GUILDERLAND — Nearly five months after its first meeting, the Guilderland Comprehensive Plan Update Committee is still trying to define its role in the revamp process of the town’s two-decade-old master plan. 

The committee recently held its third public meeting, where its members and the public expressed similar concerns about the committee’s ability to run the plan’s update process as it sees fit. 

The committee is due to meet again on May 9. 

 Also on April 17, members decided on who would lead the committee as it wades deeper into its revision of Guilderland’s 2001 comprehensive plan. 

Members unanimously approved Cody Betton to chair the committee, with James Abbruzzese serving as its vice chair. 

Betton is a 2009 Guilderland High School graduate. He graduated from the  University of Buffalo four years later with a degree in health and human services,  and currently works as a commercial underwriter.

Abbruzzese is a lifelong Guilderland resident who, along with his brothers, one of whom served on the 2001 committee, co-own Altamont Orchards and the Orchard Creek Golf Course. He holds a degree in agricultural science from Cornell University, and served for 20 years on the Farm Service Agency’s Albany County Committee, several as its chair.

On April 17,  before she even had a chance to ask the committee who would lead it, consultant Jaclyn Hakes of MJ Engineering was fielding questions from  committee member Richard Brustman, who was seeking clarification about the role of the committee. Brustman is a civil engineer who was in charge of planning for the state’s Department of Transportation.

“So the role of this committee is to help guide the process,” Hakes said, while she and her team will provide technical support and the information members will “need to be able to help make decisions about what might be appropriate recommendations to include in the comprehensive plan, what might be an appropriate draft vision ….”

She explained, once the committee has finished the update, its work goes to the town board, which is “the only body, the only entity that can adopt a comprehensive plan.” To which Brustman responded, “Just to clarify, we’re advisory,” which he was told was correct.

He then asked how active or passive committee members should be, given that consultants have largely run the show to date.

  Hakes, who acknowledged the process thus far has been consultant-led but explained that she and her fellow consultants were not without their reasons, said the team from MJ Engineering took charge of the committee’s earlier meetings because there was a lot of information that had to be provided to members “to kind of start setting the foundation for the discussions.”

But starting with the April 17 meeting, Hakes said, “There’s going to be more of an opportunity for you to be more engaged in terms of a discussion related to the vision.”

Brustman took the explanation to mean committee members can initiate discussions about things not brought up by the consultant, and he was told that was correct.

Open meetings?

Brustman’s third question had to do with transparency, asking Hakes if there were “any restrictions on our meeting.”

He said at the committee’s first meeting there were questions about whether members could meet by themselves virtually. “Was this legal or not,” he asked, “was it considered an executive session?”

Hakes said she would defer to the town as to whether the committee was subject to the Open Meetings Law.

The Enterprise asked Guilderland Supervisor Peter Barber if the committee was subject to the state’s sunshine law. 

Barber, in an email, said James Melita, Guilderland’s town attorney, “is researching the issue,” but “in the interim, we are recommending that the Comprehensive Plan Update Committee, like all of the Town’s boards and committees, follow the Open Meetings Law.”

Whether or not the comprehensive plan committee falls under the Open Meetings Law appears to be a case of the preferred legal linguists used by the entity that created it. 

New York State courts have consistently found that advisory committees, task forces, and commissions are not subject to the Open Meetings Law “where it possesses no power and exists merely to provide advice and, therefore, is not a ‘public body’ serving a governmental function.”

“However,” the state’s Committee on Open Government, has “consistently advised, and judicial precedent has confirmed, that [the] entities that are creations of law are required to comply with the OML,” specifically New York State Town Law covering planning and land use. 

Under that part of the law, Section 272-a, entitled “town comprehensive plan,” advisory committees have been subjected to the Open Meetings Law if they’re found to be a “special board” created to oversee the process, according to an advisory opinion from the Committee on Open Government. 

(Guilderland’s zoning code defines the town board’s adoption of the comprehensive plan as being “in accordance with NYS Town Law § 272-a,” which the Committee on Open Government has interpreted as an act performed “pursuant to a statute.”)

The opinion from the Committee on Open Government states a “special board” consists of “one or more members of the planning board and such other members as are appointed by the town board to prepare a proposed comprehensive plan and/or an amendment thereto.” 

Guilderland’s 2001 plan committee, whose work took place years before the  Committee on Open Government issued any of its many comprehensive plan-specific advisories, counted among its many members, the chairs of the town’s planning and zoning boards, Stephen Feeney and now-Supervisor Barber, while the current iteration contains Guilderland’s zoning chair, Elizabeth Lott. 

