ALTAMONT — Mayor Kerry Dineen has proposed abolishing the Altamont planning and zoning boards and replacing them with a single board that has “powers and duties” encompassing both functions.

At the Jan. 4 village meeting, in asking trustees to set the public hearing on the proposal, Dineen read the agenda item aloud: “Consider holding a Public Hearing on February 1, 2022 at 7:00 p.m. on proposed Local Law No. I of 2022 to Abolish the Existing Planning Board and Zoning Board of Appeals and Create a New Zoning Board of Appeals for the Village of Altamont.”

“I know that sounds really ominous, but it’s a lot simpler than it sounds,” Dineen said, but she was just asking the board to set the public hearing so it can discuss the proposal. 

“This was an idea I was kicking around for some time after we went through the Stewart’s application process and a few other [applications] that required going from board to board, board to board,” she said. The convenience store’s expansion plan caused controversy in the village for several years as it involved changing the zoning on a parcel that had been residential to commercial.

It seems to Dineen, she said, that the approval process could be streamlined with one board to deal with all applications. 

The mayor noted that the zoning board rarely meets, its last meeting — prior to the one on Jan. 11 — having been in September 2020; it met six times that year, when Stewart’s application was typically the only agenda item. The zoning board met twice in 2019. 

Dineen said Altamont puts a lot of money into training members of the village planning and zoning boards. “But it seems like we train these great members who have volunteered and they never get to serve to use their training or things like that,” she said.

Dineen said merging the two boards into one would streamline the approval process for applicants as well “because oftentimes, if it’s a big project or even a medium-sized project, they have to go to the planning board, the planning board sends it to the zoning board. And then the zoning board says, ‘Well, we want this.’ And [the applicant] may have to go back to the planning board again.” That causes the project to run “on and on,” she said, which isn’t fair to the applicant. 

Abolishing the planning board will also save the village money, she said. And merging the planning and zoning boards is more common than Dineen thought, “especially for smaller municipalities,” she said. 

The mayor also said it can be “tricky” trying to fill 12 seats, “as much as people want to volunteer — they’re five year terms.”

The mayor’s statement seems somewhat contradictory to earlier reasoning cited for not reappointing Maurice McCormick, the longtime chairman of the zoning board, in April 2020. 

At the April 2020 village meeting, Dineen said she was asked about appointments and if board seats were ever rotated. “I think what brought it up is [that] Stewart’s especially had a lot more people that are involved and want to be involved in the boards,” the mayor said at the time. 

McCormick had thought he wasn’t reappointed largely because of how he handled the Stewart’s situation.

In response to an April 2020 emailed Enterprise question about McCormick’s reasoning for why he wasn’t reappointed, Dineen wrote in part, “I spoke with Maurice about wanting to get more residents involved on the boards as there has been an increased interest; some of it because of the Stewart’s application.”

Dineen continued in the April 2020 response, “Historically, that has not been the case and members of the zoning and planning board would generally renew and agree to extend their terms another five years.”

On Jan. 4, Dineen said she thought trustees would be able to “seat, if not 100 percent, close to 100 percent” of the current planning and zoning board members on the newly-created zoning board. 

The proposed law calls for seven members of the new zoning board, each with a seven-year term. The appointments would be made at the board of trustees’ reorganizational meeting in April. 

The mayor attributed the ability to seat nearly every current planning and zoning board member on the new board to not filling vacancies — James Sullivan was appointed to the zoning board in September after Gary Goss stepped down to become the village’s building inspector; Robert Freeman was appointed to the planning board in July after Daniel Hitt resigned — in addition to expiring board member terms for which current appointees “are not going to be serving again.” 

Both boards are currently without alternates, and each has a member whose term is up in April.