ALTAMONT — The water is on again at Alice Fisher’s house, but she may soon be leaving.

A widow and a mother of six, Fisher was forced to leave her Gun Club Road house last December when the village shut off her water because of unpaid bills. She owed $6,732.

According to a recent letter from Altamont’s mayor, James Gaughan, to the county’s health department, Fisher has six months to complete repairs on the house, if she is to live there.
In a letter to the village this week, Fisher said, "It is my intention to put the property up for sale." It would cost thousands of dollars to do the repairs that are necessary on the house, the letter says.

George Pratt, Altamont’s former police chief who has been involved with helping Fisher, said that it might be better to level the house rather than fix it. He also said that he knew of someone who would be interested in buying the property, though he wouldn’t name the potential buyer.

According to the Guilderland assessor’s office, the 6319 Gun Club Road house is assessed at $228,000.
Local developer Jeff Thomas owns the neighboring property, on the corner of Gun Club Road and Route 146, but he said that he is not interested in buying Fisher’s parcel. He has, though, offered to help her out of her current situation. "We offered some services," he said, but added that she hasn’t yet accepted.
Thomas plans to build a mixed-use Victorian-inspired "gateway" to Altamont on his Route 146 property, he said.

Helderberg Safe Haven Inc., a not-for-profit organization helped negotiate the reinstatement of Fisher’s water. Safe Haven will house Fisher and her children in one of the apartments that it keeps, said Richard Umholtz, the organization’s president. He’d like to work out the family’s problems, he said, and help Fisher start again. Fisher’s husband, Robert Fisher, died in a tractor accident while working at Altamont Orchards in 1998.

She bought the Gun Club Road house later that year, and paid her water bill to the village until 2001, when she re-mortgaged her house and thought the water bill was included in the new mortgage payments that she made every month, she said. The Enterprise filed a Freedom of Information Law request on Wednesday to find out what date the village began recording unpaid bills, but it was not answered.

The village’s lawyer, Guy Roemer, did not know how long the bills were unpaid for, nor did Trustee William Aylward. Gaughan did not return repeated phone calls from The Enterprise and James Roemer, Guy Roemer’s brother who is handling the case for the village, said that he could not answer any questions without permission from Gaughan.

Similarly, The Enterprise could not find out from the village when it first contacted Fisher about the outstanding bills, but, according to her, she was first notified in a letter from the village in March of 2006.

By November of that year, the water flow to her house had been cut to a few hours a day and on Nov. 21, Gaughan and trustees Kerry Dineen, Harvey Vlahos, and Dean Whalen voted to accept a second mortgage on her house and a portion of her wages in exchange for returning full water service to her house. Aylward was not present at the meeting, according to the official minutes, and did not vote on the resolution.
After adopting the resolution, the village turned off the water completely. When asked about the decision-making process to turn off the water, Aylward said that he was not "privy" to the discussions about water flow to Fisher’s house. "Counsel was of the opinion that that would not work because of the other mortgages," he said of Guy Roemer’s advice to the village after he said he discovered on Nov. 30 there was more than one mortgage on the house.
"We would be getting a mortgage that basically has no value," Guy Roemer told The Enterprise last week.

The village of Voorheesville and the town of Guilderland, which both have municipal water systems, have policies similar to each other regarding unpaid water bills: If the bills are not paid after a certain amount of time, they will be re-levied onto the house’s property tax.
"We don’t shut anybody off," said William West, Guilderland’s superintendent of Water and Wastewater Management.

Altamont has the power to do the same within the village, but people on municipal water outside of the village, like Fisher, are not in a water district; the village would like to create one. The town of Guilderland has to create the district, Guy Roemer said, so he could not say how the project is progressing. Once there is a water district for users outside the village, he said, overdue water bills can be put on the property-owner’s town taxes.

Currently, people using Altamont’s municipal water outside of the village pay a minimum of $103 for up to 10,000 gallons of water per bill cycle, which happens twice a year.
Disregarding the Nov. 21 resolution "was based on the offered mortgage being a second mortgage and the village being provided with a title search showing it," Guy Roemer said this week. "That didn’t prove out and that’s all I’ve got to say about it."
Guy Roemer said that he did not recall discussing the issue with the village board, but, he said, "There was certainly discussion with the mayor."
When asked who made the decision to cut off the water, he answered, "It was an administrative decision."
When asked who the administrators were who made the decision, he answered, "My understanding is it was an administrative decision that probably should have occurred months sooner."