The Lysander Town Board voted unanimously Sept. 14 to authorize town engineer Al Yager to prepare a new Map, Plan and Report (MPR) for a revised Lamson Road water district east of Route 48.
Resident Jim Stirushnik suggested the board call the new proposal by a different name to avoid confusion. Supervisor John Salisbury said the revised MPR would refer to it as the “Lamson Road East Water District.”
Last month, the town determined that signatories of a petition to create the water district did not own enough of the proposed district’s total assessed value to move forward with the district creation process under Article 12 of New York state’s town law. Last week’s vote is the first step the board has taken to create the water district under Article 12-A, which will be subject to permissive referendum.
This means that any resident who is opposed to the resolution may start a petition within 30 days of the vote. If more than 10 percent of the town’s residents sign the petition, the town must hold a vote on the creation of the district.
While he voted in favor of spending as much as $2,500 to create the MPR, Councilor Roman Diamond shared his reservations about the second attempt this year to create a water district in the Lamson Road area.
“The board already tried to create a water district and it did not succeed. I am concerned on how much money the board is spending and the board has not budgeted this,” Diamond said.
Councilor Andy Reeves took issue with Diamond’s assessment.
“I would like to correct that statement. The board did not try to form a water district. The board followed the law and allowed [the residents] to try to get enough signatures to form one or not,” Reeves said. “It was dumped into the hands of the public and they followed the system. You are implying that we tried to form a district and we didn’t.”
Councilor Bob Geraci — who lives on Dinglehole Road, which was included in the previous proposed district and now is not — said he is “very much in favor” of pursuing the possibility of creating a water district under Article 12-A.
“There are some people who desperately need water, and there are some people who absolutely don’t need water. We need to let the system work its way through this thing. The folks that really want this have been wanting it for well over a decade, close to two decades,” Geraci said. “It is an opportunity for them to take the parts of the original district that would have never supported it and now we are going to find out if there is still support for this type of thing.”
Geraci said the money spent on the new MPR is “not extra cash.” Supervisor John Salisbury said Yager would be revising the earlier MPR, and the expected cost of $2,000 will not come out of the general fund, but out of Yager’s time.
