WAWARSING – While negotiations continue in Kingston regarding the potential sale of the Nevele Grande Resort, questions of what will happen with a pending selective timber harvest application from BG Quality Logging before the planning board remain, for the moment, unanswered.

At the most recent Wawarsing Planning Board meeting on January 26, the board decided to hold open the public hearing regarding the application to perform a selective timber harvest on the Nevele grounds. Pending since September 2009, the board has been treading carefully since that September meeting's public hearing session showed many residents' opposition to the project.

"I think it's a very unique situation," said planning board chair Brian Schug, who compared the dozens of people who came to vocalize their opposition to the project in September of last year to the public's presence during last month's meeting.

"You can see from the [January 2010] planning board meeting — I believe we had two or three other public hearings regarding logging, and no one showed up for them. So there was some pretty good public opposition to the [Nevele] logging application which the town needs to weigh."

However, Bryon Gardner of BG Quality Logging said that the harvest was relatively small in scale.

"We're not taking a lot of timber out of there," said Gardner. "On 200 acres, we're probably taking five trees out of an acre, which, you know, you can hardly tell."

The public's response to the project is but one reason that the project has yet to get the green light. The board also asked Gardner to submit detailed maps of where on the property the harvest is to take place. He was also asked to pay for a survey of the boundary between the Nevele and its neighbor, the Honor's Haven Resort and Spa, since the two have disputed their properties' borders in the past. And during this last visit, Gardner was asked to combine the maps with the surveys and resubmit them to the board. And that's not all: news that the Nevele property is under contract to be sold to Brooklyn-based developer Rafi Weiss — and Weiss's reported stance against the project — are also causing the board to proceed with caution.

But there's yet one more wrinkle in an already wrinkled situation: Gardner has a lien on the timber, estimated at around $60,000. Because of the contract he entered into with Joel Hoffman, the financially strapped owner of the property, Gardner was able to put a lien on the timber he planned to harvest from the property to ensure that the money he was investing in the project would bear fruit.

"The timber's worth 'x' amount of dollars to me," he said. "I'm pretty much due the timber; we had an agreement, and it's a good contract. So I don't see any way around it."

After January's planning board meeting, Gardner spoke with Weiss on the phone to discuss the situation.

"He said it didn't surprise him that there was a lien on the timber," said Gardner with a laugh. This lien is one of many more financial obligations placed on Hoffman that would have to be satisfied before a sale could close. Despite wanting to protect his investment, though, Gardner doesn't want to jeopardize the potential sale of the resort.

"I think they're protecting themselves," said Gardner of the board's slow movement on the application. "If Mr. Weiss does buy it, they don't want some kind of a wrench in the system, is what I'm thinking. I understand that — it's a big project."

In the meantime, until more is known about when and if the Nevele sale closes, Schug invites residents to come to the next meeting of the planning board on February 23.

"It should be known that the public hearing has remained open, and that they are scheduled to be on the agenda for February's meeting," said Schug, "and I'd like to see a good showing so we can continue to hear the input from the public."