountability to the community, not the end of it. And I am asking both institutions to consider, as a matter of professional respect if not legal obligation, whether the standards they apply to everyone else ought to apply to themselves.

Forty years in Brighton has taught me that this community is at its best when its institutions trust the people who live here with the full picture. We can handle complexity. We can handle trade-offs. What we should not have to handle is finding out after the fact—from a contractor’s shovel, an architect’s revised drawing, a change order on a consent agenda—what was decided without us.

William Price, a landscape architect and urban planner, is a former member of the Brighton Architectural Review Board and Planning Board, and a member of Community Design of Rochester and the ReImagine ROC Housing initiative and Inclusive Housing Coalition.

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