GUILDERLAND — For the town of Guilderland and the village of Altamont, 2025 was a year where lofty civic-minded concepts like one about how best to preserve “town character” ran headlong into the day-to-day realities of municipal governing.

As the year came to a close, Guilderland found itself at odds with a very specific set of town residents.

In November, the Guilderland Town Board unanimously adopted a $47.7 million budget for the upcoming fiscal year. On the surface, the budget appeared sound, delivering a decrease in the average property tax bill for the vast majority of town residents by approximately $16.

However, this aggregate stability masked a stark inequity: For residents of Altamont, their property tax was set to jump by an average of $240 per household, a 162-percent increase over the previous year.   

The catalyst for this disparity was a rigid interpretation of New York Tax Law by the Office of the State Comptroller, which arrived at the conclusion following nearly a year of confidential auditing that found the town’s long-standing method of allocating sales-tax revenues was against the law.

Guilderland funds town services out of three buckets:

— The A Fund:, which is a town-wide general fund that covers services provided to all residents, including those in the village (property assessment, 9-1-1 dispatch, and increasingly, emergency medical services);

— The B Fund, or town outside village, covers services exclusive to town residents outside of Altamont, such as zoning and building inspection; and 

— The DB Fund, which covers highway maintenance, largely outside the village.

For years, Guilderland exercised what it had believed to be its statutory discretion to apply sales-tax revenues to the A Fund, thereby subsidizing the tax levy for all residents, including those in Altamont. This practice acknowledged that village residents, who pay their own village taxes for services like police and parks, should not be double-taxed for town services they do not fully use, while also recognizing that modern town services like Advanced Life Support are used by the entire populace.   

The comptroller’s audit, however, enforced a strict reading of a 1965 statute. The audit determined that the town must use its sales-tax allocation to reduce the property tax levies in the B and DB funds before any surplus could be applied to the A Fund

Supervisor Peter Barber took every chance he could to criticize the audit,  labeling the 1965 law “grossly out of date.” His argument rested on the evolution of municipal services over the last 60 years. 

When the law was written, town governments were fundamentally different entities, Barber argued. For example, ambulance services were largely volunteer-run, costing taxpayers little more than the price of fuel and bandages. 

In 2025, Guilderland’s Emergency Medical Services department required a budget appropriation of over $4 million to maintain professional paramedic coverage — a service that saves lives in Altamont just as frequently as it does in Westmere.   

Barber contended that the statute’s language, specifically the word “reduce,” implied discretion, not a mandate to “eliminate” or “reduce to zero.”

He argued that strictly applying this archaic formula in 2025 ignored the reality that the town now provides robust senior services, animal control, and information-technology support to the village — services that did not exist or were negligible in 1965. By forcing the town to prioritize the elimination of taxes for one group of residents over the subsidization of another, the comptroller was, in Barber’s view, creating a “taxpayer inequity” rather than solving one.   

While the tax hike was a matter of math and law, the fallout faced by the town was a problem of communication. The comptroller’s audit was classified as “confidential” until its final release, a constraint that Barber cited as the reason for the town’s silence during the budget-preparation process. However, this explanation did little to assuage the anger of village trustees, who learned of the impending financial hit in the pages of The Enterprise.   

Mayor Kerry Dineen told the town board in November, “I don’t think this increase should stand,” describing the situation as creating a “trust deficit” between the two governing bodies. Dineen said trustees were texting her screenshots of the news story, asking, “Did we miss something?” 

The realization that the town had adopted the budget the same night the tax hike was first made public, left trustees feeling sidelined and their constituents blindsided. During the December meeting of the Altamont Board of Trustees, the focus shifted to discussion of legislative intervention. 

By December, the offices of Assemblywoman Gabriella Romero and Senator Patricia Fahy told The Enterprise they were exploring legislative remedies. 

