Selling Burial Plots One at a Time, Albion Bought 35 More Acres for Its Cemetery
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.
Drumlin shoreline along Lake Ontario, NY — photo:
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▶Key Actions & Decisions
●• Dec. 11, 2024: Board adopted Resolution 2024-31 nunc pro tunc, stating in words rather than digits that "Two Hundred Forty-Eight Thousand Three Hundred and seventy-four dollars and fifty-eight cents," plus recording fees and survey costs, was withdrawn from the cemetery's unrestricted "CM" fund (then totaling $250,874.58) to complete the purchase of 35.205 acres adjoining Mount Albion Cemetery from Patricia Nelson at $7,000.00 per acre; deed recorded Nov. 8, 2024
●• The purchase followed a year of incremental votes: authorizing the attorney to pursue at least 40 acres (Feb. 28, 2024, carried, Riley/Barry/McMurray aye, Javier and Buczek absent); agreeing to $7K an acre for the parcel south of the cemetery (April 30, 2024, carried); approving a purchase agreement with Nelson for "approximately 30" acres (June 29, 2024, carried); and scheduling and holding a public hearing (Oct. 9 and Oct. 23, 2024, both carried, no public comment) on spending up to $250K in cemetery reserves
●• Board separately directed DPW to physically mark the new cemetery boundary "per survey" using GIS, rebar and other means
●• Cemetery deed-signing motions — transferring individual burial plots to named families — recur across dozens of meetings in the 2023-2026 record, the recurring revenue source behind the reserve fund
●• Cemetery equipment: two weed eaters purchased 2023; a Cyclone Rake, utility cart, salt spreader and door panels surplused 2024; $410.95 credited to reserves from a scrap sale; a $40,450.00 excavator purchased 2025 from cemetery reserves
●• Staffing: an MEO position at the cemetery filled ahead of a retirement effective June 29, 2023; a Laborer vacancy advertised April 13, 2026, then filled by hiring John Kingdollar April 22, 2026, under the DPW union contract on a 52-week probation starting April 23, 2026
●• A rental apartment on cemetery grounds: unit-transfer paperwork approved for its tenant Sept. 25, 2024; deputy mayor authorized to sign a notice of eviction for that tenant Feb. 5, 2025
●• As of the board's May 27, 2026 agenda, both "Deeds-Attorney" and "Cemetery apartment-Attorney" remained listed as open matters for the village attorney
On December 11, 2024, the Village of Albion Board of Trustees adopted a resolution to formally record something it had already done a month earlier: buy the ground meant to keep Mount Albion Cemetery open past the point its own superintendent warned it would run out of room. The resolution explained why. Cemetery Superintendent Jason Zicari had advised the board that the cemetery — in continuous use as the county's main secular burial ground since September 7, 1843 — would reach capacity within five to ten years. The fix required no tax increase and no bond vote. It required the board to spend money the cemetery had already earned.
That money sat in an account the minutes call the CM fund, and the resolution goes out of its way to explain where it came from: not perpetual-care deposits set aside for maintaining existing graves, but an accumulation, over time, of donations for flowers at established gravesites and proceeds from selling burial sites. By the time trustees voted, the fund held $250,874.58. The resolution states, in words rather than digits, that the board withdrew "Two Hundred Forty-Eight Thousand Three Hundred and seventy-four dollars and fifty-eight cents," plus recording fees and survey costs, to complete a land purchase the board had already made — an arrangement it formally ratified "nunc pro tunc," after the fact.
Feeding that fund is a piece of business that turns up in Albion's minutes almost as often as approving bills for payment: a line reading "cemetery deed," followed by a motion letting the mayor sign over a burial plot to a named family — Anne E. Neilans, Clark M. and Anne M. Brooks, Penny Blake, Josephine Blackmon among them. Motions like these recur across dozens of meetings between 2023 and 2026, a steady, granular trickle of small transactions that, plot by plot, built the reserve the board eventually spent thirty-five acres at a time.
The 35-acre purchase itself took most of a year to assemble. In February 2024, trustees authorized the village attorney to pursue land surrounding the cemetery, setting a minimum of 40 acres. By late April, they had settled on a specific parcel immediately south of the cemetery, agreeing to a price of $7K an acre based on a survey. That June, the board approved a purchase agreement with the landowner, Patricia Nelson, describing the deal as approximately 30 acres "for use of cemetery land." By October, the board was calling it 35 acres and scheduling a public hearing — held October 23, with no members of the public choosing to speak — on spending up to $250K in cemetery reserves to complete it. The deed closed November 8, 2024; the final survey put the parcel at 35.205 acres, priced at $7,000.00 an acre under the board's resolution, still bought from Nelson.
