GUILDERLAND — Democrat Patricia Slavick, who was first elected to the town board in 2000, is running for a fifth four-year term.

On the subject of revaluation and the state-set equalization rate, Slavick said she felt the town should have had some input into the selection of properties used in the state’s sampling, because she does not think that the ones selected were a true representation of all properties in Guilderland.

She noted that the town met with the Office of Real Property Tax Services to try to mitigate the situation but that it was unable to alter the outcome.

She said that revaluations are done on the basis of the town assessor’s recommendation, which in turn is based on the equalization rate. Since 2005, when the last revaluation was done, the equalization rate had held steady, Slavick said.

According to Van Wagenen, the equalization rate went down in 2009 to 79 percent, then climbed until 2013, when it hit a high of 92 percent. Over the next few years, it declined slowly, to 90 in 2014 and to 88 in 2015 and 2016, only to fall sharply this year, to 75.58 percent.

Town officials looked at other municipalities, and some had not done a revaluation “for years and years,” she said.

As part of the remediation process, the board recently put out a request for proposals for consultants to help the assessor do a townwide revaluation, Slavick said.

One way that the board is trying to address the problem of “zombie buildings,” Slavick said, is with the new abandoned-property law put into effect in 2016. She pointed out that there are thousands of properties in town. She noted that the overgrown bank on the corner of routes 146 and 20 will soon be demolished to make way for a Cumberland Farms.

The town cannot just go in and demolish properties, Slavick said. The emphasis should be on building inspectors working to contact the owners and see what can be done. “Maybe trying to find someone else who would buy it, and put it to another use,” she said.

Slavick is in favor of cutting costs on sidewalks, but was not sure of the aesthetic appeal of having sidewalks in some places and blacktop in others. “To me, that would almost be something for a public comment, to get resident input about,” she said.

As places that could particularly use additional sidewalks, she named East Lydius Street, saying, “There are some around DiCaprio Park, but they don’t go all the way down.” Old State Road was another street that she thought needed sidewalks: “Many people live over there, too.”

Slavick said that Guilderland is a very welcoming town, and that she would think that, if an illegal immigrant had a medical issue, he or she would be taken care of. She also said that she thought that the police should have the right to question people who look suspicious, “for the safety of the other residents.”

She said that she thought a person’s medical needs should be addressed first, “and then they can go in and do the questions.”

Slavick thought that the idea of a compost center sounded expensive, and said she had not heard any requests from residents for a compost center. “So you have to weigh the expense of that versus what it’s going to cost the residents, and the benefit to the residents.” She said that she thought most people in town already do a good job of recycling and added, “I’m not sure Guilderland really needs to put in anything extra on that.”

Slavick, who is 65, works at the Statewide Financial System, which manages the state’s central accounting system; she called it a “very interesting place to work.” She is a licensed certified public accountant and has a master of science degree in accounting from the University at Albany as well as an undergraduate degree in business administration from The College of Saint Rose.

She has been married for 38 years, she said, and has two grown children.

Asked for a surprising fact about herself, she said that her parents are Italian immigrants. “But I was born here.”