GUILDERLAND — Town officials are eager to have William Larned & Sons move Stitt Road as promised years ago. The company has a large mine located near the road.

Josh Plue, a project manager with Larned, told The Enterprise on Wednesday that the company’s intent is to get the new road completed within the next month or so. “We’re going to be starting out there next week,” he said.

Once the road is moved, and the new road is accepted by the town, the old road may be abandoned allowing Larned & Sons to apply for a permit to mine there.

The permit for Larned’s mine on Stitt Road, located near the Watervliet Reservoir, Guilderland’s major source of drinking water, was renewed in May 2016, according to Rick Georgeson, a spokesman for the state’s Department of environmental conservation.

This permit regulates the 104-acre sand and gravel mine, with 51 acres to be affected during the current five-year permit period, Georgeson said.

A draft environmental impact statement from 1996 required that, as the Larned mine was reclaimed, 77 acres of the reclaimed area would be deeded in incremental transfers to the city of Watervliet, which owns the nearby reservoir. A subsequent agreement with Watervliet and the town of Guilderland now requires those 77 acres be deeded to Guilderland in incremental transfers as reclamation is completed.

Also, unrelated to the DEC, Larned has an agreement with the town of Guilderland to reconstruct and improve Stitt Road, at his own expense, to the boundary of his property.

Jacqueline Coons, Guilderland’s acting zoning administrator, noted Larned would not be working on the last section of the road, near the reservoir, where a half-dozen or so houses are located. The last portion of the road would remain as it is, and continue to function as a kind of shared driveway, Coons said.

Old site plans indicate, Coons said, that Larned intended to extend his mining operation into the area where the current Stitt Road lies. But, in order to do that, he would need to complete the road relocation, and the town would need to accept the new road.

Then the old Stitt Road can be abandoned, she said. At that point, Larned would need to renew any applicable mining permits for the area of the expansion.

Town officials want Larned to begin work on improving Stitt Road by the end of August. According to town attorney James Melita, Guilderland has had a longstanding agreement to move Stitt Road further from the sharp slopes of the mine pit. The road currently is in rough shape, full of potholes. Once Larned builds a new road, that portion of the road will become a town road, rather than a private road.

Melita said that Larned needs to take some steps to begin building the road, or Melita may request, at an upcoming meeting, that the town board give him permission to take some legal action. Melita said town officials hope to have the road completed before winter.

Coons said this week she was happy to hear that the company intends to finish soon. “They’re going to run out of time. The blacktop plants are going to close in November, so it’s in their best interest to get it done.”

Currently, Stitt Road is a private road treated almost like a town road, Coons said.

Once Stitt Road is moved and rebuilt to town specifications, she said, “There will be setbacks that should be more reasonable.” She said she did not know just what the setbacks are now, but that the cliff-like edge of the roadway “does feel pretty close.”

Asked if the edges were close because it had been a private road, without the same regulations as a town road, Coons speculated of Larned & Sons, “Over the years they’ve just taken advantage of how close they could get before they had to move it [the road].”

Once it becomes a town road, she said, there will be, as with any other town road, an area at the side of the road owned by the town — for fire hydrants, telephone poles, utilities, and the like — within which the company will not be allowed to mine.