GUILDERLAND — Twenty-five years after secretly scooping up homes in the area, Pyramid’s yearslong litigation-plagued plan to place a Costco Wholesale on Western Avenue is another step closer to its ceremonial groundbreaking.

The Guilderland Planning Board on March 22 signed off on the proposed site plan for Costco, voting unanimously to send as its recommendation to the zoning board Town Planner Kenneth Kovalchik’s memo on the project, but not before adding comments made by the board during the meeting related to landscaping, fencing, and parking-lot access. 

The project is also on the upcoming meeting agenda of the town’s industrial development agency, where Pyramid will be requesting $475,000 in tax breaks and for the agency to use its power of eminent domain to help it “acquire and extinguish any interest” the town has with the roadways on the project site.

The company is also requesting the IDA help it deal with some properties whose “deed restrictions that purport to prevent their development for commercial use.”

Pyramid’s three-site proposal — for Costco, 222 units of housing, and a yet-to-be-determined parcel — has been subjected to equally as many lawsuits, all of which were ruled in the company and town’s favor. 

In April 2020, following the company’s clear-cutting of 8 acres on proposed Costco site, a group of Westmere residents along with a local gas station owner filed a federal lawsuit against Guilderland, its zoning and planning boards, as well as Pyramid and two of its subsidiaries.

The suit argued the clear-cutting violated the federal Clean Water and Endangered Species acts in addition to the state’s Environmental Quality Review Act, while also claiming a violation of the plaintiffs’ constitutionally-protected due process rights and privileges.

The federal judge overseeing the case dismissed it in August 2020 because the complaint hadn’t met the legal definition of readiness. 

In September 2020, the same group filed suit in Albany County Supreme Court, seeking to stop Pyramid’s proposed development. The lower court judge agreed with the plaintiffs and halted the projects in November of that year, but his decision was overturned in July 2021 by the state Supreme Court’s Third Appellate Division. 

Save the Pine Bush also sought to use the courts to stop the project from moving forward, but the not-for-profit group ended up on the wrong side of two decisions: In October 2021, when the lower court judge in the case dismissed the suit because a number of its arguments were found “to be lacking in merit,” and in May 2022, when that decision was upheld on appeal.

Costco plan

Pyramid, through its local limited-liability company, Crossgates Releaseco, is proposing to build a 163,000-square-foot Costco on 16 acres at the corner of Western Avenue andxx. The site would also include an 18-pump gas station, enough parking for 770 vehicles, and eight electric-vehicle charging stations. 

The area around the proposed site will also see infrastructure upgrades, some of which were mandated by New York State and adopted by the planning board as part of its July 2020 Environmental Impact Statement, which approved Pyramid’s planned layout for its three-site proposal.

The state required the roundabout “to address an existing high rate of accidents at this intersection (20x the national average),” according to Kovalchik’s project memo. “A condition of the EIS requires the roundabout to be operational prior to Costco opening for business.”

The work is expected to start in April, and be wrapped by the end of July. 

Guilderland Planning Board Chairman Stephen Feeney asked about the roundabout’s construction as it related to a work timeline for the Costco site, to which Kovachick responded, “My guess is, by the time we get through the zoning board review [and] building permit approval, the roundabout will probably be done by that time.”

The Capital District Transportation Authority, as part of its new $81 million Purple Line rapid transit route, is installing the roundabout at the Crossgates Interstate-87 interchange. There are also plans for “traffic signal upgrades on Crossgates Mall Road, repaving, restriping, and updated landscaping,” according to the transportation authority.

March meeting

The planning board on March 22 was told that the warehouse club would be open Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., Saturdays from 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Sundays between 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., with the gas station typically opening an hour before the store. 

Following Pyramid’s presentation, the public was given a chance to weigh in on the project. While praise for the proposal was offered by a few, there were more speakers who voiced concerns about issues, traffic in particular, that have been raised since the project’s inception. 

“We think the due diligence has been done,” Guilderland Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Sandra Dollard told the board, and the “fact that this plan did not have to ask for any special variances is huge.”

Pyramid’s previous application included a variance request that would allow for light poles in some places on the site as much as 20 feet above the town’s 16-foot height limit; the company is now proposing 16 feeet for the height of the site’s light poles. 

Another change from four years ago is the proposed site layout of the project. 

The 2019 proposal had the store located in the northeast corner of the development, at the intersection of Lawton Terrace and the mall side of Crossgates Mall Road, with the building entrance oriented west toward the Capital City Diner and perpendicular to Western Avenue. 

The planning board on March 22 was presented with a site plan where the building is still located in the northeast corner of the development but which now has a more south-facing entrance running parallel to Western Avenue.

More than a few public comments made on Wednesday had to do with the traffic that would be generated by a single store with estimated annual sales expected at well over $100 million. 

But Chairman Feeney said that project traffic had been analyzed as part of the environmental-impact-statement process while Kovalchik encouraged speakers to review Costco’s project page on the town website.

“If you look from May through December of last year,” Kovalchik said, “our town-designated engineer provided 12 rounds of comment letters specifically related to traffic … So in terms of the traffic changes, the intersection improvements, the driveways, all of that was specifically analyzed for queuing, stacking, the road diet, [and] intersection improvements … So we took a very detailed look at all of the traffic improvements.”