Once the paperwork was done, the follow-through was physical. The board directed the DPW to mark out the new cemetery land "per survey," using the village's GIS system, rebar, and "any other means necessary" — the boundary of the cemetery's next stretch of ground, staked into place.
That expansion sits inside a much smaller, steadier pattern: the cemetery operating like any other village department with a budget and equipment of its own. In 2023, trustees let Zicari purchase two weed eaters out of his department's budget. In 2024, they surplused a Cyclone Rake, a John Deere utility cart, a tailgate salt spreader and a set of overhead door panels, and separately credited $410.95 to cemetery reserves from a scrap sale. In 2025, they approved spending $40,450.00 from the same CM fund on an excavator for the cemetery.
Staffing follows its own cycle. In June 2023, trustees approved hiring an MEO for the cemetery to fill a vacancy ahead of a retirement effective June 29 that year — the seat filled before it was even empty. Three years later, in April 2026, the board worked the process in the usual order: first authorizing the clerk to advertise a Laborer vacancy at the cemetery, internally and then externally after seven days, and then, within two weeks, hiring John Kingdollar to fill it, at the rate set by the DPW union contract, on a 52-week probation starting April 23, 2026.
The cemetery's ledger of small transactions also includes a rental apartment on its grounds. On September 25, 2024, the board approved unit-transfer paperwork for its tenant. About four months later, on February 5, 2025, it authorized the deputy mayor to sign a notice of eviction for that same tenant. The minutes record no further detail on why.
The record's most recent entry on the subject is an agenda, not a resolution. On the board's May 27, 2026 discussion list sat both "Deeds-Attorney" and "Cemetery apartment-Attorney," alongside a National Grid staging area and a downtown lease — a reminder that, land purchase completed, the cemetery keeps generating routine business for the board to work through, deed by deed, tenant by tenant.
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Coverage of the Topics meeting on 2026-08-14,
Village of Albion, NY.
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Related Topics Meetings
Albion Board Demands County Repay Lost Tax Revenue After Property Purchases Inside the Village
●• Feb. 28, 2024: Village Board tabled an item its minutes list as "PILOT ORLEANS COUNTY" pending review by the village attorney.
●• March 13, 2024: Board adopted a resolution stating the Orleans County Legislator had resolved to remove certain properties inside the village from the Village of Albion's taxing authority, without advising the Village Board beforehand; vote was Mayor Angel Javier Jr., Deputy Mayor Joyce Riley, Trustee Timothy McMurray, and Trustee David Buczek all AYE, Trustee Christopher Barry absent.
●• The resolution states the decreased assessment removed more than six thousand dollars from the village's yearly allotment of county tax money, with no PILOT or other remuneration offered by the county, and that the resulting shortfall falls on village water/sewer customers and taxpayers rather than the county.
●• The remedy sought: reinstatement of the lost county tax revenue "with perpetuity" plus a PILOT on the properties rising 3.5% a year.
●• March 26, 2024: Orleans County Legislature's meeting record lists "Resolution 2024-09: Potential PILOT Plan between the Village of Albion and Orleans County on Property Purchased in the Village of Albion" among its business; no vote or discussion on it appears in the available minutes, which move on to unrelated proclamations.
●• Separately, county and village tax administration are already linked by Local Law No. 4 of 1997, under which the County Treasurer relevies unpaid Village of Albion taxes onto the county/town tax bill each year with a 5% penalty added — $175,346.12 in Town of Albion village taxes alone were relevied this way under Resolution No. 575-1123 for the 2023-2024 cycle.