Also on the current committee is Caitlin Ferrante, a member of another Guilderland public body, the Conservation Advisory Council.

If an advisory committee is determined to be a “special board,” it would, in the opinion of the Committee on Open Government, “constitute a ‘public body’ subject to the Open Meetings Law.”

The town board in September 2022 adopted a resolution titled “Rules of Conduct for Members of the Public and Procedure Guidelines for Public Bodies,” that identified Guilderland’s seven public bodies, including the update committee, which hadn’t been part of the draft resolution presented to the board three months earlier. 

The town on its website contains a link to a comprehensive planning guidebook for local New York State officials put out by the Syracuse University Center for Sustainable Community Solutions. 

The guide states, “If a board is formally charged with preparing the comprehensive plan, i.e. special board, it must comply with the Open Meetings Law (OML),” but if that board is advisory, which some maintain Guilderland’s committee is, then the legislative body tasked with formally adopting the plan “can take action with or without their input, and therefore need not comply with the OML.”

Public input

Following a recap of the open house and visioning workshop put on by the town in March, MJ Engineering’s Jesse McCaughey was asked by committee member Dominic Rigosu why public involvement appears to pale in comparison to 20 years ago. Rigosu is an architect who had chaired the Albany County Planning Board for 13 years.

 Rigosu said when the 2001 committee was working on its plan, the town had received over 1,000 responses to a resident survey. 

He wondered how today, in the age of email, smart phones, and social media, Guilderland could only muster about 480 responses to its online survey.  “What did they do differently? Why aren’t we getting a turnout? I suspect we should have more [responses],” he said.

McCaughey began his response by noting this committee’s survey is still available to the community, “so the number of responses received in 2001 “presents a target to get to.” But beyond that, McCaughey said he’d have to  “to look into the methodology that they used.”

Town Planner Kenneth Kovalchik told committee members the town in 2001 sent direct mailings to every household in Guilderland. “So, I think they sent out over 10,000 surveys.”

Kovalchik said the response rate had been higher than what’s typically expected of such questionnaires.  “If you get three to five percent, you’re happy,” he said. “I think back then they had a 10- or 15-percent response rate.”

Kovalchik said later there had been a discussion about sending out a town-wide survey, but “the cost to mail a first-class letter is a lot higher than it was in 2001.” He said the surveys would have to be mailed to the approximately 16,000 households in Guilderland, the cost of which “I don’t think that was included as an expense here.”

Returning to the issue of the public showing little interest for the plan’s update, Abbruzzese noted one reason there had been so much community involvement 20 years ago was because the many members of the board charged with oversight of the process had been a “a contentious committee,” which itself was working to update a long-outdated set of laws, adopted in 1969, that the town said functioned as a comprehensive plan.

Abbruzzese also said that, 20 years ago, committee members traveled to where people lived, holding community meetings all over town to receive feedback from residents. 

In what’s likely to cause some readers to question if they’ve heard this story more than once already, Guilderland’s decision to update its zoning was due in no small part to an effort made by Crossgates Mall to turn itself into the country’s second-largest mall.

In 1998, Crossgates came to the town with a plan to expand by over half, from 1.6 million square feet to 3.6 million. The proposal elicited fierce backlash from the public, forcing the town to take action with the declaration of a building moratorium and naming the town’s Comprehensive Plan Advisory Board.

The current online survey is supposed to remain open until the end of the month, Hakes said, but given what was said during the April 17 meeting, “We can certainly think about and work with town staff on if that should be extended.”

When it was residents’ turn to speak, more than a few expressed concerns similar to those offered by committee members earlier in the meeting. 

Former Enterprise reporter Elizabeth Floyd Mair said the process that took place 20 years ago, as she understood it, “was much bigger and much messier and much more townspeople led. It wasn’t led by a company; it was led by the people of the town who met in committees.”

She said with the current update process that’s in place, it feels like “we’re being led quite rapidly through [it], very much led by the company.”

Robyn Gray, who chairs the Guilderland Coalition for Responsible Growth,  suggested to committee members, if they felt that online surveys didn’t offer enough community input, and they really meant they wanted more public feedback, “perhaps the development of your neighborhood groups now is what you want to do.”

