ALTAMONT — It’s tough getting old. It can also be expensive. 

The board of trustees was re-apprised of that fact this week as it: 

— Heard about issues with the village’s water infrastructure, parts of which date back to the Second World War; 

— Signed off on partial list of much-needed repairs for the building that houses Altamont’s fire and police departments as well as its village offices; and 

— Set a public hearing for a proposed local law to increase a twice-a-year fee paid by village sewer customers.

The public hearing is set to take place on Dec. 7, at 7 p.m.

The proposed local law would amend Altamont’s 2008 sewer-use law by allowing trustees to increase from $45 to $100 the fee sewer customers are charged every six months, or $110 per year, that is used to pay off the debt associated with upgrades made to the village’s waste-water treatment plant.

The village upgraded about two-thirds of the Gun Club facility in 2013, with the remaining third being over 40 years old. Along with those improvements came $170,000 in annual loan payments. At the time the village adopted this year’s budget, in April, $2.75 million of the original $3.58 million bond was still outstanding. 

The village has three pots of money on which its annual budget is built: the general, water, and sewer funds. 

The funds are supposed to be “self-supporting,” Mayor Kerry Dineen said during the Nov. 3 board meeting. But “right now the revenue we are taking in in the sewer fund is not self-supporting the expenses for the sewer fund.”

Every year for the past few years, the village has had to take $25,000 out of the sewer reserve to help pay back the bond on the sewer-plant upgrades. The board was told in March 2020 that more revenue had to be raised so the village could collect another $100,000 per year to help pay down the bond. 

Altamont started 2020 with about $383,500 in its sewer fund rainy-day account. This year, that number was about $281,000, with the expectation that the fund will end 2021 with approximately $217,000 in reserves, according to village filings with the state Comptroller’s Office.

Trustee Nicholas Fahrenkopf said the village had been flagged for borrowing from the general fund to cover sewer-related costs. The state Comptroller’s Office had “notified us and said you have to do something about your rates,” said village Treasure Catherine Hasbrouck, because the fund “has to be self-supporting.”

Last year, $70,000 had to be borrowed from the general fund to balance the 2020 sewer fund. For the 2021 budget, another $105,000 was needed to close the sewer funding gap, according to village filings with the Comptroller’s Office.

Dineen said there are “different reasons” for the sewer fund not being able to support itself, citing, as an example, savings the village thought it would see from a sewer-plant upgrade. “Originally, we thought the electricity costs” at the plant would decrease after upgrades were made, Dineen said. “They did not go down.”

Hasbrouck added that water-fund revenues had declined as well. The closing of the Peter Young Center was a “big revenue hit,” according to Hasbrouck, who also noted the Altamont Fair is hosting fewer events than in years’ past. “Therefore you don’t have the water usage and then you don’t have sewer input,” she said.

Between 2017 and 2021, the village’s median metered water sales were approximately $328,500 per year, which represented an average annual decline of about $16,000 from the previous five-year period, 2012 to 2016, when median sales were about $345,000 a year, according to village filings with the Comptroller’s Office.

Hasbrouck noted issues with the water fund because of its relation to how sewer revenue is received. The village bills customers for their water consumption and bases the sewer charge as a percentage of water use. In April, customers are charged 180 percent of their water use for sewer rent. The October bill has a 150-percent charge.

Over the past five years, Altamont collected about $430,000 per year in median sewer rents, down from the annual median of about $436,000 it received between 2012 to 2016, according to village filings with the Comptroller’s Office.

By raising the twice-a-year fee, the village knows it will see a certain amount of added revenue, Dineen said. If the board instead had decided to increase water rates, there’s less of a guarantee that additional funding would come in “because we don’t know what the usage might be.”

The mayor said another reason the village wasn’t looking to raise water rates right now is because the water fund is being supplemented by additional non-customer cash in the form of annual rent from a company that put up a cell tower at the village’s Agawam Lane water-storage site in addition to an eventual one-time influx of revenue that will come from logging the Altamont Reservoir in Knox.

Hasbrouck added that a water-related bond is due to be paid off in about five years. “That’s why we’re hoping to just get through to that point,” she said, “and you will have extra money there” because it would free up $105,000 a year that is currently being used to pay off the loan. 

Fahrenkopf said the board didn’t immediately look to increase customer costs. 

