Lake George Village trustees considered and then tabled “until needed” draft legislation that would attempt to force property owners to use their vacant property in the village. They discussed the measure in a special meeting held for this purpose on Monday Nov. 22.
The plan, a very rough draft intended to start the conversation, outlined the way in which the village would force landowners to register empty properties and maybe require them to put the properties to use or offer them to others who would put the property to use. A fine would be levied if the owner did not make changes, Mayor Bob Blais said.
Also, the registration would help the village reach a property owner if there were a fire, a break-in or a similar issue.
The rules would not apply to seasonally unoccupied buildings.
Blais added that three buildings in the village have been unoccupied, one for about 15 years, despite sincere interest from people and organizations to use the spaces.
“The owners have flatly said, ‘No, we’re not interested’,” Blais said. “They [the properties] just sit there. It just seems a shame to me.”
Matt Fuller, an attorney working with the village, had provided examples of similar legislation from other New York municipalities. Although not included in the examples, Glens Falls passed a similar law late in 2020.
Fuller pointed out that the village cannot use a law like this to twist the arm of a property owner to make a sale, a lease or a change to his or her land.
None of the examples that Fuller had provided the trustees were used to force a landowner to take action on an empty property other than to register the property, he said.
Empty property is not the same as a property that is a blight on the village, he said.
The key was in the definition of “vacant.”
The definition he provided the board did not simply refer to an empty building. Under the example laws, a property is “vacant” if it is empty and unsecured or improperly secured; that the property was empty and had been visited by code enforcement and found to be lacking in some way and could be considered a health threat in the community; or that the owner has an outstanding fine from code enforcement for the condition of the building.
The law in Glens Falls says much the same.
Fuller said the law cannot create a tax or be coercive. Any fee applied would be for the costs incurred by the village to monitor the property.
Homeless people occupying the building illegally, health and safety concerns surrounding the structure itself, and public welfare issues can cost a village money. If the building burns or if the village has to deal with the mortgage company when a landowner walks away from a property, that also can incur costs to the village.
“Those [properties] have a higher cost of monitoring,” he said, adding later that an owner cannot be forced to sell or lease: “We can’t really interject ourselves” in the sales process.
The trouble for Lake George Village: none of the buildings that Blais referenced would fall under that definition or have required that sort of monitoring. They are unoccupied but pose no health threat and are not a blight on the community.
In the end, the three village trustees in attendance, the mayor, John Root and John Earl tabled the proposal with the idea that they would look to it again, if the village had blighted buildings.