Town of Ghent · Zoning Chapter 190 · analysis for the Town Board

What the proposed lot-coverage definition would do on the ground

Proposed Local Law 1 of 2026 keeps lot coverage in the residential districts as it is (buildings only) and, in the five business districts, redefines it to include pavement, gravel, compacted stone, parking, loading and storage areas. This page measures every parcel in town against both rules using the county parcel fabric, the state building-footprint layer, and leaf-on aerial imagery, so the board can see how many existing lots the change touches before deciding whether the Appendix B maximums should move.

175business-district lot portions (HB, VB, C-1, C-2, C-3), counting a split lot once per district

0of them exceed today's maximum under the current buildings-only rule

2 to 9would exceed the same maximum under the proposed rule, out of 175 classified: 2 counting pavement, gravel and bare yards, 9 if drought-browned lawn is also counted (upper bound)

33residential-district portions already exceed their 10% to 25% maximum today; the proposal leaves them unchanged

The two definitions

Current, 190-2: "The percentage of the area of the lot covered by a building or buildings." Appendix B maximums: HB 80, VB 70, C-1 60, C-2 60, C-3 60, RRA-1 10, RRA-2 10, VR 25, HR 20.

Proposed, residential districts: principal and accessory buildings or structures only; driveways, parking, walks and patios stay out.

Proposed, business and commercial districts: buildings plus every developed surface: roof overhangs past 24 inches, decks, porches, patios, pools, paved, graveled or compacted walks and drives, vehicular access, loading, parking and storage areas, all impervious and semi-impervious surfaces. A lot in two districts is calculated separately for each portion, and the Appendix B row becomes "maximum total covered lot area" with the open-land row becoming a minimum.

By district

Each row is a district portion: a lot lying wholly in one district is one portion, and a split lot contributes one portion per district it touches, which is how the proposed law says the arithmetic must run. "Now" is coverage by buildings alone; "proposed" adds classified developed surface in the business districts and is identical to "now" in the residential districts.

District	Max	Portions	Median now	90th pct now	Over max now	Median proposed	90th pct proposed	Over 80% of max, proposed	Over max proposed	Over max, upper bound
HB Hamlet Business	80%	37	10.2%	27.6%	0	39.8%	62.4%	3	0	1 (median 50.1%)
VB Village Business	70%	26	4.2%	17.4%	0	12.1%	50.3%	2	0	3 (median 35.9%)
C-1 Commercial 1	60%	63	0.0%	9.1%	0	2.2%	36.9%	4	1	4 (median 7.3%)
C-2 Commercial 2	60%	7	0.0%	3.4%	0	0.0%	24.2%	0	0	0 (median 0.1%)
C-3 Commercial 3	60%	42	4.2%	9.1%	0	12.8%	40.3%	3	1	1 (median 21.5%)
RRA-1 Rural Residence Agriculture 1	10%	1371	1.1%	5.1%	25	unchanged	unchanged		25
RRA-2 Rural Residential Agriculture 2	10%	494	0.6%	3.1%	3	unchanged	unchanged		3
VR Village Residence	25%	72	8.4%	15.4%	1	unchanged	unchanged		1
HR Hamlet Residence	20%	159	6.4%	12.8%	4	unchanged	unchanged		4

current rule, buildings onlyproposed rule, buildings plus developed surface

What a cap would need to be

If the board wants the new definition to leave existing business lots where they stand, the maximum has to sit above what those lots already cover. The table reads: to keep the stated share of today's business portions conforming under the proposed definition, a single uniform maximum would have to be at least this high.

Target	Uniform maximum needed
90% of business portions conform	50%
95% of business portions conform	62%
98% of business portions conform	64%
100% of business portions conform	69%

The current maximums are 80 (HB), 70 (VB) and 60 (C-1, C-2, C-3). Whether any lot's existing coverage should be grandfathered rather than accommodated is a policy choice this table does not make.

Business portions that would exceed their maximum under the proposed rule

Sorted by how far over they land. "Developed" is the classified pavement, gravel and yard area outside the building footprints; "buildings" is footprint area clipped to the portion. Each of these deserves a look at its review image before anyone treats the number as final.

District	SBL	Address	Owner	Portion	Buildings	Developed	Now	Proposed	Max
C-1	91.-1-33.110	1131 State Route 9H	Skate 9H Realty Inc	114,621 sf	28,339 sf	45,551 sf	24.7%	64.5%	60%
C-3	91.-1-72.3	1006 State Route 9H	Kozel's Inc	66,153 sf	12,473 sf	28,799 sf	18.9%	62.4%	60%

Where developed surface dominates

The fifteen business portions with the largest share of their area in developed surface. These are the lots the definition change is really about: the buildings are modest but the paved and graveled area is not.

