GUILDERLAND — After meeting in closed session for over an hour on May 6, the Guilderland Town Board unanimously adopted, without public discussion, three resolutions dealing with legal matters.
One was to respond to a suit filed by Burger King, claiming the town is responsible for flooding; a second is because of long ambulance wait times at St. Peter’s Hospital; and the third is over a property that the town owns within the city of Albany.

The state’s Open Meetings Law allows elected boards to meet in executive sessions to discuss litigation.

Before adjourning to a private session, Supervisor Peter Barber said that the town’s attorney, James Melita, would “give us an update on both pending litigation and potential new litigation.”

After the board returned to public session, it voted to authorize Melita “to bring an action against Carrols LLC or whatever appropriate entity might be suitable for the recovery of damages associated with failure of a pipeline, a pipe carrying a stream,” said Barber.

On March 17, a suit was filed by Carrols LLC, owner of over 1,000 Burger Kings in 23 states, claiming that Guilderland is the owner of, and therefore responsible for, a 36-inch corrugated metal pipe running under its Western Avenue location, across the street from Stuyvesant Plaza, and that the pipe’s failure caused significant flooding and erosion on the property, which forced the closure of its drive-thru service and resulted in financial losses.

The six-month drive-thru closure resulted in a $400,000 revenue loss, the company claims, while repair of the pipe and pumping of the accumulating stormwater cost over $1 million. 

The town, in its March 28 response to Carrols, said that it didn’t own, control, or maintain “the subject pipe and is not a proper party to this lawsuit.”

On ambulance waiting time, Barber said St. Peter’s Hospital is “basically keeping our ambulance for an extraordinary long periods of time and not reimbursing us.”

He said the town’s EMS department is rendering services at the hospital but not getting reimbursed.

Barber made a motion to “authorize the town attorney to bring whatever action and cause of action that would be appropriate to protect the town’s interest and to recover the money that we are owed.”

In 2022, Jay Tyler, who was then the director of Guilderland Emergency Medical Services but has since retired, reported to the town board about growing waiting times at area hospitals.

“Sometimes we’ll be delayed at the hospital an hour up to four hours,” said Tyler. “They’re really holding us hostage there. We have to treat the patient; we have to monitor the patient.”

While the GEMS crews were doing the work that usually would be done by hospital emergency-room staff, they could not answer other calls.

Tyler proposed, and the town board later fine-tuned and adopted, a policy that sets out three levels for ambulances waiting at hospitals, each with a shorter waiting time based on availability of ambulance crews.

The final May 6 motion was to “resolve litigation over a tax certiorari matter,” said Barber, explaining, “The town of Guilderland owns a lot in the city of Albany and hopefully for not too much longer.”

The landlocked lot is at 162 Rapp Road, Melita said.

Albany’s 2025 tentative assessment roll lists the two-acre vacant property as having a full-market value of $202,000.

“The proposed settlement is to deed this lot over to the city of Albany,” said Barber.

“The majority of the lot is located in the city,” said Melita. “We dedicate the entire parcel to the city of Albany.”

An April 7 letter to the Albany County Supreme Court judge hearing the case, Kimberly O’Connor, from Brett T. Williams, deputy corporation counsel for Albany, says, “The City has determined that it would like to obtain the property from the Town. I have communicated as much to Mr. Melita, the Town Attorney, and the parties are now working on closing documents to effectuate the transfer.”

Williams wrote that he did not anticipate “any issues with the property transaction or the tax certiorari proceeding.”

“Very good; good riddance,” said Barber before the board’s unanimous May 6 vote.