albion.news

Over nearly two years, the Village of Albion dissolved its own fire department and handed its equipment, debt and firehouse building to a newly created three-government fire district, a legal process that ran through a special election, a two-minute public hearing with no comments recorded, and a lease that shifted from a proposed zero-rent term to a cost-sharing triple-net deal. The most recent minutes in the record show questions about the department's old debt and disputes over parking and lease terms with the new district still unresolved.

Warned that Mount Albion Cemetery would reach capacity within five to ten years, Albion's Board of Trustees drew on an unrestricted cemetery fund — built over time from grave-plot sales and memorial donations, not tax dollars, and totaling $250,874.58 — to buy 35.205 acres adjoining the cemetery from Patricia Nelson at $7,000.00 an acre, with the deed recorded in November 2024. The purchase sits alongside the routine business of running a working cemetery: recurring deed sales, equipment bought and surplused, a staff vacancy filled, and a rental apartment on the grounds whose tenant the board later moved to evict.

The Albion Village Board of Trustees adopted a resolution March 13, 2024 demanding Orleans County permanently reinstate tax revenue lost when the county purchased property inside the village and pay a PILOT rising 3.5% a year. Two weeks later the county Legislature's own minutes list the resolution among items received, with no recorded vote or discussion.

Fifty-five residents turned out for a June 2025 Village of Albion hearing on consolidating the village into the town, but the record gathered here shows no outcome since; eight months earlier a narrower dissolution, folding the village's own fire department into a new joint district, passed within weeks without recorded objection. Across six years of Town, Village and County minutes pulled under this topic, direct discussion of ending Albion's village government is rare next to how often the word "dissolve" turns up for unrelated business.

Since 2019, Albion's water treatment plant project has moved from an initially authorized $3,249,000 in bonds to a March 25, 2024 resolution referencing $7,855,059 in aggregate principal, financed alongside two rounds of water and sewer rate increases — a 60 percent base-charge jump in 2024 and a phased 2026-2028 schedule adopted in 2025 — while a PFAS contamination lawsuit against 3M turned into a settlement now paying the village back in installments.

The Albion Village Board authorized a grant application for the water treatment plant's infrastructure project on the same night it accepted the retirement of the Superintendent of Public Works who has overseen that system, effective August 29, 2026, and directed the clerk to start recruiting his replacement. Trustees also introduced four local laws in one motion, including moratoriums on battery energy storage and renewable energy projects and a code change tied to the village's former historic preservation committee.