WESTERLO — The Westerlo Zoning Board of Appeals has approved the application that contributed to the abolishment of the town’s planning board last month by a vote of 4 to 0, with one member abstaining.

Zoning board Chairman George Spahmer told The Enterprise that the board discussed the application for Boosted Coatings, a powder-coating business owned by Rebecca Haaland, of Greenville, for about an hour on July 22 before taking the vote. 

Haaland expressed her gratitude on Facebook, saying it was the end of a “long 4 months of board meetings and controversy.”

As The Enterprise previously reported, Haaland went before the  Westerlo Planning Board in May about setting up a workshop at Westerlo’s Shepard Farm, an old resort that in recent years has been presented as a potential hub for local business.

Although there were few solid concerns with the business itself, town officials including Supervisor Matthew Kryzak and town attorney George McHugh had serious concerns about how the planning board went about the application.

At the May planning board meeting, McHugh had recommended that the planning board have Haaland coordinate with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and have the town engineer review the application. Although the board appeared amenable to the former suggestion, it demurred on involving the engineer, upsetting McHugh enough that he left the meeting early. 

Shortly after, Kryzak proposed that the town eliminate the planning board and move its functions over to the ZBA. He said the idea predated the May planning board meeting and even his tenure as supervisor, which began in 2021. 

Although the proposal was enormously unpopular at the public hearing the town board held in June, the board ultimately voted, 3 to 2, to abolish the planning board later that month.

The vote was spurred in part by a convoluted and legally dubious effort by former planning board Chairman Beau Loendorf to schedule a July 1 meeting where the board would have been able to push the application through with a supermajority vote. A supermajority was required to approve the application locally after the Albany County Planning Board, which received significant input from Kryzak, McHugh, and others at its June meeting, disapproved of it.

In spite of all the controversy, the application got its supermajority — without requiring an engineer.

Spahmer told The Enterprise that, while the board discussed getting the engineer involved, “The majority of the board felt comfortable with the facts and findings to make a determination.”

He added that the board set a condition that the business must follow “all DEC requirements concerning powder coating.” 

Kryzak, who had earlier told The Enterprise that he felt the application could be approved so long as it met some basic requirements, said the approval this week was “exactly as it would have been if the planning board followed the process correctly and gathered all the appropriate information from the start.”

“There was no delay in the approval of the application because of the board merger,” he said. 

Although he said he would have preferred that the engineer look over the application, Kryzak said the board “did a good job in gathering additional information and working through the concerns raised by myself and the Albany County Planning Board.”

“Based on the additional information collected and clarifications made by the board,” he said, “I feel that they made a legally defendable decision.”