What’s behind the slow motion?
Niskayuna officials dispute reasons for delayed actions
Delays on decisions before the Town Board appear to be challenging the pledge among Niskayuna leaders that they’re committed to working together.
Republican Supervisor Yasmine Syed, a political newcomer, ousted 10-year incumbent Democrat Joe Landry in November. Since then, Syed and the four Democratic Town Board members agree that innocuous issues — naming a town historian or starting a farmers’ market — have become more complicated than expected. They disagree on why.
Syed said she’s getting partisan pushback from the board members when she has questioned ongoing proposals or offered up her own.
“If it’s not their idea, it’s gonna be really hard to get it done,” Syed said. “It may not necessarily be me as a person, it’s just politics, which is very unfortunate.”
Town board members deny their decisions are politically motivated. Board members said they delayed votes because of a lack of timely and open communication. A prime example, they said, was the farmers’ market which they said everyone supported but couldn’t figure out how to turn into reality.
This summer Syed met with board member and chair of community programs Lisa Weber to discuss setting up a farmers’ market in the Town Hall gazebo and put the proposal on the agenda of the next board meeting.
Syed said it then “became one road block after another.” Board members said her proposal was a skeleton not worked
the capital city began when Mayor Jerry Jennings’ administration picked the Coeymans property to be home to a new dump, seen as the solution to the Rapp Road landfill’s pending closure. But the plans were thwarted by residents’ opposition and the federal government’s discovery of some protected wetlands.
So, the land laid fallow, the wetlands grew.
The property sits on the eastern side of the Thruway off Exit 21A, and the Port of Coeymans as well as the industrial park are just south of the city-owned land.
In May 2017, the DEC was in talks with Albany officials to purchase the land for a nature preserve. Necessary appraisals discovered the property was seriously overvalued at $3.6 million. Appraisers estimated its value at about $620,000.
A few months after the reduction was made public, nearby Coeymans Industrial Park owner Carver Laraway expressed interest in buying the land for future expansion of the park.
By March 2018, Laraway had pulled out of the deal, unable to reach agreement with parties to ensure access to the property from Route 144, according to a letter sent by Laraway’s attorney, George Mchugh, to the city earlier this year.
When the possible purchase deal fell through, the city once again reached out to the DEC and state officials say they’re going through the process of acquiring the property.
At one point, Albany officials had hoped to sell the 363 acres for nearly $5 million to help make up for the nearly $5.2 million the city spent over several years beginning in 1993 to three landowners. The city finally took ownership in 2006.