ALTAMONT — After initially agreeing to abolish the village’s planning and zoning boards and replace them with one five-member zoning board, the Altamont Board of Trustees has decided a seven-member body will take its place. 

The revision came after a March 1 public hearing on the proposed local law to merge the two boards where current members of the village’s planning and zoning boards as well as citizens asked trustees to make the change. 

Mayor Kerry Dineen in January proposed abolishing the Altamont planning and zoning boards and replacing them with a single board that had “powers and duties” encompassing both. As presented to the public, the initial law would have done away with both boards and in their place created a seven-member voting body with one alternate member.

However, the mayor’s intention was actually to have the new zoning board made up of five voting members and two alternates. (Village attorney Allyson Phillips had incorrectly numbered the members of the new zoning board in the proposed local law.)

The mayor’s intention was not made clear until late in the Feb. 1 public hearing, which drew the ire of some of  the meeting’s attendees. The board ultimately decided to keep the public hearing open and draft a new law that clarified the makeup of the new zoning board.

During the March 1 public hearing, a number of the same residents who had spoken against the merging of the two boards in February made similar pleas again this month. Missing from the Feb. 1 public hearing — but included on March 1 — were the views of those impacted by the proposed local law. 

Deborah Hext, the chairwoman of the planning board, said she’s “really at a loss as to why everyone is against” merging the two boards. 

Addressing an earlier comment about who benefits from merging the two boards, Hext said, “Bringing more people together in one setting, who’s it beneficial to? It would be beneficial to me, it would be beneficial to the rest of the planning board, it would be beneficial to the zoning board, they get to use their training.”

Three-term planning board member Steve Caruso said he didn’t think there would be a loss of checks and balances — an argument that had been made earlier in the hearing — if his board were abolished, and said it would be the residents who reaped the rewards. 

“By having one board, putting everybody together, all having everybody trained, and all being on the same page to be able, I think, to understand things a little more clear, the community would be the people who would benefit with this,” Caruso said. 

Planning board member Barbara Muhlfelder said she saw the benefit in “combining the two boards.”

The three planning board members who spoke in favor of merging the boards (all five were in favor) were also in favor of a new seven-member zoning board. 

Danny Ramirez, the current chairman of the zoning board, said he favored a seven-member body for the new zoning board. Ramirez said the seven-member board “would be more enticing, more diverse,” and that he favored “putting more minds out there with [more] experiences.”

Kate Provencher, a member of the zoning board, was the only real dissenting voice among the appointees who spoke. 

“I do think it is valuable to have a planning board and zoning board,” Provencher said. 

She said she didn’t “think that the process that we’ve had where an applicant has to go before the zoning board and the planning board has been onerous or has slowed things down.”

Referencing the expansion of the Stewart’s Shop in the village, Provencher said, “There’s one project that people point to” when making the argument to merge the two boards, “but there were a number of factors that were going on with that, including the village board doing a second hearing on that.”

The village board approved a rezone, of a residential lot into a commercial lot, for Stewart’s in December 2018, but a lawsuit questioning the completeness of its environmental review forced the board to rezone the property for a second time a year after its initial rezone.

A few details with the new merged board still have to be ironed out — for example, can appointees to a seven-member board be appointed for fewer than seven years. The village board set a public hearing for the latest iteration of Local Law Number 1 of 2022 for April 5, at 7 p.m.