Fahy said in a statement she would “consider drafting narrowly-tailored legislation alongside Assemblymember Gabriella Romero to correct this fiscal imbalance.” Romero’s office said she was exploring the possibility of soliciting a second legal opinion from State Attorney General Letitia James to challenge the comptroller’s interpretation.   

Water in Altamont

 In February 2022, testing of Altamont’s Brandle Road wellsite revealed manganese levels of 0.59 milligrams per liter, nearly double the Environmental Protection Agency’s secondary maximum contaminant level of 0.3 mg/L. 

The village shut down the Brandle Road wellsite, which had produced a third of the drinking-water supply when operating.

While manganese is naturally occurring, at these concentrations it becomes a destructive nuisance, staining laundry, clogging pipes, and rendering water aesthetically repulsive. The issue hit home in September as Al Caruso, a Guilderland resident of the senior-living Brandle Meadows condominium complex, came to a village board meeting to ask trustees what the village can do about the appliance-damaging manganese.

“We’ve lived in Brandle for 13 years and this is what we’ve experienced," Caruso said, passing out photos of damaged appliances. The problem has been ongoing. Caruso had to have the “dispenser of our washing machine” replaced because “it was so plugged up,” he said. Faucets also have had to be replaced. “Our toilets are disgusting,” he said. “We have to pumice them like every week.”

Hope arrived in December in the form of a state grant, as Mayor Dineen announced the village had been awarded $3.38 million to help cover 70 percent of the cost to create an emergency interconnect with Guilderland. 

While villagers breathed a collective sigh of relief at news of the funding, town residents have for months been skeptical of the village connecting to town water.

During public hearings for the Comprehensive Plan Update, Robyn Gray of the Guilderland Coalition for Responsible Growth raised the alarm. 

She argued that the detailed mapping of the waterline extension in the comprehensive plan acted as a “blueprint for developers.” Her fear, echoed by Historic Altamont President David Bourque, was that, once the infrastructure existed, the pressure to tap into it for new subdivisions would be irresistible.

“A water main is like an interstate highway exit. Intensive development follows that,” Bourque warned.   

The concern was specific: The waterline would run along Route 146, a corridor of open fields and rural vistas that define the approach to the village. If developers could access this water, the fields could quickly become cul-de-sacs. 

To assuage these fears, town and village officials repeatedly stressed that the interconnect was legally restricted to emergency use only. Dineen was adamant: “We are not hooking up to Guilderland to get water from them unless it’s an emergency …  because they don’t want development ... from here to Guilderland Center.”   

Despite these assurances, the skepticism remained. The history of development in Guilderland is one of incremental expansion, and for preservationists, the physical presence of capacity often outweighs the paper promises of policy.

The theoretical 

After years of committee meetings, pandemic delays, and extensive public input, Guilderland formally adopted an update to its land-use plan in November. 

The document is a philosophical statement that attempts to answer a fundamental question: What makes Guilderland, Guilderland?   

The plan explicitly attempted to define the “town character” concept, which is often not codified but is frequently cited in opposition to proposals for development. The plan describes character as the “unique set of qualities ... influencing architecture, natural features, history, [and] culture” that shapes the town’s identity.   

The phrase was defined to support specific preservation goals:

— Rural Preservation

The plan calls for tightening regulations in western Guilderland to prevent the suburbanization of agricultural lands, implicitly validating the “green belt” concept advocated by Altamont residents;

—  Conservation Overlay Districts

The update recommends the creation of an overlay district to protect the Helderberg Escarpment viewshed. This would place stricter controls on development along the ridge lines and steep slopes that form the town’s iconic backdrop, ensuring that scenic vistas are not marred by construction; and

— Smart Growth Nodes

In a pivot away from sprawl, the plan directs higher-density, mixed-use development toward existing infrastructure hubs — specifically the Western Avenue corridor and the Transit-Oriented Development district near Crossgates Mall.   

The influence of the Save the Pine Bush advocacy group was imprinted on the final document. Early drafts were criticized for treating the Pine Bush — a globally rare inland pine barren ecosystem — as just another park, but Lynne Jackson and other members of the not-f0r-profit  group argued that the plan lacked sufficient detail on the unique value of the ecosystem.

