“Are we going to put life on hold?” asks Guilderland Supervisor Peter Barber.

The state’s Department of Environmental Conservation and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority announced this week that more than $24 million is now available to replace diesel-powered transit buses with new all-electric transit buses.

Now we have a call from Guilderland — from Kenneth Kovalchik, the town’s planner — for the Hilltowns, Guilderland, and New Scotland to work together for the good of all. We endorse this call wholeheartedly. 

Some of the towns with land on the Helderberg escarpment where large wind turbines were proposed in 2008 drafted laws on wind energy; others haven’t.

With the state looking to take control away from municipalities for the permitting and siting of medium- to large-scale renewable energy projects, how have local towns done enacting their own solar legislation?

We must protect places that are seen as essential for the common good. In the past, we have urged individual municipalities to protect the Helderbergs with their zoning and planning processes. We now urge the county to take up that banner.

At a special meeting held Feb. 21, members of the Knox Town Board and Amy Pokorny discussed details of a solar farm they hope to build with grant money as the deadline by which to use that money looms. “Let’s keep moving forward,” Supervisor Vasilios Lefkaditis said at the meeting. “That’s the goal.”

The Knox Town Board authorized the purchase of new lights for the town’s baseball field, which will be the first improvement to come out of grant money from New York State Energy Research and Development Authority’s Clean Energy Communities program.

Developer Armand Quadrini is willing to pay the cost of remediating the polluted site where he hopes to build a residential-and-commercial project called Foundry Village, with 140 apartments and a convenience store with fuel pumps. 

Depending on the source, some New Scotland water customers can pay as much as $26 per 1,000 gallons of water while others pay as little as $4.50. Recently, because their own service had to be shut down, the 127 customers in the Northeast Water District have been paying close to double what they normally pay for water.