NEW SCOTLAND — At the February town board meeting, new Supervisor Douglas LaGrange proposed the first law of the year; an amendment to the planning and zoning board member term limits.

The board also appointed planning board member Laura Ten Eyck to fill a seat on the town board vacated by LaGrange when he became supervisor, leaving another seat empty on the planning board.

New Councilwoman

“We’ve considered several names,” LaGrange told the town board audience of the decision to appoint Ten Eyck to the town board. Ten Eyck’s term will begin March 1.

Resident Sharon Boehlke questioned the amount of time Ten Eyck served on the planning board before moving to the town board.

“She’s served on the planning board now for some time,” LaGrange said. “Over a year, but I’m not positive.”

Republican Party members had asked the Democratic and Independent town board to consider appointing Craig A. Shufelt, who garnered more than 1,100 votes in November’s election but was defeated by less than 60 votes by Democrat Adam Greenberg. Laura Ten Eyck is enrolled as a Democrat.

Boehlke told the town board that Ten Eyck had served less than a year on the planning board. Ten Eyck served on the planning board from March 2015 until her current appointment.

“I’m at frequent planning board meetings, as you know. She has confusion when trying to grasp what’s going on,” she said of Ten Eyck. “I don’t disapprove of her — a great candidate.”

Boehlke said that Ten Eyck was too new, with limited experience.

Ten Eyck, 53, is the senior New York project and outreach manager for American Farmland Trust, a national not-for-profit organization, she told The Enterprise.

“I do have a pretty extensive professional background in town planning,” she said, referring to her work with land-use planning for agricultural lands in five different local towns in three counties.

“The planning board was a great learning environment, and I would have been happy to continue serving there,” Ten Eyck said.

Ten Eyck said that she was approached by New Scotland Democratic Committee Chairman L. Michael Mackey about switching to the town board.

“I would be willing to do that, if that was the desire of the board,” Ten Eyck recalled saying. To retain her appointed town board seat, she will need to run in the next election to fulfill the term for LaGrange’s former seat. Ten Eyck plans to run, she said.

“I committed to run as a candidate in the fall,” she said about being approached to work on the town board.

“I’m glad to make the switch. I think it’s a better fit for me,” she said.

A lifelong New Scotland resident, Ten Eyck’s father owns Indian Ladder Farms. She and her husband, Dietrich Gehring, recently opened Indian Ladder Farmstead Brewery & Cidery. 

“I understand a lot of the issues,” she said. “I’m sure I can make a positive contribution.”

Term limits

LaGrange said that term limits of 10 years, enacted in 2011, “can be unduly restrictive.” The amendment is proposed “to allow a procedure for making exceptions to the term-limit rules in certain circumstances,” he said.

“Due to the limited number of qualified candidates who are willing to serve as members of the boards,” the proposal states, “and the overall population of the town, the town board has found that the term limits can be unduly restrictive…and the town code should be amended.”

An exception would require approval by a supermajority on the town board, LaGrange said, with four of the board’s five members supporting the allowance.

The board will hold a public hearing on the law on March 9 at 6:45 p.m.

Councilwoman Patricia Snyder said that she had “concerns” with the proposed law, but that she would reserve judgment.

“I will remain open-minded until the public hearing,” she said. “These positions become personal attachments, and 10 years is a long time.”

Snyder said that the town should deal, instead, with “more leadership and succession-planning issues.”

When the term-limits law was passed in 2011, according to former Supervisor Thomas Dolin, who spoke to The Enterprise in 2014, no “grandfathering” was allowed; board members were limited to 10 years of service, regardless of when they were appointed.

During a transition, when a board member leaves or resigns mid-term, a new member filling less than half of a five-year term could still serve two full terms, Dolin told The Enterprise.

The term-limits law was accompanied with restructuring of the boards; the terms are now set up so that only one board member’s term expires each year, Dolin said then. Also, most boards were set up to have five members with five-year terms, Dolin said; the planning board previously had seven-year terms for seven members.

At the end of 2014, planning board member Kurt Anderson was eligible to keep his seat for another five years, but was not reappointed. Ten Eyck joined the planning board last spring.

Corrected on Feb. 19, 2016: Our story originally said that Craig A. Shufelt had lost to Adam Greenberg by fewer than 30 votes, which was corrected to fewer than 60 votes after checking official results from the Albany County Board of Elections: Greenberg garnered 929 votes on the Democratic line, 152 on the Conservative line, and 141 on the Independence Party line for a total of 1,222. Shufelt got 1,084 votes on the Republican line and 84 on the Reform Party line for a total of 1,168. So the difference was actually 54.