ALTAMONT — A request during a recent board of trustees meeting to pave Brandle Road and install sidewalks led to broader discussion about some of Altamont’s long-standing infrastructure challenges and highlighted communication difficulties between the board and its constituents. 

Trustee Michelle Ganance, after listening to complaints, urged residents to come to village meetings and to get involved in the budget process.

On Sept. 2, Charlie Giglio told trustees, “I do a lot of driving. And I don’t know if it’s my imagination or not, but I think every road except Brandle Road has been repaved.”

Giglio — who lives in the senior-living condominium complex on Brandle Road located just over the village line in Guilderland but whose residents receive their water from Altamont — asked, “Is there any indication that that road is going to be repaved?”

Giglio had been one of a number Brandle Meadow residents who came to the meeting to apprise the board of water-quality issues in the condo complex. 

Mayor Kerry Dineen noted only a small portion of Brandle Road is located in the village; a little over a quarter mile of the approximately 1.75-mile Brandle Road is located in Altamont, according to Albany County’s Interactive Mapping,

The mayor said paving the village’s portion of the road wasn’t on this or next year’s schedule, but thought it might be able to get squeezed into next year’s schedule.

“We have a rotation; we’re trying to get to them,” Dineen told Giglio. “We only started this about, I don't know, six, five years ago, with making sure to repave all these roads. So we’re getting there … This year we have three that we’re still waiting on our pavers. We’ve been kind of put off.”

Giglio then moved on from paving. 

“I know this is pie in the sky, but there are also no sidewalks on that road,” he said. “You have a lot of people walking up and down every day. So who do we talk to about that?”

Dineen said that was mostly a town issue, but added that she didn’t think they would “put in a sidewalk that's that short. I don’t know that we could in that space. It would all depend on easements and stuff.”

Dineen said, if she knew the town planned on putting in sidewalks, then the village would try as well. “If we can get them to commit to doing a grant for something like that, I mean we could do a joint grant so we could do our little end and they can follow it through.”

But it was noted that the village and town have been fairly unsuccessful in obtaining state funding for such things. “Gun Club Road has failed the grant process several times, and that’s in the town,” Dineen said. “We got one finally for Maple Avenue. That has been needed for some time.” 

Dineen added that the Maple Avenue grant took multiple attempts to finally obtain. “I think two tries. Maybe three.”

Giglio said not having sidewalks was a “quality-of-life issue for those of us who live here,” to which the mayor agreed stating, “Yeah, it is important. It’d be nice to connect it to what we have on Main Street.”

Resident James Gaige asked which streets in the village didn’t have sidewalks, which led to trustees and meeting attendees reeling off a half-dozen or more streets without sidewalks including Euclid, both sides of Schoharie Plank, Thatcher, and Sand, whose residents Dineen said “didn’t want them way back when.”

Marian Court resident Theresa Commisso said Gun Club Road is a “walker’s paradise,” but without sidewalks it’s “very dangerous,” an observation Dineen agreed with as someone who “walks every morning [on] that road.”

Dineen said she and her predecessor, James Gaughan, had worked for the past two decades to get sidewalks installed in the village. “We do it when we can, when we get the money to do it, but it’s quite the endeavor and it, you know, it takes a long time.”

Near the end of the public-comment period, Trustee Ganance offered an observation. “What’s really important here is that, when we have budget meetings, no one comes. When we have board meetings every month, no one comes,” she said. 

Ganance said, “And we’d love to have you here, but the budget tells you we aren’t just throwing money out the window. We have a limited, limited budget and we do the best we can.”

She said the village has to apply for grants to get a lot of things done. 

“And it’s a hurry-up-and-wait situation,” she said. “I myself, my road didn’t get paved for like 10 years … and it finally did. I got it last year.”

Ganance said the board has meetings and budget workshops where “it says this is what we’re trying to do for sidewalks. This is what we’re trying to do for the fire department, for the water department, for what streets in the village are gonna get [paved].”

But she said, “We can’t do sidewalks until we do that tree thing. We can’t do sidewalks on some streets until we get all the new lighting. So I think there’s a disconnect.”

Ganance said, “It would be so helpful if people  — I find it frustrating because no one comes unless they’re upset about something, which is valid … like I didn’t know [some Brandle Meadows residents] water was gross until today.”