Their pleas worked, as Barber announced in September that he directed the inclusion of a standalone chapter dedicated entirely to the Pine Bush. 

This chapter formalizes the relationship between the town and the Albany Pine Bush Preserve Commission. It codifies the practice of referring all land-use applications within the Pine Bush study area to the commission for review, ensuring that ecological impacts are assessed before a shovel hits the ground. 

The practical

While planners debated the theoretical future of the town, the physical transformation of Guilderland proceeded unabated in 2025, as developers and residents played their parts true to form.

Construction of Costco Wholesale on Western Avenue, a project that survived years of litigation, became a source of daily misery for its neighbors, as residents of Westmere Terrace, whose homes abut the site, described the construction process as a “continuous earthquake.”

The issue played out in public in October when Peak Construction, the project contractor, applied for a variance to begin work at 5 a.m.— two hours earlier than the code allows. 

The contractor argued that early starts were necessary for concrete pours to ensure the building was weather-tight before winter. Residents were outraged. Lisa Hart told zoning board members that her house shook so violently that pictures rattled on the walls, and she described the psychological toll of “suffering through” the noise while trying to work from home.   

Project superintendent Derek Snyder explained that his company was responsible only for building the physical Costco structure. The severe vibrations and pre-7 a.m. start times, he said, were the responsibility of the site’s developer, Pyramid, and its subcontractors responsible for earth-moving, grading, and utility work.

Jacqueline Coons, Guilderland’s chief building and zoning inspector, told board members a complaint listing similar issues to those voiced by residents on Oct. 15 had been filed with the town. 

When it came time for the board to vote on Peak’s request, those in favor — Richard Villa, Nichole Ventresca-Cohen, and Chairwoman Elizabeth Lott — reasoned the request was for eight weeks, which would negate Peak having to wait until spring to do its noisy work, while significant weight was given to Peak’s proactive approach, “being responsible and coming here for permission instead of another company that is violating laws,” as Villa described it. 

Sharon Cupoli and James Zieno based their dissenting votes on Westmere residents’ quality-of-life concerns over Peak’s scheduling issues. 

The 3-to-2 zoning board approval on Oct. 15 led some residents to the Oct. 21 town board meeting to request immediate action be taken to halt the project’s disruption; authorize an independent test of noise and vibration at the site; and investigate the zoning board’s decision as well as the underlying facts provided by Peak, in the form of a sound-level assessment.

Following residents’ recounting of the zoning board meeting, town board members took the opportunity to be disappointed.

Councilman Jacob Crawford expressed his deep disappointment that an “out-of-town contractor,” whose on-site supervisor in Guilderland has overseen construction of 18 Costcos, deemed its construction schedule more important than the welfare of Guilderland residents. 

Nothing happened

In Altamont, Jeff Thomas won a long battle over parking spaces in his proposed village center development, which calls for the relocation of the village’s post office and building of a mixed-use complex at 120 Park Street.

The project stalled for months due to arithmetic. 

Gary Goss, the village code enforcement officer, had rounded up fractional parking requirements for each of the four uses proposed — each with their own specific guidelines for determining space — which resulted in a demand for 62 spaces; Thomas argued for 48 spaces, aggregating the requirements before rounding.   

Thomas’s central contention was that any rounding up for partial spaces, as dictated by the code, should occur only at the end of the entire calculation process, after totaling the requirements for all uses. But Goss was rounding up and then adding. In June, the zoning board agreed and ruled in Thomas's favor, a victory that allowed the project to proceed.

In October, the 161-year-old village train depot on the property Thomas hopes to develop was demolished. The neglected structure was located behind the restored 1897 train station that now serves as Altamont’s library.

Thomas said the demolition cost him “roughly $65,000” and was needed because “a lot of people worried about kids going in there and getting hurt.”