The traffic study estimated Costco would generate 262 new trips during the peak morning hour, 7:30 to 8:30 a.m., 538 between 4:30 to 5:30 p.m., and 755 during the Saturday peak hour, from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m.

But Westmere resident Iris Broyde pointed out that it wasn’t just a Costco being built. 

“Existing roadway traffic does not account for the influx of traffic being generated by the 222 residential units of the Apex complex, the 24 residential units of the Viscusi project already under construction,” Broyde said. “It also doesn’t account for the 48 additional residential units plus office and retail development being conceptualized for site number three.”

The proposed 222-unit apartment project, which Pyramid initially proposed but sold to Troy developer United Group for $5.43 million in June, is expected to generate 102 new vehicle trips during the morning peak hour, 124 in the afternoon, and 156 new peak-hour trips on Saturday. 

Site 3 has yet to be proposed but is listed as being in the pre-design phase by construction analytics company Dodge Data. The site was estimated to generate 833 new peak-hour trips: 189 in the morning, 310 in the afternoon, and 334 on Saturdays between 12:30 and 1:30 p.m.

IDA meeting and old home sales

On March 28, the Guilderland Industrial Development Agency will hear a request to grant the Costco project $475,000 in tax exemptions: $400,000 in sales tax relief and a $75,000 break on the state’s mortgage-recording tax.

The proposal has an overall price tag of $40 million, with new construction costs accounting for about half of the project’s estimated budget.

Costco estimates it will create 100 full-time jobs. 

Once in operation, the store, after taking in $100 million during its first year, would have annual sales estimated between $150 and $180 million, according to an economic impact analysis of the project. Half of that would be considered new revenue to the town and county, meaning the two municipalities could expect to receive new sales-tax revenue on about half of Costco’s expected annual sales, between $75 and $90 million. 

The impact analysis estimated $157,000 in new tax revenue for Guilderland and over $1.8 million for Albany County. 

But the applicant seeking the exemptions isn’t the site’s future tenant, currently number 11 on Fortune’s list of America’s 500 largest companies by revenue. Costco operates about 850 international and domestic stores, which have approximately 68,000 members who pay an annual fee of at least $60.

In October 2021, Costco signed a 25-year lease with options on the site. 

Along with its tax-break request, Pyramid, which owns most of the parcels that make up the future home of the discount club, is asking the IDA to help it with acquiring the public roads located within the proposed development’s 16 acres: Lawton Terrace along with Rielton and Tiernan courts. 

The company also made a request to the IDA related to “portions of the site [that] are currently encumbered by deed restrictions that purport to prevent their development for commercial use.”

With two exceptions, Pyramid “owns or controls the parcels comprising those portions of the Site,” according to its IDA application, but also holds the option to buy those privately held parcels. Guilderland’s interactive mapping shows 1685 Western Ave. and 8 Rielton Court as owned by entities other than Crossgates Releaseco LLC. 

The company’s application doesn’t state specifically the location of the deed-restricted land, only that they are “certain historic deed restrictions for residential use, which is now a prohibited use under the Transit Oriented Development (TOD) District Zoning (as well as certain rights to enforce those restrictions, if any such rights exist).”

But a vacant half-acre parcel located near the corner of Western Avenue and Crossgates Mall Road and purchased by a Pyramid-affiliated LLC in 1998 includes a deed that said the property was subject to two easements.

“One held by Town of Guilderland for an underground sewer,” according to the record on file with the Albany County Clerk’s office, and one “held by the State of New York for a drain of surface water, which is located immediately adjacent and west of the said town of Guilderland easement.”

But Pyramid in the IDA application argues “the deed restrictions are both legally null and void and unenforceable” anyway because “the restrictions are fundamentally inconsistent with the Town’s zoning classification of the Site and do not inure to the benefit of any identifiable party.”

About a quarter century ago, Pyramid started to buy properties in a residential neighborhood near Crossgates. 

The 1998 home sales were meant to be secret. The properties were purchased by companies named Warp Enterprise and Westville Associates, which had the same address as a handful of other LLCs buying homes in the area. The two companies ended up buying 13 homes from residents who had to sign non-disclosure statements about their sales.

A seller at the time told The Enterprise that the non-disclosure agreement stipulated, “We’re not even supposed to tell we have a contract.”

While Pyramid was trying to keep its home-buying under a legal muzzle, it was also eager to snatch up the residences of Gabriel and Lawton terraces and properties on Rielton and Tiernan courts. One home purchased by the company, 16 Lawton Terrace for $270,000, went for more than double its assessed value at the time, $121,700. The property was owned by the same person who sold Pyramid the deed-restricted vacant land. 

The Pyramid-purchased homes were eventually boarded up and allowed to fall into disrepair.

At the time of the secretive property sales, Pyramid went to the town with plans to more than double the size of Crossgates, to 3.6 million square feet, in addition to building an eight-story hotel and a recreation facility on-site. 

The mall, which opened in 1983 as a 875,000-square-foot shopping center, had expanded once already before the 1998 proposal, in 1994, when 650,000 square feet were added, which was followed in 1997 by the opening of a 18-screen movie theater. 

The proposal to double Crossgates was met with fierce public opposition, and the town ultimately declined to approve the zoning changes the project needed.