GUILDERLAND — Receiver of Taxes Lynne Buchanan, a Democrat, says she loves working for Guilderland and believes in the town. She is running unopposed for re-election to the position she has held for four years.

Buchanan was born and raised in Altamont. Her grandfather, Howard Diehl, was chief of police before George Pratt. She raised her now-grown children in Altamont, where she continues to live. Her husband, Robert Haines, is logistics coordinator for Alpha Analytical Environmental Testing Lab.

Before becoming receiver of taxes — which has an annual salary of $59,495 — Buchanan served as deputy receiver of taxes under Jean Cataldo for three-and-a-half years and then spent six months working in the comptroller’s office, “learning the back side of the money and the budget and banking.”

Before working for the town, she worked in banking, in jobs with Key Corp and with a corporate credit union.

During the months of September and January — the busiest for tax collection — she stays open late on Wednesdays, until 6 p.m., she said. About 40 people stop in during those extended hours over the course of the month, she said.

Altogether, she estimated, she gets about 1,200 people paying in person at the window during the month of September and then again in January. “People definitely do like to come in and pay in person,” she said.

Residents once had the option of paying in person at First Niagara Bank, but after Key Bank bought out First Niagara about a year and a half ago, it did not want to continue, Buchanan said. She looked into other banks, but a lot of them did not want the responsibility of accepting tax payments. One bank wanted to charge every resident who chose to pay in person.

“Obviously, I didn’t go with that; I feel residents pay enough,” she said. “So they come to visit me in town hall.”

Asked about security measures to protect residents’ credit-card information and other data, Buchanan said that all of that is handled by a third-party vendor that the town uses.

When she first started as receiver of taxes, she said, Guilderland used a different vendor, which charged the town a fee for offering a credit-card option. She has since found a different vendor, used by other towns, which passes the fee on to the individuals who choose to pay by credit card.

This seems fairer, she said. “The town of Guilderland shouldn’t be paying credit-card fees; it’s not a tax line that we can charge every resident, if we only have, say, 100 of them using it.”

Her office also recently purchased a counterfeit-detecting machine, to avoid having the town need to cover any losses from accepting counterfeit bills.

Key Bank did catch one counterfeit bill that came in, which triggered the idea of getting the machine “to protect the town,” she said.

“It was $100, so not a huge loss, but it was definitely a flag that it can happen.”

Another improvement she has made is that all processing of bills is now done in-house. Bills used to be processed by an out-of-town bank, but processing in-house means everything can be done sooner; if a resident has a notice of insufficient funds, Buchanan said, it is easier to catch it sooner, she hopes before the penalty period.

There are just two people in the office for the receiver of taxes — Buchanan and her assistant, Amanda Beedle — and they process about 10,000 tax bills twice a year, as well as 10,000 water bills twice a year. There are actually 12,000 tax bills that go out, but about 2,000 of those are processed electronically by a large escrow-payment company, Buchanan said.

Buchanan has heard complaints directly from many residents who live in the town but in school districts other than Guilderland, since they saw increases of up to 19 percent in their school-tax bills this fall, due to a new state-set equalization rate for Guilderland.

Buchanan said that this tax period “has been a challenge” for that reason. She tries to listen to complaints and direct residents to websites and phone numbers where they can get information, particularly the school districts’ websites.

“I feel especially bad for the seniors on fixed income who saw a drastic increase and had no warning,” she said.  Guilderland has done a town-wide property revaluation in 12 years.

Asked for a surprising fact about herself, Buchanan said she recently became a certified yoga teacher.