ALTAMONT — Hitmans Towing has moved from Knox — where owner Kristen Reynders was involved in a protracted legal battle spanning the last few years — to Altamont. Reynders hopes to start running the business soon from its new home at 974 Altamont Boulevard, but has run into unexpected delays involving village procedures about special-use permits.

Hitmans signed a lease with building owner Jeff Brown for its new Altamont location on April 1.

The previous tenant, Jim Herzog’s Towing & Recovery, ran a towing and auto repair shop in the space, Reynders said, so she had thought that there wouldn’t be any issue. She says that Brown, who runs Sundown Landscape in the back of the same building, had thought the same thing, and the two of them signed a lease agreement on that assumption.

Reynders had been selling off some of the equipment and thinking that she was going to stop the towing business, when she was approached by Brown, who said his tenant was moving out and asked if she was interested in running her business there.

“There’s not really a garage in Altamont, so I thought it would help the village and would be a win-win. Everything started moving fast, and we started moving stuff in, and then the brakes got put on when the building inspector [Glenn Hebert] started poking around and saying ‘No, no, what’s going on?’”

Reynders said that, for now, the business is still operating out of Knox, until she can get approval of her special-use permit. She is scheduled to appear before Altamont’s planning board on June 27. She said an informal meeting with the planning board this week went well.

Brown, said Reynders, will need to appear before the board with her, because he owns the building.

“He was under the impression,” Reynders said of her landlord, “that it was zoned properly and that he had a certificate to operate there as a towing lot and garage. It wasn’t specific to the previous tenant, so we assumed that the permit was for the property itself. Then we come to find out that the building inspector decided ‘No, you need your own certificate, and you can’t be doing this.’

“It was like, Oh no, not again; here we go again. I really feel like I’m being discriminated against by the village because they heard about the problems we had in Knox. So it’s going to be another one of those fun battles again,” said Reynders, who now works full-time as an emergency medical technician with Western Turnpike Rescue Squad. She also volunteers with Voorheesville Area Ambulance Service.

“This place is already commercial, it’s zoned properly, the whole nine, so I don’t know why they wouldn’t let us use it the same way,” she said. But she told town officials that the business “would not operate yet, until we get the A-OK,” she said. 

Hebert told The Enterprise that regulations in Altamont require all new businesses in the village to fill out an application for a special-use permit, even when a new owner plans to use a building in the same way that the previous owner did.

Reynders is hoping that “in the next month or so” they will be able to “be official and open the doors to everybody.”

Once they do get started, Reynders and manager Jeremiah Beck hope to offer  New York State inspections. “Right now, we’re waiting on approval from New York State,” Beck said.

Eventually they also hope to offer full-service automotive repair.

“We so badly want to be able to fully operate,” Reynders said, noting that she filled out an application to be on the list of companies that can do towing for the Guilderland Police — work that she said the company did not qualify to do in Knox because the company was located half a mile out of town. She says that she was told, about her recent application, “We’re good to go, but you have this matter open with the village, so we can’t do anything until we finalize that.”

Hitmans Towing has no signs up yet, Beck said, because it is in the process of working out, with the village’s zoning board, the details of what kinds of signs will be allowed.

Reynders summed up her time in Knox this way: “What a battle in Knox we had. Our outcome was basically a mutual understanding that we were not to run a garage here, but we were to keep things as they were and not start any more trouble, and that, as long as no more complaints came in, we would be OK, which we have been, knock on wood.”

She added that the new Knox supervisor is pro-business, and one of the company’s big supporters. She said that she could have tried to move forward in Knox, but thought there would be more opportunities down the hill, in the village.

“It’s just bad,” Reynders concluded, about her experiences so far in Altamont, “thinking you’re getting ahead and then finding you’re five steps back. But we’re going to keep plugging away.”

Hitmans timeline

2007: Reynders, then 18, opens a towing business in Altamont, out of her parents’ house, with just one truck. When neighbors complain because the property is zoned only for residential use, Reynders finds a property in Knox that has a garage and buys it believing that she will run her business from there.

Summer 2013: Reynders appears before the Knox Zoning Board to ask to be allowed to expand her business by doing vehicle inspections. The board sends her to the planning board.

July 2013: The Knox Planning Board recommends that the town board create a business district to accommodate Hitmans and a few other nearby businesses.

October 2013: The planning board reverses itself and recommends against creating this business district.

Feb 2014: Many people speak up in support of Reynders at the Knox Town Board meeting, citing inconsistent enforcement and alleging an unfriendly business environment. The town board decides to let the planning board decide. The town board is asked to make running a public garage a conditional use in a residential district, rather than a not-permitted use, but it declines.

Jan. 2015: Reynders pleads guilty, in a civil action, to operating  a business in a residential area and pays a $300 fine, five days before the start of a criminal trial in which she would have risked being convicted of a misdemeanor and getting a record.

Feb. 2015: Reynders files an Article 78 petition against the town of Knox, asking the court to order the town to stop prosecuting misdemeanor charges against her and to pay attorney’s fees. Supporters look to an addendum to the town’s comprehensive plan for a signal that the zoning regulations could be changed to allow commercial uses along Reynders’s road (the Knox town board had, in 2014, amended the zoning law to allow for mixed commercial and residential uses on Route 146 in the hamlet).

August 2015: The town board amends the zoning law to allow commercial uses, postponing a recommended district around Hitmans until the town’s comprehensive plan can be updated.

April 2016: Hitmans signs a lease for a new building at 974 Altamont Boulevard in Altamont.

— Elizabeth Floyd Mair