GUILDERLAND — When the Guilderland Planning Board heard a recent proposal for an 8,000-square-foot medical-office building, it turned out to be a rare case of a resident offering only positive feedback on a project. 

At the conclusion of Concord Hill Drive resident Dominic Paratore’s comments on Dec. 14, board member Thomas Robert observed to laughter, “It’s nice to hear a neighbor being happy about something.”

To which Chairman Stephen Feeney replied, “You don’t get a lot of that.”

The zoning board in October 2017 approved a special permit for a 23,250-square-foot building, with 11,625 square feet of living space in the form of 11 apartments and 8,720 square feet for commercial endeavors on the corner of Western Avenue and Hague Drive. That building would have had 44 parking spaces. 

The project has now been scaled down to an 8,000-square-foot medical-office building, and from two stories to one; the project requires 56 parking spots, but the applicant is proposing to install 35 spots with 21 banked, or potential future, spaces. A 2009 proposal similarly proposed a medical building on the site. 

Whereas the zoning board was the original lead agency for the project, this time around it’s the planning board because the proposal needs only site-plan approval. 

Brian Pattison, who manages the office for dermatologist Theta Pattison, is the applicant; he runs the dermatology practice on the other side of Hague Drive from the proposed project; he paid $310,000 in January 2021 for the three parcels — 2500 Western Ave., 2502 Western Ave., and 3 Hague Drive — that make up the corner of Western Avenue and Hague Drive. 

Paratore, whose property abuts the proposed project, said if Pattison “does anything like he did for the property that he currently owns, that’s a positive for our neighborhood. My concern is the buffer, the current buffer of the existing new office is excellent. If you could do that again, I’d be a happy neighbor. The buffer is really important.”

The area around Hague Drive has seen its fair share of development recently with quite a bit more proposed. A self-storage facility is located directly across from Hague Drive, while a proposed 66-lot single-family residential cluster subdivision has drawn the ire of Windmill Estates residents, Paratore among them. 

Feeney made the observation that there’s a swath of Windmill Estates Homeowners’ Association property in between Paratore’s land and the proposed medical building. “So I don’t know how buffered that is, or how much permission … [Pattison] doesn’t have the ability to” recreate what he did across the street because that land directly abuts the adjacent property. 

Board member Christopher Longo pointed out that Paratore could thank the homeowners’ association for already having buffer lands, and recommended that he talk to the association about plantings going on its land because, he said, “we can’t really dictate that.”

The board ended up tabling the proposal for the time being as it waits for Albany County to weigh in and for its in-house engineer to start in the first part of the new year.