New Scotland to sue three property owners over code violations

NEW SCOTLAND — After years of disrepair, New Scotland has decided to take three local landowners to court to get them to clean up their properties.

The New Scotland Town Board on Sept. 9 authorized its law firm to file lawsuits against the owners of three properties that the town’s code-enforcement officer has said do not comply with town zoning and building codes.

The resolution names three properties:

— 133 Normanskill Road, Voorheesville;

— 2030 New Scotland Road, Slingerlands; and

— 2064 New Scotland Road, Slingerlands.

On Friday, no one answered the door at any of the three properties.

The code-enforcement officer, “after failing to obtain the cooperation of the landowners that were subject to the enforcement efforts, has determined to commence legal actions against the landowners,” according to the resolution approved by the board, which authorized Bailey Johnson “to file actions/proceedings and take all steps necessary to obtain compliance with the Code and laws of the Town.”

Michael Naughton, the town board’s attorney, told board members that the three owners “have not really complied with the efforts that have been made to get voluntary compliance with the code.”

The code-enforcement officer, Jeremy Cramer, and the law firm retained by the town, Naughton said, “want to take legal action, Supreme Court, and to take this to the next level and get injunctive relief, etc.”

Injunctive relief is a court order compelling a party to do, or stop doing, something; the state Supreme Court is New York’s trial-level court of general jurisdiction, the lowest level in the state’s three-tiered system.

Approving the resolution was “just to formalize that the town board is authorizing the actions, the lawsuits, with respect to these three properties,” Naughton said. “I think everyone’s been filled in on the general issues, and the efforts have been made to get compliance voluntarily before we’ve got to the step.”

“So, the last one,” Councilwoman Bridgit Burke said of 2064 New Scotland Road, “it says no violation has been served.”

“Yeah, I’m sure that would be done before the actual action is filed,” Naughton said in response, to which Burke asked,“But have there been conversations?” Naughton said there had been.

Supervisor Doug LaGrange told The Enterprise on Friday that, although he hadn’t personally been to 2064 New Scotland Road, there had been “discussions” about the property “in the past.”

Those talks were reignited recently due to a fire call there “a couple weeks back,” he said.

“The fire folks got in there and saw a lot of things that they were very concerned about on that level, and they reported that to our building department,” he said. “And so … that reaches a different level than clutter.”

LaGrange said that the town’s enforcement efforts had gone on “quite a while,” and that its practice is to let owners fix problems on their own before turning to the courts.

“One of the things we like to do is to give people a chance to … correct their own issues that … may, you know, butt up against the zoning law,” he said. “But there comes a time when you try to work with somebody and they just don’t seem to get it done. That’s primarily across the street.”

Town Hall sits at 2029 New Scotland Road; 2030 New Scotland Road is across the road from it.

That property, he said, “can’t be treated any different than any other place.”

The town code does not set a number of warnings an owner gets before being cited, LaGrange said. Asked whether the code spells out how property must be maintained, or how many chances an owner gets, he said, “No, no. We try to work with people.”

“So again, everybody, you know, gets multiple chances,” he said. “I mean, maybe that’s, maybe that’s a problem. You know, maybe we, you know, we should be a little harder, but you know we, we try to. And a lot of it’s ‘eye of the beholder.’”

New Scotland to sue three property owners over code violations

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