Glenville officials announced Tuesday, Sept. 1, that the town has received a $579,600 state grant to help pay for the new sanitary sewer service for the residents in Alplaus, adjoining residents in Clifton Park and the Glencliff Elementary School of the Niskayuna Central School District in Rexford.
It’s a shared services thing. It was the Town of Glenville, Clifton Park and the Niskayuna Central School District [who participated in the grant application], said Glenville Town Supervisor Frank Quinn.
Geographically, Glencliff Elementary, the section of Clifton Park and Alplaus are all next to each other, but they function under three different tax districts ` Glenville, Niskayuna and Clifton Park.
Quinn said the $579,600 of grant money will keep costs down for the users of the new sanitary sewer system, which was completed by the Town of Glenville last year. The grant funds will be used to reduce capital construction costs, and at the same time they will `promote more efficiency in the operation and maintenance of the new sewer system.`
`Both towns and the school district have worked collaboratively to adopt an inter-municipal agreement to provide the legal and contractual structure for the project, as well as the broad outline for the design of the system,` said Quinn.
He said that the cost of the entire project for the three jurisdictions and the special districts involved is estimated at over $4 million dollars.
`New York state has this funding service that they’ve had for years called ‘shared services,’ and the whole purpose of this was to have different taxing districts come together and provide services together,` said Quinn.
According to Quinn, all parties involved incurred expenses for the new sewer so this grant will be distributed among them, but since Glenville incurred most of the expenses the bulk of the grant money will go to them ` specifically the Alplaus residents. It should reduce taxes for residents by about $50 per year.
The same sewer plant project for the town is currently pursuing low-interest bonding from the New York State Environmental Facilities Corporation in Albany to reduce interest on the bond from 5 to 6 percent to 1 to 2 percent.
`That’s grant money that we had been hoping for, and it’s going to end up bringing the bill down for all of the residents in that area in the sewer district,` said Town Councilman Ed Rosenberg.“
