RENSSELAERVILLE — The Rensselaerville Town Board has tentatively settled on the idea of entrusting its Kuhar Endowment Fund — a roughly $830,000 pot of money left to it three years ago in a will — to the Community Foundation for the Greater Capital Region.

After discussing it with the board, town attorney William F. Ryan said he would draft an agreement with the organization to create a non-endowed trust, meaning that the board could “invade the principle” of the fund if it so wished, giving it a higher ceiling on how much of the money and its interest it can spend overall. 

The current board has promised to distribute interest from the fund to community-oriented projects and organizations in the town. It created a citizens’ committee to oversee the fund, and had gone as far as announcing the first slate of recipients before stumbling over state legal hurdles that have only recently been cleared. 

Per a judge’s orders, the town is required to entrust the money to another entity, and is capped at using 90 percent of the interest generated for its intended purpose — a ceiling that Ryan called “generous.”

With that, the town board debated at its Jan. 9 meeting between the non-endowed and the endowed options, with the endowed option protecting the principle from future boards that may decide to spend it on non-community-oriented endeavors, but would allow only 4 percent of the generated interest to be used. 

As a reference point, Supervisor John Dolce told the board that the fund generated about $24,000 of interest in one year, meaning that only around $960 could be used from that return. 

“I really think the non-endowed fund is the way to go,” Ryan said, explaining that he could set the agreement up so that the principle is protected while giving the board the option to spend a more meaningful amount of the interest.  

The fund would be subject to a step-fee schedule that Dolce calculated would come to about $8,600 annually. Councilman Randy Bates said that was a “lot of money,” to which Ryan replied that it was essentially unavoidable.

“You’re going to have to pay a fee for someone to do this, number one,” he said. “Number two, 99 percent of the companies to whom I’ve spoken — like, four or five companies — these are the only people that have responded.”

When asked, Ryan said he needed to look into whether the fund could be changed from a non-endowed to an endowed at a later time, and said that he would proceed with drafting an agreement for the non-endowed fund with no motion being necessary.