GUILDERLAND — On Grievance Day, May 24, two local attorneys represented 73 townhouse owners from the Mill Hill development off Route 155 in Guilderland; they were asking to have their properties declared condominiums, which would lower their combined assessment by about $9.7 million, said town Assessor Karen Van Wagenen.

Van Wagenen expects that the board of assessment review, which is scheduled to reconvene on June 15, will approve the request. Her position had been that the homeowners did not complete the process in time for this year, she said.

The homeowners were represented by Donald Zee and Andrew Brick of the Donald Zee Law Office in Albany, who did not return calls asking for comment.

If the properties are declared condominiums, Van Wagenen said, they would need to be assessed “similar to apartments, in which case their assessments will drop considerably.”

She said that the total assessment for the 73 properties, which are part of a planned unit development, is currently $23,761,650.

The assessment of the townhouses are “extremely varied,” she said, because the owners seem to have had a lot of flexibility in how they decided to build. But an average assessment, she said, now is about $325,500, and this will go down to about $197,100 if they are declared condos.

Does she expect a rash of other townhouse owners to clamor for condo status?

“I hope not,” she said, “because I don’t know if they understand all the responsibilities of being a condo owner. There’s a lot of responsibility and things a condo owner has to do, especially if they’re selling.”

There isn’t any definitive definition of a condo, other than that the common areas are owned by a homeowners’ association, and the association also maintains the exterior of the unit, said Van Wagenen, who added that condo ownership is usually ownership of an apartment without any land. The condo owner usually has little to no control over construction, with design and materials set by the developer and builder, she said.

A townhouse, meanwhile, she said, usually shares at least one wall with a neighbor, and the owner usually owns the land around the townhouse; the owner is responsible for maintaining the property and the portion of the structure that he or she owns.

Mill Hill residences fit some parts of the definition of a townhouse and some of a condo, Van Wagenen said. The land surrounding the townhouses has been owned by the homeowners’ association since the beginning. Each homeowner was granted exclusive use of a limited portion of land surrounding the dwelling; that will not change if the units become condos, she said.

“They voted to become a condo development and filed the revised homeowners’ association declaration as a condo,” she said. She added, “Case law supports their right to do it.”

Condos are not common in Guilderland, she said. She was out of the office this week at a conference and unable to check town records, but could think of just two condo developments: Strawberry Lane and Mallards Pond.

She was able to name a number of townhouse developments: Highwood Circle, Suzanne Lane, part of the Weatherfield development, Squire Boulevard, Georgetown Square, and Velina Drive.

The owner of one of the 73 contesting Mill Hill townhouses has died, Van Wagenen said, so that property was not included in the Grievance Day case, but that property will be adjusted, along with all the others.

Certiorari proceedings

Van Wagenen said a total of 48 other properties were grieved this year, but very few were commercial property filings.

Three of the commercial properties that had active tax certiorari cases, Van Wagenen said, did not file grievances this year. Three others are in the process of being settled.

In the cases in which no grievance was filed, she said, she plans to file papers with the Albany County Supreme Court to, “hopefully have them dismissed.”

If they don’t file a grievance, they won’t have a certiorari for this year, she said, adding that these certiorari cases go back a year or two, and that she will try to have the past actions dismissed as well.

Not everyone who files a grievance requests a hearing, Van Wagenen said, noting that, including the 73 townhouses, the board received about 180 filings this year. “We usually have between 100 and 115 file each year,” she said.

Guilderland is in the process of conducting its first townwide property revaluation since 2005, but those values have not yet been applied.

The town had set aside two days this year for hearings, but all hearings were completed in one day. Since board members had arranged to clear their schedules for two days, they used the second day for deliberations, Van Wagenen said.

Guilderland’s board of assessment review consists of five members: Nicole Ventresca-Cohen, Deborah Riitano, Dave Payton, Carol Wysomski, and Tracey Slutsky. There are also two alternates: Patricia McArdle and Teresa Freeman.