ALTAMONT — Seeking to raise additional revenue for the village, the Altamont Board of Trustees at a special meeting last week authorized Mayor Kerry Dineen to sign an agreement with a Greene County company to log village-owned land in Knox.

Dineen said during the Dec. 17 meeting that the contract with R&R Logging to harvest timber at the 303-acre Altamont Reservoir would yield $40,000 to $50,000 of revenue — while noting this was a minimum amount — for the village. She said it wasn’t the first time the village allowed the site to be logged.

In 2003, Dineen said, a timber specialist was allowed on the land to fell some of its hardwood trees, and that Altamont took in about $60,000 in revenue. 

This time, R&R would be allowed to take down both hard and softwoods, the mayor said.

During the Dec. 17 virtual meeting, Trustee Dean Whalen said his concern was that the contract was rather short, just four pages; he felt that it needed to be “beefed up” to protect both the village and R&R. 

In his opinion, Whalen said, the contract was written “a little loose,” noting there was vague language that could be open to interpretation, for example, trees that were not being taken down would be “protected against unnecessary damage during harvesting,” and Whalen wanted to know what was “unnecessary damage?”

Speaking to how the land will be cleaned up after the loggers have left, Whalen wanted to know what would happen to “the slash,” the leaves and branches left behind, because the contract said the site would be cleaned up “as much as possible.”

Dineen told Whalen that, on other R&R jobs, materials were not taken away by the company; they were placed in piles on-site.

Whalen said that wasn’t the best practice, and that the leftover material should either be chipped up and spread out or hauled off-site — it shouldn’t be left in piles. “We shouldn’t be stuck with all of the small branches and leaves” on the ground, he said.

 Whalen then asked what the contract meant by restoring the skid roads back to original conditions, because he didn’t think R&R was going to be doing any plantings. Dineen said the company would not. 

But the mayor noted that someone who had provided a reference for R&R had informed her of a similar situation: A road was left in poor shape by the company, R&R was notified, and the next day it was back on-site rectifying the situation. 

“At least, I feel like they are conscientious about their work,” Dineen said. “They came back and made good on it.”

Dineen said she’d write up a list of conditions that would have to be satisfied before she signed the contract.

Dineen will ask the village lawyer to add to the contract that branches and leaves would either be chipped and spread or taken off-site, and that any roads damaged during the logging would be graded appropriately afterwards. 

Altamont hasn’t been hit as hard by the pandemic as other municipalities, with its sales-tax revenue from the county down less than 1 percent from last year: $622,764 in 2020 compared to $628,463 in 2019.

But the village has been seeking other revenue-generators as of late, with the planning board approving a cell tower on village-owned property on Agawam Lane in early 2019. That deal has yielded an additional $18,000 worth of annual revenue for Altamont.

In 2017, the town of Knox and the village of Altamont settled a decade-long dispute of the worth of the 303-acre reservoir property, agreeing to value it at two-thirds of its original million-dollar assessment. The reservoir itself is no longer used by the village, which now gets its water from wells.

In 2019, the village board had discussed leasing the property for a solar installation.