GUILDERLAND — The Guilderland Industrial Development Agency is poised to define workforce housing and to improve its response to requests for public records.

The IDA — whose function in town government is largely financial, determining which projects receive applied-for tax benefits — began to define workforce housing in April. 

Workforce housing doesn’t have a hard-and-fast definition like affordable housing, which is defined by the federal government as “housing on which the occupant is paying no more than 30 percent of gross income for housing costs, including utilities,” according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

In April, only the 260-unit proposal for Foundry Square at the corner of Western Avenue and Foundry Road included workforce housing as part of its submittal to the town. On Aug. 26, Chief Executive Officer Donald Csaposs noted that there had been a change.

Kenneth Kovalchik, the town’s planner, told him that “there are currently four projects” referred to by their developers as workforce housing “at some stage of approval-seeking with the town’s administrative bodies,” Csaposs reported.

Christopher Canada, the IDA’s attorney, during a previous meeting had laid out the legal landscape in a memo, explaining that the state law governing IDAs doesn’t explicitly name housing as a project-type eligible for financial aid. IDAs were primarily set up to boost business, create jobs, and prevent economic stagnation by supporting things like factories, commercial buildings, and research labs, he said. 

But, the board was told, state oversight bodies, like the Authorities Budget Office, are increasingly emphasizing the need for solid justification beyond simply constructing apartments. An IDA must prove that a housing project meets the legal definition; fits its mission; and complies with clear agency policies, including a specific one for general workforce housing, something the Guilderland IDA lacked at the time.

A month later, Canada returned with policies from Dutchess, Suffolk, and Onondaga counties for the board to examine, drawing particular insight from Onondaga’s policy and its specific definition for workforce housing, a large portion of which Guilderland appears to have incorporated into its own policy. 

The draft policy presented to the IDA board on Aug. 26 defines workforce housing as “facilities where a specified percentage of units shall be designated to be rented to individuals earning approximately eighty-percent (80%) of the area median income (AMI) and no units shall be rented to individuals earning over one-hundred-twenty percent (120%) of the area median income (AMI).”

Such projects looking for IDA incentives would have to set aside 25 percent of units “to be rented to individuals earning” 80 percent of Albany County’s AMI, about $83,150 per year; Guilderland has an AMI of approximately $107,500 per year. 

The policy was referred to the IDA board’s governance committee for its input prior to formal adoption. 

FOIL 

“So the crux of this [policy] is how to deal with FOIL properly,” Canada explained to board members on Aug. 26. 

In June, the board was criticized by resident Robyn Gray for having Csaposs serve conflicting public-information-request roles within the IDA: as FOIL officer, receiving requests for information, and as FOIL appeals officer, deciding whether a records denial should be upheld or overturned.

At the time, Gray, who chairs the Guilderland Coalition for Responsible Growth, recounted that, on April 29, Canada had provided the IDA board with a single-page document that did not appear on that night’s agenda, nor was it available online at the time the meeting took place. “I filed a full request back in I believe it was May, requesting a specific document that Mr. Canada handed out at the April 29 meeting ….,” Gray said in June. “It was not on the agenda. It was not anywhere.”

When she filed for the document, a printout from the  Department of Housing and Urban Development’s website showing the median family income of residents in the Albany Metropolitan Statistical Area, Gray said, Csaposs, “who serves a dual role as the agency records officer and the FOIL officer,” which isn’t allowed by law, responded that, “for a single piece of paper, I would get a response before May 30. At that time, it would be determined whether my response would be answered or not — for a single piece of paper.”

New York State Public Officers Law states that “the records access officer shall not be the appeals officer”; however the same section of statute begins, “The governing body of a public corporation or the head, chief executive or governing body of other agencies shall determine appeals or shall designate a person or body to hear appeals regarding denial of access to records under the Freedom of Information Law.” 

Csaposs both heads the IDA and is its only employee. 

On Aug. 26, Canada made it clear that the IDA policy for FOIL requests, once adopted, would name its chief executive as records access officer and the agency counsel as appeals officer. 

The draft FOIL policy was referred to the IDA board’s governance committee for further input.