District	SBL	Address	Portion	Buildings	Developed surface	Developed share	Proposed coverage
HB	75.4-2-64.200	State Route 66	11,827 sf	0 sf	7,378 sf	62.4%	62.4%
HB	75.4-3-14	2327 State Route 66	22,582 sf	635 sf	12,648 sf	56.0%	58.8%
HB	75.4-3-15	2331 State Route 66	53,678 sf	4,392 sf	28,776 sf	53.6%	61.8%
VB	76.-1-33	2565 State Route 66	30,548 sf	3,227 sf	16,135 sf	52.8%	63.4%
HB	75.4-2-6	Garage Place	144,508 sf	7,594 sf	74,117 sf	51.3%	56.5%
C-3	101.-1-7	74 Bender	31,030 sf	473 sf	15,446 sf	49.8%	51.3%
HB	75.4-1-36	2230 State Route 66	21,240 sf	0 sf	10,513 sf	49.5%	49.5%
HB	75.4-3-13	2319 State Route 66	40,210 sf	2,635 sf	19,890 sf	49.5%	56.0%
HB	75.4-2-7	Garage Place	118,920 sf	18,727 sf	57,563 sf	48.4%	64.2%
C-3	101.-1-9.3	5 Grandinetti	50,818 sf	0 sf	24,416 sf	48.0%	48.0%
HB	75.4-3-16	2337 State Route 66	57,684 sf	6,285 sf	26,772 sf	46.4%	57.3%
VB	76.-1-61	2614 State Route 66	277,984 sf	48,270 sf	126,406 sf	45.5%	62.8%
C-3	91.-1-72.3	1006 State Route 9H	66,153 sf	12,473 sf	28,799 sf	43.5%	62.4%
C-1	73.-2-37.1	1840 State Route 9H	608,439 sf	63,606 sf	264,809 sf	43.5%	54.0%
C-1	73.-3-76	1851 State Route 9H	444,428 sf	28,349 sf	186,461 sf	42.0%	48.3%

Method and limits

Districts

District boundaries are the town's own "Ghent Zoning Districts" map (the Google My Maps the town publishes, pulled September 4, 2026), one polygon set per district, drawn on the county parcel lines (every district's vertices a median of under one foot from a parcel line) and forming a clean partition with no overlaps. RRA-1 is taken as the remainder of every lot under no other district, which closes the two acres the map leaves unlabeled. The consultant's per-district shapefiles were checked against it and agree for the hamlet, village and RRA districts but not for C-1 (drawn 36 ft off the parcel lines on an old base) or C-3 (631 acres drawn versus 343 on the town map), which is why they were retired for this study; the town map states that the adopted PDF controls on any discrepancy. A parcel is assigned every district covering at least 200 square feet of it; 43 business lots touch more than one district. The Airport district has no Appendix B column and is reported without a maximum.

Buildings

Building footprints are the New York State ITS statewide layer (the county Geo-Data Hub's "Columbia County Building Footprints" is a filter on it): 4,210 footprints in Ghent, drawn by NYSERDA from 2014 to 2017 imagery with Microsoft fill. Buildings added since 2017 are missing unless they appear in the developed-surface classification as roof; buildings removed since are counted. Footprints are clipped to the lot line, so a barn straddling two parcels counts on each only for the part on that parcel.

Developed surface

No public map of paved and graveled areas exists for Columbia County (county Hub, state Clearinghouse and the 30-meter national land-cover product were checked). Developed surface was therefore classified from USDA NAIP four-band imagery flown leaf-on in August 2019 at 60 cm, using the normalized-difference vegetation index (NDVI), which is strongly negative on asphalt, near zero on gravel and concrete, and positive on anything growing. Measured on Ghent lots: asphalt −0.30 to −0.50, gravel and concrete −0.05 to −0.35, drought-browned lawn 0.00 to 0.10, live lawn and brush 0.20 and up. The main estimate counts pixels below −0.02 (pavement, gravel, concrete, bare compacted yards) that are not water, deep shadow or building footprint, after a small morphological cleanup that removes parked cars and stripes. The upper-bound column reruns the same classification at 0.15, which also sweeps in every browned lawn; the truth for any one lot sits between the two, and the two numbers together say how much of the answer rides on the imagery rather than the rule. Method tag: naip_ndvi_v1(ndvi<-0.02); 0 hand overrides. Bare tilled fields and construction sites read as developed. Decks, patios and pools under tree canopy are missed. Every classified parcel has a side-by-side review image in the GIS viewer's parcel panel; the estimate is for understanding the rule's reach, not for enforcement on any single lot.

Reproducing

gis/zoning_drawn.py, gis/build_lot_coverage.py, gis/classify_developed.py and gis/report_lot_coverage.py in the iWorQ tools repository rebuild every table here from the source files; the GIS viewer's "Lot coverage" selector colors the map by the same numbers.