GUILDERLAND — As Guilderland is poised to update its comprehensive plan, the town board Tuesday adopted a resolution to become a Pro-Housing Community.

A committee of residents appointed by the town board has been working with a consultant since November 2022 on updating Guilderland’s 20-year-old land-use plan. On March 5 the town’s planner said that, rather than superseding the committee, the town board, in adopting the resolution, would be giving the committee direction on issues that need to be addressed.

Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order last July to initiate the pro-housing program, increasing the chances of participating municipalities to get state grants. In a Feb. 22 editorial, The Enterprise urged local towns to join the program.

Last month, Hochul addressed representatives from the first 20 municipalities to sign on to the program, brandishing a bunch of carrots rather than the legislative stick she had tried unsuccessfully to use last year.

“It’s a simple matter of supply and demand,” said Hochul; as more homes are built in New York state, prices will go down, she said.

Owning your own home, said Hochul, has always been the American Dream. New Yorkers are leaving to live in states with more affordable housing, some of them nearby, she said.

“We’re losing population … We’re losing political clout,” Hochul said, as, with fewer representatives in Washington, D.C., New York gets fewer federal benefits.

Guilderland has to show that its housing stock has increased by 0.33 percent in the last year or by 1 percent over the previous three years. A memo from the town’s planner, Kenneth Kovalchik, to the town board said his department is working on completing the necessary documentation.

He told the board it would take his department a few weeks to finish gathering the information it needs to submit to the state and “then it may take a couple of months to hear back from them.”

“We met the criteria because we have all this high-end housing going on in town,” Robyn Gray, who chairs the Guilderland Coalition for Responsible Growth, told the board members at the start of their March 5 meeting.

While she said the program is “a great idea,” she went on, “I just want to make sure that we’re going to focus on affordable housing and senior housing and not high-end housing, not even market-rate housing. It should all be for those special needs.”

Superintendent Peter Barber responded that the grant programs “are all geared towards workforce housing, affordable housing, senior housing.”

By adopting the resolution, the town has agreed to streamline permitting for and adopt policies encouraging multifamily housing, affordable housing, accessible housing, accessory dwelling units, and supportive housing.

It has also agreed to adopt policies that further fair housing, to incorporate regional housing needs into planning decisions, and to increase development capacity for residential uses.

Kovalchik told the board that putting together the application “is quite extensive in terms of the data that we have to provide the state, going back to 2018 … And then there’s quite an extensive analysis of our zoning code that has to be provided to the state.”

Hochul had touted $650 million available through state programs, for which pro-housing communities could apply. But Kovalchik noted that, of the eight funding programs he listed in his memo, quite a few would not be relevant for Guilderland.

Among those that would be relevant is the Market New York program. “One of their goals is promotion of agritourism and craft-beverage tourism, which is quickly becoming a hot item here in the town with a lot of the vineyards and craft breweries that are popping up,” said Kovalchik.

He also mentioned Thacher park’s recent designation as a Natural Landmark and noted Guilderland is within the Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area. “So I think there’s a lot of opportunity here,” he said.

Councilman Jacob Crawford noted agribusinesses like wineries in New Scotland and “further up the Hill” and asked if Guilderland could partner with other communities.

“You’d have to have the town of New Scotland to be designated as a Pro-Housing Community,” said Kovalchik, a designation which New Scotland has started to discuss. 

Kovalchik gave two examples of grant requests the town had made earlier of New York State Homes and Community Renewal. One was for the Pine Bush Senior Living facility and the other was for the Beacon Communities intergenerational housing project; both projects were dependent on grant funding.

“Each one of those projects were denied twice by Homes and Community Renewal,” said Kovalchik. “So I think, by becoming a Pro-Housing Community, that might help us with projects like that in the future.”

Referencing the New York Main Street funding program, which is administered by Homes and Community Renewal, Crawford said he was intrigued and would like to see more of a “Main Street feel in the town of Guilderland,” something he said councilwomen Christine Napierski and Amanda Beedle had “talked about for the last few years … trying to create a sense of community.”

“Obviously, with Route 20 being our primary corridor, it does make it hard with a four-lane highway … I don’t think you’re ever going to have something like the downtown in Altamont.” But, Kovalchik said, in places like McKownville, where there is more density, there would be “opportunities for infill or redevelopment.”