●• June 11, 2025: Village of Albion trustees opened a public hearing before 55 residents on "the consideration of consolidation of the Village into the town"; the vote to open it carried on ayes from Trustees Riley, Bennett, Gabalski and McMurray (Mayor Javier's vote is not recorded), trustees separately let Attorney Weiss speak two extra minutes and let resident Joe Martillotta speak a second time, and residents spoke both for and against — but the excerpts gathered here don't show the hearing closing or any vote on consolidation itself
●• Sept. 27-Oct. 14, 2024: a separate, narrower dissolution — the Village of Albion Fire Department — moved fast: a Sept. 27 vote scheduled an Oct. 9 hearing, that hearing opened and closed within two minutes with no comment recorded, and trustees adopted Resolution 2024-27 on Oct. 14 dissolving the department under Village Law Section 10-1020 as its duties passed to the newly formed Albion Joint Fire District (established Aug. 12, 2024 after an Aug. 6 special election among the Town of Albion, Town of Gaines and Village boards); the separate town-level fire protection districts of Gaines and Albion were set to dissolve Dec. 31, 2024
●• 2020-2021 Town Board minutes reference a different village dissolution — placed in 2013 by one unidentified board member's account — with unfinished business still being sorted years later: a cemetery-staffing question, three properties still carrying the former village's name on the deeds, and, per Supervisor Faulkner, a fire-department water-lease commitment that "was never done"; the record doesn't say which village this was, and it plainly was not the Village of Albion as a whole, which still had its own mayor, trustees and meetings through 2024 and 2025
●• Elsewhere, the words "dissolve" and "dissolution" appear in the record almost entirely for unrelated matters: the county legislature voting in 2021 to dissolve a $39,906.08 telephone-equipment reserve account into the computer-services budget, a Bicentennial Committee set to dissolve automatically Dec. 31, 2025, and a 2025 county resolution addressing "the possibility of agency dissolution" at FEMA; a 2023 legislature debate over sales-tax sharing separately invoked "the dissolution vote a few years back" in the Village of Medina, a different Orleans County village
●• By late 2025, Albion trustees were weighing dissolving the village's own Historical Preservation Commission after its membership fell to four of a required seven, tabling the question Sept. 24, 2025 and directing the attorney in December to prepare a dissolution procedure for the Jan. 14, 2026 meeting
●• March 13, 2024: Board adopted a supplemental bond resolution raising the water project's estimated maximum cost to $5,241,440, after costs ran $1,992,440 over the $3,249,000 originally authorized in 2019 (Javier, Riley, Buczek, McMurray aye; Barry absent)
●• Same meeting: approved $3,000,000 in short-term financing for the WIIA 2 project pending EFC financing
●• Feb. 20, 2024: Board increased WIIA 1 contingency by $520,000 for an amended bond resolution
●• March 25, 2024: Board adopted a second supplemental bond resolution for the water project referencing authorization of up to $7,855,059 in aggregate principal, in the same document noting actual costs had run approximately $3,563,441 above earlier estimates; the same meeting the board voted to retain the Law Office of Robert King, PLLC and Stage Liuzza, L.L.C. for a PFAS soil-and-water contamination lawsuit
●• March 28, 2024: Board voted 3-1 with one abstention (Javier nay, Barry abstained) to advance proposed water/sewer rate increases of up to 60 percent
●• April 10, 2024: After a public hearing, board adopted final water and sewer rate increases, including raising the base charge on a standard 3/4-inch water meter from $21.00 to $33.60 and the residential inside volumetric water rate from $3.39 to $3.90 per 1,000 gallons
●• May 8, 2024: Hiring of a Water Treatment Plant operator position tabled "until 5/22/24 and leaks are addressed"; Trustee Gabalski assigned to work with DPW Superintendent Jay Pahura on leak detection
●• May 30, 2024: Board funded a $7475.00 leak detection survey from water capital reserves and contingency
●• Aug. 28, 2024: Chief Water Treatment Plant Operator Adam Rush's resignation accepted, effective Sept. 20; Sept. 3, 2024: civil-service replacement pay range set at $65k-$75k; Sept. 11, 2024: Levi Boyer appointed acting Chief Water Treatment Plant Operator, effective Sept. 21, with a prorated $5K pay increase
●• July 9, 2025: Trustee Riley reported a settlement agreement with 3M in the PFAS litigation; settlement payments to the village followed, including $22,614.83 (July 30, 2025), $53785.30 as a "2nd payment" (Aug. 13, 2025), $13,364.97 as a "4th payment" (April 6, 2026), $5591.84 as a "5th PFAS payment" (April 22, 2026) and $20,558.81 as a "6th PFAS Payment" (June 10, 2026)
●• Sept. 24, 2025: After a public hearing, board adopted a phased water and sewer rate/base-charge schedule for 2026-2028, citing "current capital project debt service at the water plant"; board noted the numbers could still be revised pending Chief Operator Levi Boyer's review of a large-user rate option
●• May 13, 2026: Board shifted $154,600.00 from a debt-service interest line to a debt-service principal line specifically "to pay down WIIA I principle"
The Nine-Minute Hearing: How Albion Erased Its Historic Preservation Commission
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