WESTERLO — KO’ed by voters about a year ago, a proposal to renovate the town hall is back for a rematch, in somewhat leaner shape, hoping for an OK this time.

At its Tuesday meeting, the town board — over strenuous objections by some residents seated in the gallery and with one dissenting vote — approved a resolution authorizing the expenditure of up to $887,000, along with a second resolution to add a bond issue for that amount to the Nov. 8 general-election ballot.

The  figure is much less than the $2.7 million that was asked for in last year’s referendum, which also included building a new highway garage. The new plan also eliminates some costs in the town hall renovation, according to town officials. The town offices are housed in what used to be a school, which was purchased from the Berne-Knox-Westerlo School District after a public vote.

Councilman William Bichteman told the meeting that the new lower figure would translate to an estimated $30 to $33 increase in the yearly tax bill for each residential parcel in the town.

Commenting after the meeting, Amie Burnside, the board’s lone Republican who cast the sole dissenting vote on the spending resolution, said she doubts the referendum outcome will be positive. She also said she voted “nay” on the resolution because she had received the top-lines estimate — developed by Delaware Engineering, the firm retained by the town to design the renovation — only earlier the same day.

Burnside said she felt that the Building Committee — of which she is a member along with the four other town board members, including Supervisor Richard Rapp, and two interested citizens — should have been allowed more time to “study and digest” the numbers before making a decision.

But town attorney Aline Galgay said time was running out if the town wished to save more than $2,000 in fees by piggybacking onto the November general-election ballot. The referendum last September, which turned out badly for the town, was a stand-alone ballot that incurred considerable expense in fees from the county board of elections.

Bichteman underscored the urgency as he responded to a host of complaints by several audience members about the work, procedures, and perceived haste of the Building Committee.

Before voting on the spending resolution, the board voted to hold a Building Committee meeting to discuss how to inform town residents about the bond issue, to be followed by an advertised special town board meeting  on Tuesday, Sept. 20, in order to meet the board of election’s deadline for placement on the November ballot.

Asked why the committee had not come to the evening’s meeting prepared to discuss the estimate in greater detail, as audience members pressed them to do, Bichteman told The Enterprise “There was not enough time tonight.” He said that a more detailed account of the plan and estimate may be available at the Sept. 20 meeting

Although opposing sides squared off — not among the board itself but largely between town residents Leonard Laub and Dianne Sefcik, on one side, and Bichteman, on the other — the back and forth remained civil if heated at times.

“It doesn’t matter”

Sefcik, who had attended the last Building Committee meeting, said she recalled no vote then being taken to recommend approval of the plan or the estimate from Delaware Engineering.  Bichteman assured her the committee had decided to recommend the plan at that meeting. He told The Enterprise that he doesn’t recall a formal vote being taken “but a consensus developed” to move forward with the recommendation.

Sefcik pressed to know if the estimate number was known at the time.

“No,” said Bichteman, “because we were approving a plan not an estimate.”  Galgay confirmed this: “The plan was approved, whatever the number is,” the attorney said.

Bichteman said later that an estimate was not completed until a few days before the Tuesday meeting and then had to be corrected. He confirmed that members of the Building Committee finally received the estimate Tuesday, the day of the meeting.

In a letter to the Enterprise editor published in the Sept. 1 issue,  Sefcik warned that, if there was not an open vote taken by the Building Committee members on the estimated cost, “The town board will likely once again violate the state’s Open Meetings Law.”

Bichteman says there was no violation and that the town board at its June meeting had authorized the project and estimation to go forward.

Laub asked the board on Tuesday to table any action for several reasons, the most important, he said, being a reason that he had just come to understand: “The building committee,” he said, “has not actually considered the dollar amount that has been put forward by the engineering firm that was paid $60,000 in order to come up with that number.”

Enough input?

Laub also said the Building Committee has “routinely failed to accept input from the public.”

The public was allowed to attend all Building Committee meetings but no public comment was allowed. However, two of the committee members were citizens: Mike Sikule and Dick Umholtz.  Both were at Tuesday’s town board meeting and raised no objections to their committee’s recommendation of the plan to the town board. Bichteman says there was a constant give and take between the committee and the engineering firm, with the purpose of reducing cost.

Sikule pointed out that competitive bidding will be part of the process.

Frederick Grober, the project’s point person from Delaware Engineering, said that the last service to be performed by his company under its contract with Westerlo will be to recommend the “lowest most responsible bid.” Bidding would take place after voter approval of the bond issue.

Final costs could be lower than the Delaware Engineering estimate, Galgay pointed out. She also praised the hard work of the committee and said some towns rely on outside consultants, at considerable expense,  to do the work the committee did in overseeing the project planning, design and estimating.

Public input at this meeting, at least, was not lacking. Several other audience members spoke, most with reservations about the planned renovation.  Earlier, at the June town board meeting, a long letter from Edwin Lawson, the town building inspector, was read. It detailed his criticisms of the plan as it was then, and expressed objections to it made by town employees who work in the building.

At the same June meeting, the board authorized a $60,ooo payment to Delaware Engineering for final design work.

The remodeling seeks to reconfigure the old school building for more efficient working of town government as well as to modernize it. The cost of asbestos removal is included in the estimate, but not the cost of exterior work — other than materials — which Bichteman said can be performed by town employees. Repairs made to the highway department garage, he said at the meeting, should postpone replacement of that building for a number of years.

Other business

In other business, the board:

— Approved attendance by planning board and zoning board members to an educational workshop in Troy  and authorized payment of related expenses;

— Approved the town’s participation — at no expense to the town — in the State of New York Deferred Compensation Plan, as a savings plan for town employees;

— Authorized the town accounting firm to perform an audit of the town court as required by the New York State Unified Court System;

— Learned that the chlorination building needs a new roof and that the water board has a vacancy; and

— Heard Bichteman critically discuss at length a claim by resident Sefcik, in a letter to the Enterprise editor, that the town had petitioned Albany County to intervene to collect unpaid water bills from town residents.