WESTERLO — Once again, Westerlo is without a planning board. 

At a hastily called special meeting on June 28, the Westerlo Town Board voted, 3 to 2, to abolish its planning board and hand those duties over to the five-member zoning board of appeals. 

Supervisor Matthew Kryzak and board members Amie Burnside and Lorraine Pecylak were in favor, while board members Josh Beers and Peter Mahan were against.

The town had abolished its planning board over three decades ago, reinstating it 15 years later.

What was intended to be a way to make the town more efficient — at least according to Kryzak, who has been challenged on this point by residents and planning board members alike — turned explicitly into a way to halt what Kryzak described to The Enterprise earlier this month as a “rogue” board, hence the sudden vote just over a week after a contentious public hearing. 

According to emails that Kryzak shared with The Enterprise, former planning board chairman Beau Loendorf, who submitted his resignation to the town board in May, had attempted to call a special planning board meeting for July 1 after asking Town Clerk Karla Weaver to withdraw his resignation. 

The purpose of the meeting, according to the agenda, was to discuss the application for a powder-coating business at Shepard Farm. That project did not receive approval from the Albany County Planning Board and so needed supermajority approval from the five-member planning board — four votes — to receive its special use permit. 

It’s the same project that was under discussion at a meeting in May where town attorney George McHugh left the meeting after complaining that the planning board was not heeding his recommendations on how to go about the application. 

After Weaver had emailed the town board to notify them that Loendorf had withdrawn his resignation and called a special meeting, McHugh replied that he would need to get permission from the town board to withdraw the resignation, and advised Weaver to “retract your prior email and desist from publicly noticing a special meeting.” 

New York Public Officers Law holds that resignations from appointed town officers must be addressed to the board that appointed them — in this case, the town board — and that the resignation will take place either on the effective date specified or immediately upon delivery of the resignation letter. 

It says that a “resignation delivered or filed pursuant to this section, whether effective immediately or at a specified future date, may not be withdrawn, canceled, or amended except by consent of the officer to whom it is delivered or body with which it is filed.”

Planning board member Angela Carkner told The Enterprise that the planning board was advised by the Association of Towns that “if no date is specified, the town clerk … has the right to withdraw a resignation within 30 days.” 

The law establishes a 30-day benchmark for effective dates, saying that such a date can’t be more than 30 days from the delivery of the letter and that, if it is, the resignation is effective in 30 days, and does not appear to give a 30-day grace period. 

“Members of town planning boards, including planning board chairs, resign in writing to the town clerk (see Town Law § 26; Public Officers Law § 31),” the New York State Department of State told The Enterprise in an email this week. “The resignation would take effect when filed unless the resignation specifies a later effective date, but in no event would the later date be more than 30 days after the date of filing …  

“A court of competent jurisdiction would be the body authorized to render a determination on whether a resignation validly filed with a town clerk on May 22, with a future effective date of June, would be effective thirty days after May 22 or otherwise.  Indeed, the Department of State cannot finally determine what is the effective date of the planning board chairperson’s resignation.”

Kryzak told The Enterprise prior to this response that the matter was “black and white.” 

“[Weaver] is not the appointing board, the resignation was not sent to her, so she does not have the authority to [withdraw it],” he said. 

“Once again, my planning board has gone rogue,” Krzyak said. “They aren’t doing their due diligence.”

However, when asked how much of the decision to abolish the planning board was personal, Kryzak said that it had “zero to do with personalities,” and came down instead to efficiency, cost savings, and protecting the town from what he sees as legal vulnerabilities over how the planning board goes about its business. 

One issue related to the last point that came up at the public hearing was the fact that the planning board had issued conditional approval for the powder-coating business’s special-use permit before sending it to Albany County, which the Department of State says is not allowed in an introductory course it offers for planning board members. 

Although the county planning board ultimately did not approve the project — citing its “industrial nature” and the Rural Development/Agricultural zoning, along with environmental impacts — Carkner said that the reasoning was inaccurate.

She said it was established in the first planning board meeting that the sandblasting required to give the metals a smooth surface is done offsite. And the actual application of the powder, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s Green Suppliers Network, is environmentally safe; the EPA advises manufacturers to switch to this style of coating.

“Because powder coatings are generally the lowest polluting of all coatings, you should give them serious consideration,” a pamphlet on the EPA site says. “Powder coatings emit virtually no VOCs, do not require the use of organic solvents in the coatings, and retain the benefits of traditional coatings.”

The county planning board has been accused of inaccurate determinations in the past. In 2021, The Enterprise reported that the planning board had misinterpreted a county law it cited when disapproving of a solar project in Knox. 

Notably, the planning board was also not “super excited about the concept” of handing the planning board functions over to the ZBA, as Kryzak put it, issuing a qualified approval of the law with warnings that the ZBA should be expanded from a five-member board to a seven-member one.

The county board also wrote, “As advised by the New York State Department of State, consolidation of Zoning Board of Appeals and Planning Board is not the best practice as it does not allow for appropriate separation of power between zoning and land use administration.” 

However, these advisories do not require the town board to modify the law, according to county planning board Chairwoman Gopika Muddappa, and so the law could be passed with a simple majority as proposed.

Kryzak told The Enterprise he felt that more members were not needed since unlike Coeymans and Ravena, which served as the models for a unified planning/zoning board, Westerlo does not get many large-scale projects. 

“We’re seeing mainly special-use permits and small things, and a five-member board with one alternate should be able to easily handle the zoning and planning business that comes before the town,” he said.

Kryzak also addressed the checks-and-balances concern, saying that Albany County serves as a check, as do the town attorney, town engineer, and code enforcement officer. 

“It’s there,” he said. “It’s whether or not people want to hear it.” 

When asked about the volume of opposition at the public hearing, Kryzak said that it represented “roughly 2 percent” of the town’s total population, and that he has privately gotten support from what he described as the “silent majority.”

Burnside made a similar point in an email to The Enterprise in which she wrote that she “went into the hearing with an open mind.  And I listened to the public comments.  Some comments were flat out exaggeration and some even lies.  The hearing did not change my mind as the information we received from public comment was not enough to substantiate the keeping of a board that has a disregard for legal advice and puts the town in a position for an article 78. 

“I also want to point out in following social media as well as speaking one on one as well as those in the meeting - those numbers represented approximately 2% of the entire population of Westerlo.”