Tonight: The Hearth Public Hearing

The Mount Kisco Planning Board will hold a public hearing tonight on The Hearth at Mount Kisco, a proposed senior housing complex that would be built on a portion of the old Swiss Benevolent Society site.

The Hearth, which is proposed to have 129 units and two wings, would be connected to Kisco Avenue through a steep access road. The proposal requires site plan approval, a special permit, a wetland permit and a steep slopes permit.

The public hearing comes as the environmental review of the project was essentially finished last month. The review followed submission of a formal application of the proposal last October and a decision to change the position of the building and its emergency access road.

The proposal is for roughly 17.7 acres on a site of about 50 acres, a section of the property that Mount Kisco acquired. It was originally conceived as part of a 2005 lawsuit settlement between the village and developer Robert Mishkin to end litigation that he brought over the lack of approval for a proposed expansion of his senior housing center on Mountain Avenue. The center, called Town & Country, was once also owned by the Swiss Benevolent Society. Mishkin's proposal was to add room for an additional 46 residents, a doubling from the 44-resident capacity on site.

The proposal underwent an more lengthy environmental review from the planning board from 2006-09 and got rezoning from the village board of trustees in 2009. The project went dormant amid a bad economy and Mishkin emerged last year as a minority partner in a new development group, which includes himself and a joint venture of Hearth Management and Fortus Group.