“Before we got to the idea that we have to raise rates,” he explained, the village explored two options: reducing its sewer-related expenses, followed by  increasing the capital charge. “And we know that from budget hearings year after year,” Superintendent of Public Works Jeff Moller cuts as much as he can and continues to find “new ways of cutting those things,” Fahrenkopf said. 

But Altamont is facing a two-fold problem: First, expenses continue to rise, more and more system components are aging, breaking down, and require replacement, he said. “So it is literally costing more to run the plant today than it did six years ago,” Fahrenkopf added. 

And second, “we are getting less revenue,” he said, and it’s not that the village has lost out on revenue from former “big hitters” like the fairgrounds and Young Center, customers in general are just conserving more water. “They’re concerned about the environment,” he said, so customers are installing low-flow appliances in their homes and “less water is less sewer revenue.”

Fahrenkopf concluded, “We didn’t see an opportunity to reduce expenses and that’s why we ended up looking at raising revenue.”

Facelift  

Also during its Nov. 3 meeting, the board approved the village to solicit bids for long-overdue work to 115 Main St.. Once a car dealership, the building is home to the village offices and archives, the Altamont Police Department, and the volunteer fire department.

“Long story short, the front facade of this building where the fire department is [located] is visibly crumbling, sagging outward,” Fahrenkopf said. “The floors are not even.”

Based on the recommendation of the village’s now-former engineer, $135,000 was set aside in 2018 to deal with the repairs (when the board adopted this year’s budget, it reduced the repair line item by $15,000). But when contractors submitted bids for the repairs, the estimates the village received for the work came back in the range of $500,000 to $600,000, Fahrenkopf said .

The village thought there had been a “bit of a discrepancy” with the initial bid process, “so we tried bidding again,” Fahrenkopf said. “The numbers came back the same way they did the first time; we don’t have that kind of money.”

The original project called for the replacement of the brick veneer on the front of the building facing Main Street to the main entrance of Village Hall, in addition to “changing signs, changing awnings, lights, you know, the whole shebang,” he said.

Now working with a new engineer, the village came up with more targeted fixes, Fahrenkopf said, where “walls are bowing out, areas where the bricks are crumbling.” A portion of the concrete floor in the firehouse is also slated to be demolished and replaced because it “moves up and down” under the weight of a moving fire truck.

The village expects the work to be completed in the first half of 2022, with bids due by Dec. 7. 

Main breaks 

Moller said his department had been busy working to fix water-main breaks in the village, with an especially tough repair of a blowout that resulted in a football-sized hole on Schoharie Plank Road West

“I think it shocked our whole system because it dropped pressure in the whole system, which hardly ever happens,” Moller said. Two days after the initial blowout, there were two more breaks in the line that feeds the homes along the road, he said.

Moller also said the village’s water system is aging; the main on Schoharie Plank Road West was installed sometime in the early 1940s

“It’s an asbestos-lined pipe,” he said, “so it’s not a really super-hard pipe.”

He said it took two weeks to get the material needed to fix the break, and his department ended up having to replace 60 feet of water main. 

Moller said he had another break on Lark Street he was going to be fixing on Nov. 4, and another leak on Altamont Boulevard that’s to be repaired sometime next week.

Last week or the one before that, Moller said during the Nov. 3 meeting, there was another break “halfway up the hill,” along Main Street, heading toward Berne, near the village’s storage tanks on Agawam Lane. 

Moller attributed the increase in main breaks to the late September blowout on Schoharie Plank Road West. “I’ve been here for 20 years and we’ve never had a break where it just drops the pressure right out, [and] people don’t have water, three-quarters of the village,” Moller said. “It’s pretty severe.”

It was pointed out during the Nov. 3 meeting that the board was asked at a previous meeting about the village installing an emergency water interconnection with the town of Guilderland. So going forward, [that would] be something that we really have to start planning for and trying to make happen for us,” Dineen said. 

Moller agreed on the need for an emergency interconnection, and said that, between the initial Schoharie Plank Road West blowout and two main breaks that followed, the village lost almost 500,000 gallons of water. 

“And we’ve got a million gallons up on that hill,” he said, referring to the village’s storage tanks on Agawam Lane. “But only about half of that is serviceable. Once you get halfway down in our tanks, the outer fringes of the village that are higher elevation start losing their pressure.” 

With the breaks on Schoharie Plank Road West, Moller said, “We were awful close to getting pretty serious about” preparing contingencies for fire protection in the village.