That should be discussed as part of the update of Guilderland’s comprehensive plan, Kovalchik said along with “what type of zoning would be appropriate to encourage that type of redevelopment to create that greater sense of identity.”

He noted “prevailing comments” made during the update process and said, “A lot of residents feel there is a lack of identity in Guilderland.”

Crawford suggested “creating some mixed-use areas where we can identify Main Street with shops and retail on the first floor with maybe apartments on the second floor rather than multistory apartment buildings.”

Redefining an area of town may take 20 years or longer, Kovalchik said.

Asked by Beedle about tools that might entice developers, Kovalchik said the brownfield site at the corner of Route 20 and Foundry Road might be an opportunity for funding for remediation. “That would help that site get cleaned up because right now the estimates are two-and-a-half million [dollars] to clean it up,” he said.

Napierski noted the brownfield site was private property to which Kovalchik responded public-private partnerships are “pretty common with grant programs.”

Kovalchik said that developer Armand Quadrini had walked away from developing the Foundry Road site because it became “too burdensome when you included the remediation.”

But, he went on, “We now have a new application that’s been filed recently … They are including workforce housing as part of the project. It’s a mixed-use development — multifamily with commercial, where they are proposing a minimum of 10 percent of those units to be workforce housing units.”

Workforce housing is a type of affordable housing calculated on area median income, Kovalchik explained. “Guilderland’s area median income is $101,000 based on the 2022 census,” he said.

It will be up to the town board to review that project as a planned unit development, or PUD, Kovalchik noted.

“If the town was a Pro-Housing Community and adopted this resolution, are you saying that they might be able to qualify for funding or some type of grant program to make that?” Napierski asked.

“The town would have to be the applicant,” said Kovalchik.

“The price of construction has gone up on almost everything that you build,” said Councilman Gustavo Santos. “Will the state give incentives to certain contractors who have pro-housing in these communities that are applying for these grants?”

“I would say yes, but that would be the town setting the goals for wanting to see affordable housing,” said Kovalchik, adding he thought it should be incorporated into the comprehensive plan and then codified into law.

He went on, “We might be requiring developers to include affordable housing.”

Currently, Kovlchik said, just 1 percent of land in Guilderland is zoned for apartments and about 60 percent is zoned for single-family dwellings.

“If only 1-percent  of your land is zoned to allow for higher density use, we need to look at that as part of the comp plan update,” said Kovalchik. “That should be one of the goals: In the next 20 years, where do you want to see growth and how do you protect a lot of the open space in ag[ricultural] uses?”

He added, “A way to do that is not extending water and sewer infrastructure and looking at infill development and redevelopment within your already existing built-up land, allowing more types of land uses in certain districts.”

Crawford expressed reservations about “superseding” the work of the committee that is updating the town’s comprehensive plan.

Kovalchik responded, “I think this is important because now it’s the town board saying, ‘Hey, you know, we agree that there’s issues in town that need to be addressed.’ And this is kind of directing, whether it’s subcommittees or CPUC [Comprehensive Plan Update Committee] in terms of looking at each one of these criteria here and how we can incorporate that into our future land-use planning.”

With that, Barber said he had originally been thinking of putting off a vote on the pro-housing resolution for another couple of weeks but said, “Based upon the discussion and where I think is the support for this, I’m ready to go ahead and make the motion to adopt the resolution.”

The vote was unanimous.

Other business

In other business at its March 5 meeting, the Guilderland Town Board:

— Scheduled the town’s 2024 Household Hazardous Waste Day for Saturday, Oct. 12 from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the highway department;

— Provisionally appointed Sheri Tallman as assistant coordinator of Senior Citizens’ Services;

— P​​ermanently appointed Michele Merritt as senior keyboard specialist in the assessor's office;

— Reappointed Tim McAuliffe to the town’s ethics board; and

— Approved amendments to the 2023 town budget.

“We got our sales-tax revenue and we’re in pretty good shape,” said Barber. “So what we did is we funded the items that we said we’re going to do in our 2024 budget.”

This includes putting $100,000 into the general fund reserve; $50,000 into a reserve for the transfer station, anticipating “very large amounts of debris” with climate change; $50,000 into a reserve fund for environmental protection allowing the town to purchase land and preserve open space; $50,000 into a reserve for the town’s golf course; and $350,000 in the ambulance reserve.

“That's because ambulances are getting more and more expensive,” said Barber.