GUILDERLAND — The planning board last Wednesday approved a controversial plan by the village of Altamont to allow a municipal water supply system on a site the village wants to purchase from Michael and Nancy Trumpler.

The water-strapped village had drilled and found water on Brandle Road, outside of Altamont, on land owned by the Trumplers. Although the Trumplers signed a contract last year agreeing to sell about five acres, with the wells, to the village, they have since asked a judge to decide if the contract is legal and binding.
"The land issues, as far as we are concerned, are not resolved," said Nancy Trumpler. She distributed and read a letter from her attorney, Michael Englert. The Trumplers "do not agree or consent to the conveyance of property," she read.

The project has yet to be approved by the town’s zoning board.

Planning board Chairman Stephen Feeney last week read from a report by Spectra Engineering that no significant effect would be seen on the nearest residential well, if the water levels are monitored after seven hours of pumping.

Richard Straut, who represented the village to the planning board, said that seven hours of pumping, followed by seven hours off, is a typical operation. He said that the village may pump for seven hours from the new well, and then switch to a second pump elsewhere in the village for 14 to 21 hours.

Christine Capuano, whose well is the nearest to the proposed pump, said that she and some of her neighbors are concerned about the proposal.

Capuano is Nancy Trumpler’s sister-in-law and has bought land on Brandle Road, near the wells.
"We would like to have more information, and a baseline of what wells in the area are producing," Capuano said. "They can monitor it, but if they do get down, what then""

Feeney said that the Spectra Engineering report stated that monitoring would be done.
"We finally do have a report from the [town-designated engineer] hydrogeologist who came up with recommendations. The village has offered municipal water," he said. "I’m not a hydrogeologist. We don’t have a hydrogeologist on the board"We have to rely on experts."

Troubled history

Earlier this summer, Brandle Road residents had questions about the project and expressed concerns at a zoning board meeting

Some said, since the village has done exploratory drilling, they’ve had problems with dirty water.

The zoning board then hired a town-designated engineer to study the effects that new village wells have on the quality and quantity of neighbors’ wells.

What complicates matters is that the village is part of a lawsuit triangle over the issue. The zoning board can’t approve anything until these issues are settled, Chairman Bryan Clenahan said at the time.

A few months after the Trumplers signed a contract to sell their land to the village, the Guilderland Town Board re-zoned land on Brandle Road, just outside the village, for Jeff Thomas to build a senior housing complex; the village promised Thomas water then, even though it had a moratorium on granting water outside village limits.

The Trumplers were upset because earlier they had to scale back plans for a place for Nancy Trumpler’s elderly mother to live because of town zoning. They also said they had been told that their well would be used only for water in the village, and they raised procedural concerns.

After the Trumplers filed papers in March in Albany County Supreme Court — they sought no money, just a ruling on if the contract was legal and binding — the village responded by filing counterclaims, amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars, against the Trumplers.
In June, Thomas sued the Trumplers for $17 million, over what he called the "interference" with his plans to build a senior-housing project.