KNOX — Kevin Willsey says he is better off with fewer people in his life.

After a 2013 Main Street fire in Altamont took his auto-repair business with it and he was jailed for knowingly buying stolen auto parts two years ago, Kevin Willsey moved to a farmhouse on a rural back road, he says, to get away from people.

Complaints this month about the cleanliness of his property and a visit from a newspaper reporter recalled his reasons for moving up the hill, where he grew up.

“I paid my debts,” he said, reluctant to talk about his property last week. He served jail time after he pleaded guilty in 2013 to the felony charge. The garage burned that same summer, and jail was what helped him cope with his loss, he said, to “put things in perspective.”

“Outside, I was a damn zombie,” Willsey said. He added, “Everything I owned was in that garage. My first toolset was in that garage.”

Earlier that year, the village had fined Willsey for zoning violations, including glare, inappropriately parked vehicles, and exterior storage of parts and equipment.

At the May town board meeting in Knox, Willsey’s neighbor, John Rodd, sought the authority of the town’s zoning law against Willsey, now 32.

“We went away for the winter and came back to find that we now live next to a junkyard,” Rodd said of he and his wife, speaking to board members on May 12. He handed them pictures he took of his neighbor’s property on Craven Road, which he said has a large pile of construction debris, including home appliances, several vehicles, a trailer, and a large container for a semi-truck sitting outside on its green lawn adjacent to the Rodds.

“It’s not just his property but it’s also mine,” Robert Price, who owns property nearby, said at the meeting of Rodd’s concern about property value.

“I think we are already suffering a loss because of the person who lives there,” Rodd said to the town board. “We are unfortunately neighbors with a convicted felon.”

Noting Rodd is a former town judge, Willsey suggested he was being picked on because of his conviction in 2013.

Altamont Police had found a skid-steer loader on his property that had been stolen from Otsego County and Police Chief Todd Pucci described Willsey as a customer of a “chop shop,” a place where stolen cars are disassembled and the parts are sold.

“I don’t think he knew who I was,” Willsey said of first meeting Rodd. “Now, all of a sudden, the hand waving and the friendliness is gone.”

He pointed out several nearby properties, some of them farms, with vehicles and odds and ends stored outside. “It’s the buddy system,” he concluded.

Willsey said he knew many people through his business in Altamont and issued IOUs for those who couldn’t pay him when he fixed their cars. When the garage burned, he said, no one apologized or offered him help, and his records were gone.

Craven Road

Rodd came to the board, he said, because he had recently confronted Willsey about cleaning up and Willsey threatened he would have the vehicles run constantly at the property line.

Willsey said at his house last week that he never threatened to run his cars all day and, since the Craven Road property where he now lives had gone through foreclosure, he had improved the place.

“What do you see is so horrible?” Willsey asked.

The home is an old, cream-colored farmhouse with green shutters that sits close to the road. In the driveway is Willsey’s truck; behind it is a large trailer with a small Hyundai on top. The compact is being repaired for his girlfriend’s daughter, Willsey said, and he is fixing up another large truck around the back of the house before putting it on the road.

Farther back on the property sits a small playset for children. Farther still is a pile of debris with a large door atop. Perpendicular to the property line next to Rodd’s, at the far corner of Willsey’s lot, is a large semi-trailer, which Willsey said he plans to use as a “toy trailer” to transport his gear and vehicles or an RV.

In all, Willsey said, he has six vehicles parked on the property.

Willsey said he moved into the home, owned by his girlfriend, Stephanie Keyer, last December. In the time they’ve had the property, he said he has cleaned out pallets and other debris strewn over its field.

“The property went from farmhouse with no debris to one with a lot of debris,” Rodd told The Enterprise. “It’s very concerning — you know, you work on your own home your whole life to keep it up and something like this can affect it overnight.”

Rodd acknowledged that other properties in town looked like Willsey’s.

“It’s a growing situation I want to nip before it gets to the extreme,” he told The Enterprise.

The town’s assistant building inspector, Dan Sherman, told the town board he had visited the Craven Road property where Willsey lives.

“One of the things we’re going to be up against, and he kind of knew it ahead of time, is all the vehicles that are there are registered and running and even the tractor trailer, construction trailer, is currently registered and road-worthy,” Sherman said during the May 12 meeting.

“I told him it did appear from the road there was some other stuff he needed to clean up and things like that, which he had no problem with,” Sherman said.

Willsey said a pile of debris toward the back of his property is the remains of a chicken coop he took down and plans to bring to the dump.

“It’s an eyesore. It looked like hell,” he said of the coop.

Rodd said a separate pile of construction debris was burned at the property in the fall, but Willsey said the only pile he burned outside was rotten wood left by the previous owner.

“I may not be going 100 miles per hour and getting it done in a day, but there’s a lot to do here,” Willsey said.

Price, who lives down the road and chair’s Knox’s planning board, vouched at the meeting for Rodd’s account of what could be seen outside.

“There are dozens of violations of the zoning law,” Price said, “and I would be glad to quote chapter and verse where they are.”

Junkyards and junk vehicles are prohibited in the town’s zoning ordinance, punishable with a fine, but Willsey says he has registrations for his vehicles, meaning they are not junked.

“I want to make everybody in the town realize that it is our responsibility to enforce our zoning,” John Dorfman, the town’s attorney, said following Rodd at the May 12 meeting. Referring to Supervisor Michael Hammond, he went on, “And I just turned to Mike and I said to him, ‘Gee, when did we first hear of this?’ Quite honestly, this is the first I’ve heard of it.”

Dorfman told The Enterprise on May 13 that he had only looked at the pictures and the relevant laws, as the building department had yet to investigate. Of Rodd’s pictures, he said, “There were some vehicles there I saw and that’s all that really comes to mind, but that doesn’t mean there’s not more information in there.”