GUILDERLAND — The Lunar New Year falls on Feb. 17 this year. The Guilderland Town Board members or anyone who watched their Jan. 20 meeting will be ready to celebrate.

Wei Qin, who described herself as a writer with two children in the Guilderland schools, gave the board an illustrated presentation on the holiday.

Qin is the founder and president of Asian Arts New York, a not-for-profit organization that celebrates and supports Asian arts and artists across the state.

She explained that the lunisolar calendar has 12 months and uses a repeating cycle of 60 years to name years, months, and days. Zodiac animals are used to name the years — and this is the year of the Fire Horse, which, Qin said, signifies speed, freedom, and action.

The Lunar New Year, observed across many countries and communities, is now an official school holiday in New York state; that legislation was signed by Governor Kathy Hochul in 2023.

The school holiday, Qin noted, acknowledges that the Asian American and Pacific Islander community is the fastest-growing minority group in the state.

The same is true in Guilderland itself. According to United States Census Bureau data, more than 10 percent of the town’s roughly 38,000 residents are Asian. While 12.6 percent of Guilderland residents are foreign-born, 65 percent of that number — more than triple the 20 percent born in Latin America, the second-largest group — were born in Asia.

The Asian population has grown steadily in Guilderland since 1970 when less than half of a percent of the town’s roughly 21,000 residents — fewer than 100 — were Asian. The biggest jump came between 1990 and 2000 when Guilderland had about 2,000 Asian residents, making up 6 percent of the roughly 34,000 residents.

According to the Capital District Regional Planning Commission, the Capital Region, encompassing Albany, Rensselaer, Saratoga, and Schenectady counties, has seen significant growth in its foreign-born population in recent years. Based on 2018-22 United States Census five-year estimates, 74,314 people, or 8.52 percent of the total population in the region, are foreign-born.

Despite this substantial presence, the proportion of the foreign-born population in the Capital Region still falls below the national percent of 13.68 and New York state’s percent of 22.55.

Qin displayed pictures of the way the 15 days of the Lunar New Year are celebrated around the globe. She named these countries that celebrate the holiday: China, Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Mongolia, and Japan before the 19th Century.

“It goes with Chinese immigrants all around the world,” she said of the holiday.

Describing “why the Lunar New Year is so important for people like me,” Qin said, “for us, it’s like Christmas and Thanksgiving into one.”

No other holiday is comparable. “This is the one,” she said.

Each day of the celebration has a theme, from cleaning house and cutting hair to putting up decorations. At the center of the festivities are family gatherings and reunions.

Celebrants wear red for good luck; Qin herself wore a red dress for the town board presentation.

“Don’t wear black; you’re going to get kicked out,” she advised, indicating that black is funereal.

There are no gifts to shop for or wrap. Rather, elders fill red envelopes with cash and give them to children to recognize their achievements during the year — “showing them that you care about them,” said Qin.

She also said the celebration is “all about the food” as she displayed special dishes from around the world for the Lunar New Year.

“Everything in Asian culture has a meaning,” she said, commenting on a picture of her own family table set with a red cloth and a full fish front and center. For luck, the fish must have its head and tail, she said.

“My personal feeling: Look at outside. What do I see? Snow and ice … cold, cold, cold,” said Qin. She went on, “Lunar New Year makes a perfect spot in the cold of winter to give people in the Capital Region and Guilderland an excuse to celebrate.”

She said of Asian Arts New York, which supports both visual and performance art, ”Our main goal is to connect communities and generations.”

She noted upcoming assemblies at Pine Bush Elementary and Farnsworth Middle School and also classes at the Guilderland Public Library in tai chi and calligraphy.

Qin ended her presentation with a plea: “Open your heart and try — Lunar New Year can be yours to celebrate.”

When she finished speaking, the board members applauded and Supervisor Peter Barber said, “The Asian community is one of the largest growing communities in our town.”

Other business

In other business at their Jan. 20 meeting, the Guilderland Town Board members:

— Heard praise from Robyn Gray, who heads the Guilderland Coalition for Responsible Growth, on the update of Guilderland’s comprehensive plan. “In the end, residents of the town were listened to,” she said.

Gray also asked, “What are the next steps?”

Barber responded that committees would be set up to amend the zoning code.

Gray said she would like 2026 to be a year when the town listens to residents who, she said, are not amenable to so much development. “We really do want to work with the town to get things done,” Gray said of her group, which “represents a very large faction in town,” she said.

She urged the board to proceed thoughtfully with the three major projects requiring zoning changes.

“People are angry and it’s filtering down to the local level,” she said.

Gray also suggested naming the town’s conservation advisory council after the late John Wemple, who chaired the council for decades. He died on Dec. 11, 2025 at the age of 92. “He set the standard,” Gray said.

Later in the meeting, Councilman Jacob Crawford suggested that a park or a hiking trail be named after Wemple;

— Heard from Alexandra Mitsios, who lives at 11 Willow St., that rusty nails had been strewn across her driveway on Christmas Eve, upsetting her children and upending Christmas traditions.

Mitsios and her neighbors had voiced complaints to the board in August 2024 with pleas to calm traffic and ensure safety for walkers and cyclists.

Mitsios had presented the board with a petition in October 2024, seeking a permanent fix for the speeding traffic on the residential road. At that time, Barber had said that two or three speed humps would be needed, and each would be about 20 feet in length.

Mitsios told the board on Jan. 20 she felt targeted with the Christmas Eve incident and there had been no acknowledgement by Barber or his office.

“We do not feel a level of safety that we should,” she said.

 “After two years of ongoing efforts, my primary concerns remain a safer Willow Street and the lack of a comprehensive plan,” Mitsios told the board. “Throughout this year-long process, Mr. Barber stated multiple times that we would be looking into an installation of a series of humps underscoring not bumps … So, instead of executing a successful model, a single bump has unsurprisingly led us to this”;

— Approved the Conservation Advisory Council’s 2025 Annual Report, and authorized its submission to the Commissioner of the Department of Environmental Conservation;

— Authorized the transfer station to issue a request for bids for grinding and removing yard waste.

“This is the one item that really drives the budget every year,” said Barber, noting that storms, particularly ice storms, increase the costs;

— Authorized the transfer station to sponsor the Household Hazardous Waste Day on Saturday, Oct. 3, from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Barber said that about half of the cost is covered by the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation with the rest covered by the town;

— Approved a memorandum of agreement between the town and Unit A of the Civil Service Employees Association, for a contract running from Jan. 1, 2025 to Dec. 31, 2028, which provides recall pay for telecommunicators and animal control officers when they are recalled to duty.

The agreement redefines recall pay so that employees will receive a minimum of three hours of pay at their overtime rate regardless of the actual time worked;

— Approved the 2025-2026 animal control sheltering contract between the town and the not-for-profit Animal Protective Foundation of Schenectady. The town has its own shelter and keeps dogs that have been found for seven days. After seven days, if dogs haven’t been returned home or adopted, Barber said, the town needs “a more suitable home”;

— Appointed Seth Johnson as an Emergency Medical Technician for Guilderland Emergency Medical Services;

— Appointed Ted Raymond as Training Center Operator at the fire training tower with an annual stipend of $2,500; and

— Heard from Barber that because of a phishing scam where fraudulent emails were sent to solicit payments for town services, primarily targeting building and zoning requests, that “as a protective measure,” phone numbers and email addresses are being redacted from the applications being posted to the town’s website.