GUILDERLAND — The Guilderland Industrial Development Agency voted Monday morning to hold a public hearing on the application by Pyramid Management, owners of Crossgates Mall, for tax breaks that would help it to build the apartment and townhouse complex the company has proposed on Rapp Road, adjacent to the mall.

The public hearing will be held Monday, Jan. 7, at 7 p.m. at the town hall. The application will likely be voted on at the board’s Jan. 28 meeting, at 7 p.m. at the town hall.

Pyramid is seeking $1.2 million in sales- and use-tax exemptions, and $355,000 in mortgage-recording-tax exemptions for a complex of 222 residential units west of the mall. According to the application to the IDA, both figures are estimates.

Pyramid received over a million dollars in tax breaks from the Guilderland IDA to build a dual-branded Hilton hotel in front of the mall, on Western Avenue. The hotel opened in early October.

Pyramid’s application for tax breaks for the Rapp Road Development, LLC project is posted online on the Guilderland IDA section of the town website.

The application describes the project this way:

— Total project cost would be an estimated $41.8 million;  

— The project would create 150 construction jobs;

— Pyramid has spent about $640,000 on the project to date, for design, engineering, feasibility studies, and planning;

— Five multifamily residential buildings would range in size from about 7,865 square feet to 26,240;

— Initial opening is anticipated to be in the summer of 2020; and

— The project would require hiring six permanent full-time employees — three skilled and three semi-skilled. A project manager would be recruited and hired in fall of 2019, and the other employees would be hired in 2020, prior to the opening.

A brief description of the project in the application says it is consistent with the Transit-Oriented overlay zoning district that the town created in the area of the mall earlier this year, to encourage development around the mall ring road, rather than on Route 20, and to improve the walkability of Westmere and decrease reliance on cars.

A bus stop would be located at the complex.

The application says, “Young professionals and empty nesters will be among those who will be attracted to the new development.” It adds that new town residents drawn to the complex will drive sales tax revenue at Crossgates and other local businesses.

Pyramid Partner Michael Shanley of Guilderland told The Enterprise earlier said that, from the beginning of Pyramid and Crossgates, which opened 34 years ago, “We’ve been pretty much 100-percent focused on retail. That market is obviously changing, so we start looking for other alternatives.”

With its application, Pyramid also submitted a “Market Opportunity Analysis for Apartment Development: Guilderland, New York” that says that the Westmere area around the project site “skews slightly younger” than the adjacent suburbs, and that many “young, highly educated and well-compensated households” are being drawn to the Guilderland and Albany area by the University at Albany, the Center for Nanoscale Science and Engineering, and the other professionals’ offices that have grown up around these institutions.

The analysis says that, nationally, retail-integrated or adjacent development is on the rise, and that successful projects tend to be adjacent to the “right mall” and to not have a strong and vibrant downtown to compete with; it says that this site fits those conditions.

As the property exists today, the report says, it pays only about $17,000 per year in combined tax dollars; upon development it will generate significantly more, which benefits Albany County, the town of Guilderland, and Guilderland’s school district.

The market study by Robert Charles Lesser & Co., Real Estate Advisers, says that the area within a six-mile radius — an area that reaches beyond the town line, into the city of Albany — around the proposed project site is expected to see an annual demand for approximately 417 new rental apartments each year from 2015 to 2020.