VOORHEESVILLE -- The village board exercised caution last Tuesday, as it delayed plans for a housing development and resolved to create an alternate planning commission seat.

Superintendent of Public Works William Smith told the board that developer Eric King wants to hook up six new homes near Swift Road to the village sewer plant. King does not want to pay for a study of how that would be done until he has village approval, Smith said.

King, who owns Equinox Construction in Albany, told The Enterprise that he has no formal project, yet.
"We’re just looking at the capacity" of the sewer system, King said. "We’re waiting for engineers to come back to us to say, ‘Yes, it would work,’ and then make a formal proposal."
"I think he should come before the board before you approve anything," said Village Attorney Anne-Jo McTague at the village meeting.

Board member William Hotaling said that water is the main topic of the next board workshop in one week, and that King should approach the board then.

Building Inspector Gerald Gordinier said that King plans to run his own line to the system. The plan has nothing to do with the existing village line, Gordinier said.

Smith said that sewer system number one has enough capacity to take on King’s project. He said that the new system, updated when Mountainview Road was redone two years ago, was designed to accommodate the elementary school, homes on Mountainview Road, the proposed 48-unit senior housing to be built near St. Matthew’s Church, and a few more homes.

Smith urged the village board to have any further applicants who apply for sewage services pay for an engineering study to determine the additional load on the system.

New commission design

McTague wrote a resolution to establish a seat for an alternate member of the planning commission. She said that the alternate would allow the commission to vote at all scheduled meetings, once a candidate has been appointed and approved by the mayor. Before the alternate position was created, applicants had to wait for a quorum, which does not always attend the commission meetings, she said.

Mayor John Stevens said that a similar resolution had already been passed to create a zoning-board-of-appeals alternate.

A rebuttal

Stevens told the board that a critical letter written by former village clerk Lauren Meacham and printed in The Enterprise two weeks ago was a "personal attack on me. Don’t take it personally."

When the letter was printed, The Enterprise asked Stevens to respond to Meacham’s letter, but he would not. Instead, he invited concerned citizens to attend the October meeting.

Stevens responded to the letter’s main points last Tuesday at the meeting. He said that Meacham criticized a $50,000 computer purchase.
"The software was dropping data," Stevens said. "We bought a whole, complete system," rather than a single computer, he said. After the village had an audit done, discrepancies were found in the payroll accounts, he said. Stevens said that the discrepancies could have been caused by the failing software.
Stevens said that Meacham’s concerns about the construction on Prospect Street were unfounded, because the village has received "only praise" for the sidewalks that were installed.

Stevens said that the village had not increased the office staff by 40 hours weekly, as Meacham stated in her letter. The village has a part-time employee for 20 hours as it had in the past, Stevens said.

He said that Meacham was correct that the village lost the bus-parking contract with the school system. Stevens said that the school chose not to renew the contract at the old rate of $15,000.
Regarding the new parking lot next to village hall, where a razed building once stood, Stevens said, "The village purchased that house solely to take down for parking."

McTague said that repairs to the house would have been expensive.

Stevens apologized to the board for the long response, and said that he had hoped his response in The Enterprise would have brought any interested residents out to the meeting.
"The only ones here tonight are the paper and our representative from New Scotland," Stevens said.

Other business

In other business, the board:
— Hired a part-time worker for up to four weeks to help with village leaf clean-up. The extra help would "keep the job moving and get it done quicker," Smith said. Smith said that funds to cover the expense could be pulled from a payment interval between when one employee left and another began.
"We’ve done it in the past. The budget shouldn’t be a problem at all," Stevens said;

— Learned that resident Margaret Snowden, whose property is near Martin and Picard roads, has a water tap for the village system paid for back to 1982, Smith said. Smith said that he tried to locate the tap, but only found poison ivy; and

— Nominated Richard Stewart to be chairman of the Conservation Advisory Council.