To encourage affordable housing and also to protect the town’s water quality and quantify, the draft says, the town board is proposing a six-month moratorium on subdivisions of five or more lots; apartment complexes of 25 or more units; and residential care facilities of 50 or more units.

“We need housing and you don’t, in my opinion, want people who aren’t going to live in a house to own a house and then just rent it out short-term a week at a time, a weekend at a time, a wedding at a time,” said Robert Randall at the public hearing. “The people living next to them no longer have a neighbor; they have strangers living next to them.”

Guilderland Supervisor Peter Barber described the building as being “frozen in time” and said he’d also like to acquire from the district the “big pot-belly stove” and the original desks and chairs that had been in the school until recent years because he’d like to “recreate what a school looked like at that time.”

Local libraries and Thacher State Park are offering programs about the eclipse as schools are taking “a potpourri of approaches,” Guilderland Superintendent Marie Wiles told her school board on March 12.

Superintendent Marie Wiles told the board members at their March 12 meeting, that, by creating a third Comprehensive Skills section next year, “The hope is spreading those students out over three sections, recognizing the wide range of age levels that are served there, [ages] 14 to 22, will give us a lot more opportunity to meet those individual needs, customize the programs for those students as they age through the program and their journey here.”

“I mean it’s crazy,” said Guilderland School Board President Seema Rivera. “We’re asking for things for our kids … nothing exorbitant. And then … we have to send money to Crossgates. I think it’s insane.”

More than 70 high school students will represent Capital Region BOCES on March 18 in a regional competition that challenges the professional skills of more than 350 students from the Capital Region, North Country, Hudson Valley, and beyond.

“If the net cost is zero, why wouldn’t we purchase more?” asked school board member Rebecca Butterfield. “It comes down to being able to store them, charge them, and run them …,” responded Andrew Van Alstyne. “While free buses would be good … districts have seen them break down.” He said he hoped the technology will be more advanced before Guilderland turns over its fleet to electric.

The retirement of Maria Buhl and Kim LaPlant from their decades of work at the Guilderland Public Library have nothing to do with the controversy caused by the Café con Mel’s accusations of racism.

While she said the program is “a great idea,” Robyn Gray went on, “I just want to make sure that we’re going to focus on affordable housing and senior housing and not high-end housing, not even market-rate housing. It should all be for those special needs.” Superintendent Peter Barber responded that the grant programs “are all geared towards workforce housing, affordable housing, senior housing.”