Public response

Earlier in the meeting, McCaughey updated committee members about what had been learned from a recent open house and visioning workshop, from a  series of prior community-stakeholder meetings. 

The results gleaned from over 100 residents on March 20 and six stakeholder groups over the course of two days earlier in the month, shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone —a number were issues brought up 20 years ago. 

The buzz coming out of the stakeholder meetings was that the town was being presented with opportunities. 

“Commercial density is both an opportunity and a threat – the market for brick-and-mortar retail is changing,” said one member of the local and regional stakeholder group, according to a summary of the meeting prepared by MJ Engineering. “Retail has shrunk, [the town] has to pay attention to the shift and be proactive.”

Another local and regional stakeholder said there was “opportunity to expand [the] Conservation Easement Program to protect areas in important watersheds,” but that program faces limitations because “County and school taxes are not waived in Guilderland for participation” in the program.

The town’s natural resources were highlighted as a strength for the entire region, “so safeguarding water resources is important,” said one stakeholder, according to the meeting summary. The plan “should focus on natural resources and look for opportunities and threats related to this.”

One stakeholder from the  environment, sustainability, and recreation group said developers should be encouraged to “retain open space, add recreational amenities, and put in small parks.” While another group member said, “Climate resiliency should be a consideration — open space and wetlands [are] important to climate resiliency.”

From residents, common themes that emerged were:

 — Concerns about housing affordability, but also that too many apartments are being built in town; 

 — The desire for a more accessible community, whether on foot or by pedal;

— Route 20, and all that entails. 

 — Concerns about the town’s water supply; and 

—  The need to maintain open space and protect agricultural land.

A number of comments were made about Crossgates, Costco, and concerns about multi-family housing in town. The comments were made as notes posted to a series of boards delineating different topics.

“Crossgates gets a tax break, we should all get the same percentage reduction,” said one meeting attendee. “Build Costco in one of the Crossgates parking lots.”

The refrain that Guilderland didn’t need a Costco was heard repeatedly at the March 20 workshop, according to the MJ Engineering meeting summary.

And one resident said they wanted to see, “Less development (ex-Costco, Strip Malls) more affordable senior housing, and fewer “McMansions.” 

Apartments were another topic that continued to come up on March 20. 

There are just “too many apartment buildings,” said one meeting attendee.

“Stop building large apartment complexes,” said another; they bring “too much traffic.”

Others were more blunt in their critique of Guilderland’s apartment citation. “No war on suburbia,” said one resident in attendance. “Protect single family housing.”

Another commenter said there’s “Too much growth (apartments) [that] will result in overcrowded schools needing to expand. Higher school taxes.”

But multi-family housing also had a few fans in attendance on March 20. 

“I support affordable housing,” said one, “apartments are part of that picture!”

Housing

Guilderland’s housing stock growth over the past 20 years amounts to little more than a trick when compared to any prior single-decade period. 

About 6.1 percent of occupied housing in Guilderland has come online since 2000, according to the most recently-available data from the Census Bureau, which is less than half of what was built between 1990 and 1999, when about 14.9 percent of current town housing stock was built, and the spread only grows larger for each previous 10-year period. 

There were 15,029 total housing units in Guilderland in 2010, which increased by nearly 1,000 to 16,018 at the time of the next decennial federal census count.      

The criticism that too much multi-family housing is being built in Guilderland appears to have a basis in data. In 2020, for example, about 68 percent of occupied housing units — which is a different and often smaller number compared to total units — in town were single-family, down from 71.5 percent in 2010. 

To come up with the number of housing units in a given place, the census survey data relies on sampling to arrive at an estimate, which might help explain how overall housing stock went up between 2010 and 2020. Somehow, Guilderland had fewer single-family housing units in 2020, at 10,150, than it did a decade earlier, at 10,310. 

Issues with single-family housing math aside, what’s clear is that multi-family homes are going up a lot faster than single-family homes. 

Between 2010 and 2020, total multi-family unit housing increased about 9 percent, from 4,475 to 4,882, while occupied multi-family units had a 13 percent bump, from 4035 in 2010 to 4569 in 2020. During the same period, building permits for 522 units of multi-family housing were issued by Guilderland.

While the town’s home-occupancy population barely changed between 2010 and 2020, from 33,626 to 33,629, the number of renters increased by about 20 percent, from 7,847 in 2010 to 9,440 in 2020, with the number of residents in owner-occupied housing declining about 6.6 percent over the 10-year period, from 25,779 to 24,189, respectively.