The Town of Colonie has budgeted nearly $900,000 in revenues from the sale of real property in the 2012 tentative budget.
Supervisor Paula Mahan said the town is looking at four different properties to sell: a property on Wolf Road, the vacant highway garage, a property along Route 9 and the town’s Community Center, which is located on Central Avenue.
The Community Center has been looked at for several years as a piece of property the town does not have much use for anymore except for a portion of the building that houses the offices of the town’s Youth Bureau. Mahan said the town is currently looking to lease the building to a small business looking for some office space.
“We’re exploring one possibility of an incubator type set up where small businesses rent spaces and things like that,” Mahan said. “It depends on how much space is left but I know there is interest in keeping space for the youth center.”
The town is currently working with the Town of Colonie Industrial Development Agency to figure out the proper use for the building and to seek out tenants for the proposed space. Mahan said the property was appraised at $2.1 million when she first came into office back in 2008. She said the figure of $885,000 in the budget is really a conservative number and that if all four of the properties were sold the number would be much higher.
This figure was also budgeted in the town’s 2011 budget, but Mahan said the downturn of the economy has made it more difficult to sell the properties. She said there has been some interest in the buildings, particularly the highway garage, which Alex Kutikov of Vanguard Properties was looking into.
“At one point the buyer was quite interested and we almost sold it at the time,” Mahan said. “Then the economy dropped out.”
Town Attorney Mike Magguilli said the town has been looking at Montgomery Ward in Menands as an example, with just an office space to lease out to young businesses in favorable terms. He said there would be financial benefits for the town and there would be an agreement worked in that the business would have to create a specific amount of jobs in a given period of time. He did say, however, that the town is making sure the services provided by the town out of the Community Center would be allowed to stay there.
He made sure to delineate the relationship the town has with the IDA, as he said it is a separate public authority. The IDA, though, will be negotiating on behalf of the town through its attorney Connie Cahill.
“The town’s only control of the Industrial Development Agency is we appoint the directors,” Magguilli said. “After that, it’s a separate and distinct legal entity.”
The issue of the potential Community Center sale was recently brought up by Republican candidate for supervisor Denise Sheehan during a press conference on Wednesday, Oct. 19, where she called the plan a “one-shot gimmick.”
Sheehan said she would not have sold the center, but said she would look to strengthening the tax base and reorganizing the way services are delivered in the town. She also said that she would work on reducing the size of government. She was not specific, though, as to what exactly that would mean but said she would focus on attrition.
“We need to be thoughtful in our approach to the way we deliver services in this town,” Sheehan said. “There’s a lot of duplication of effort.”
One of Sheehan’s concerns was what any of the different organizations that use the center would do if the building was rented out. Mahan said there are several areas in the town that can be used and added that some of those groups rarely use the space.
“There are some that are long term and some come and then find other locations,” Mahan said. “Some of these groups meet very few times or at different times of the day… A lot of the programs are held right in the schools before and after [classes].”
