Bedford’s proposed new affordable-housing rules now have the county's blessing.

Even before the town board gave the draft ordinance a formal review Thursday night, Westchester planners had vetted the document and found it consistent with the county’s federally mandated and monitored housing goals.

After a page-by-page review produced a handful of modest changes, Supervisor Lee V.A. Roberts said the document will next be given a public hearing, probably early next month.    

In a letter this week, Westchester Planning Commissioner Edward Buroughs said Bedford had successfully blended longstanding town policies with the provisions of an umbrella “model” housing ordinance drafted by county planners.

While drawing on the town’s real-world experience and longstanding housing policies, some dating to the 1970s, Bedford's hybrid document includes much of the county’s proposed language.

Both ordinances, for example, call a housing unit “affordable” if the annual cost to buy it—common charges, principal, interest, taxes and insurance included—does not take more than a third of the household’s qualifying income. Adjusted for family size, that’s defined as not exceeding 80 percent of the geographical area's median income, or AMI.

Similarly, a rental unit’s annual cost—the rent plus any tenant-paid utilities—cannot exceed 30 percent of 60 percent of AMI.

But in other areas, the town has gone its own way, in one case with an approving nod from the county and in another with some advice to rethink the move. In his letter, Buroughs applauded several “original concepts to encourage and support” affordable housing.

When 20 percent or more of a residential subdivision’s units represent affordable housing, for instance, the planning board can waive or reduce fees or provide other assistance. It can also grant the developer some relief on dimensional and parking requirements.

The town requires developers of sites with five or more residential units to set aside at least 10 percent of them as affordable housing. But if the units are in a single-family residential subdivision, the developer can pay a fee in lieu of building the affordable housing.

“So far,” town planning director Jeffrey Osterman told the board Thursday, “we’ve collected a lot of fees.”

Buroughs expressed concern that another option offered to developers—allowing them to fulfill their affordable-housing requirement at one site and build the market-priced units at another—could also backfire. He urged the town to "reconsider" that provision.

Osterman led three of the town board’s five members—Roberts and Councilmen Chris Burdick and Francis Corcoran—through their review of the nascent ordinance. Joining the board to discuss the draft were Tom McGrath, chairman of both the Blue Mountain Housing Development Corp. and Town Housing Agency, Bedford’s twin approaches to affordable housing, and Norma Drummond, Westchester’s deputy commissioner for planning, who oversees the county housing effort.

While Bedford's Justice Court played the big room upstairs, the officials, along with two members of the public and two members of the press, filled a spartan room in town hall's basement, watching the towns' latest venture into affordable housing.    

For decades, in a town better known for large-lot zoning and big-name celebrity, Bedford has invoked both carrot and stick to encourage developers to build moderately priced homes.

 “The town has an obligation,” Bedford's zoning code declares, “to assist Westchester County and New York State in the preservation, rehabilitation and construction of affordable housing.”

The county has no authority to build or acquire any type of housing. But it has “utterly failed,” in a federal judge's view, to encourage local municipalities to provide affordable units. That inaction had prompted a nonprofit advocacy group, the Anti-Discrimination Center of Metro New York, to sue the county in 2007.

Westchester’s model housing ordinance stems from that lawsuit. At its core, the model ordinance embodies the county’s pledge to redress earlier housing inertia by providing at least 750 racially and ethnically diverse units in 31 communities, including Bedford.

Facing an uphill fight in federal court, Westchester settled in 2009, promising that the 31 municipalities, most of them wealthy and white, would provide the affordable housing.

While some—perhaps even most—of the affected communities were expected to lean on the county’s model ordinance to guide their housing efforts, Bedford faced a different challenge: how to merge the market-tested provisions of its zoning code with Westchester’s template. Although the language was drafted by the county, it clearly carried the imprimatur of a federal monitor overseeing the 2009 pledge.