GUILDERLAND — With the adoption of two resolutions at its October meeting, the Guilderland Industrial Development Agency performed the last in a long line of duties undertaken by the town’s municipal boards over the past five years to approve construction of the first Costco in the area.

On Nov. 1, the remainder of the process played out as attorneys for the IDA in court documents stated they had filed an acquisition map with the Albany County Clerk’s Office on Oct. 31, vesting the agency title to 4.23 acres of roads previously owned by the town within the 16-acre project site.

The roads were part of a residential neighborhood that had been secretly bought up by Pyramid years ago and left to languish.

It remains unclear if there will be a ceremonial groundbreaking before the year is out; that is “currently being worked out between the IDA attorneys and the Pyramid attorneys,” Donald Csaposs, the chief executive officer of the agency, told The Enterprise by email. 

Pyramid did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

On Oct. 22, IDA board members had adopted an amended resolution stating that, once the agency had acquired the land, it would hand over the property to project developer Pyramid Management Group. 

The second resolution approved an additional $55,000 in tax breaks for the company, which saw the amount of outside financing needed for the project increase by 75 percent.

In June, members of the IDA approved Pyramid’s $2.14 million request for sales-tax relief and another $75,000 break in mortgage taxes. At the time, the project had a $41.4 million price tag, with $32.4 million of that coming out of Pyramid’s pocket and the remaining $7.5 million coming by way of private-sector funding. 

By the end of October, Pyramid was on the hook for $13 million in construction financing, a 75-percent spike that netted the company $55,000 in additional mortgage breaks. 

Between March and May, overall  project costs rose from $39.9 million to $41.4 million, as machinery and equipment costs accounted for the entirety of the increase.  Also in May, Pyramid increased its sales- and use-tax exemption request from $5 million to $26.55 million. The ask quadrupled the benefit received by company, from $475,000 to about $2.2 million

Pyramid plans to build the 160,000-square-foot Costco store, 18-pump gas station, and 770-spot parking lot at the corner of Western Avenue and Crossgates Mall Road.

Costs increase

But what was not made clear on Oct. 22 was what had been behind the 13.5-percent increase in project cost. 

Was Pyramid once again behind the eightball with its finances? 

The company initially presented Costco along with hundreds of apartments and an envisioned mixed-used development to be built on land it owned around Crossgates Mall. 

It has since sold the apartment project site to a Troy builder, and while it currently owns the eight parcels slated for a cancer center located between the future price club and Hilton hotel on Western Avenue, Pyramid is not the project’s developer.

 Or is it that, in the half-decade since plans were first made public — at one time early in the process, the project was listed on construction-bid sites with an estimated $20 million budget — the commercial construction industry has seen the price of everything go up by 40 percent.

Timeline

Given that five lawsuits over the years caused Costco’s approval process to move at a glacial pace, the tossing of the final suit at the start of summer placed the final portion of the project’s regulatory review on a relatively fast track.

During the Sept. 24 IDA meeting, agency attorney, A. Joseph Scott, told board members that things were “moving forward relatively quickly on the condemnation piece.”

The following day, an Albany County court judge granted the IDA full authority to acquire the land, remove any existing deed restrictions, and to take over any rights to enforce those restrictions.

But it was thought things could have moved a little more quickly. 

During the October meeting, Donald Csaposs, the chief executive of the agency, said, “You’ll recall that at the June meeting of the IDA” a resolution was adopted that accepted Pyramid’s appraisal of the town-owned roads the company needed to control after condemnation so the planned Costco could move forward.

The June resolution also authorized the IDA to continue with the condemnation process by making the offers on behalf of Pyramid to affected parties involved in the taking proceedings. Pyramid already owns all but five of the properties on the future development site. 

“Candidly, with the benefit of hindsight, I would have added to that June resolution the authorization to do the conveyances that are authorized by this resolution and thereby wrapping it all up at the June meeting,” Csaposs said on Oct. 22. “But for one reason or another, in terms of internal operations and our review of the process, we were conducting it in two separate resolutions.”

But foresight, as Scott would explain, would not help place a shovel in the ground any sooner, because time had become relative for the IDA to complete its remaining portion of the condemnation process due to “our timetable [being] the project applicant’s timetable.” 

Because, Scott said, “There were some changes in the straight lease transaction necessitated by some changes in their construction financing,” so “when that closing takes place, it’s really, in many cases, outside our control.” 

Scott also noted that the “October date” was one Pyramid “gave us. We didn’t report that to the board as our view of the closing.”