MONTICELLO  — The Village Board of Monticello held a discussion about the Spring Hills Project during their meeting Tuesday afternoon.

Dr. Reza Naghavi spoke of how he’s been a property owner in the Village for roughly 40 years. His team recently had a project approved at the end of last year for a 204-unit residential small community.

They had secured their deal permits to go into the project.

He stated that the only thing remaining was a source of water.

“Unfortunately, time is running out, we’re losing the season,” stated Naghavi. “We were hoping January, February we’d get some sort of a feedback, and things would come to an end. As it stands right now, we’re still in the process of getting that addressed.”

He was requesting from the Board a direction. His urgency is that he wants “something to be able to move forward tomorrow” instead of two or three months from now.

He stated that the market has changed and has been changing since covid-19.

“The rates are going up, the rates are going down, nobody knows,” explained Naghavi. “We have a certain amount of certainty today that we may not have in six months or a year.”

He said that if the Board has an idea, or whatever they would like to discuss, he can accommodate.

Village Manager James Snowden clarified his assumption that the project itself was fully approved, which was confirmed.

His team is only waiting on the Department of Health. They are inquiring about water and sewer agreements.

“There were some issues and some questions raised by the Water Department here in the Village that really was a moot point because everything was in place,” recalled Naghavi.

Trustee Theodore Hutchins asked what the recommendation was for giving Naghavi a final approval without the water being in place.

He responded that the water has already been in place, but there were “a lot” of surface leaks, underground leaks and plumbing issues that have been rectified.

“The problem is at the double the maximum when this project was fully built in a year or two, the Village is almost near its numerical threshold,” explained Naghavi. “So the Department of Health kicked it back and said the Village needs to ... show us how this is going to come about.”

He stated that if the Village sees that a Building Department approval is enough for his team to move forward, then they will.

“We just don’t want to wait for a bid to come out ... in a month or two, and then wait another month or two for it to finish,” stressed Naghavi. “[Then we don’t want to wait] another month or two to decide and then we have winter here.”

Money-saving solutions

Chad Granger, Vice President of Employee Benefits at the Reis Group in Albany, put forth a proposal for putting money on employee benefits while providing “as-good or better benefits” and expanding the options that are available to their employees.

“Saving money, also offering additional options,” Granger summarized. “Then also there’s a technology aspect to this where we can actually improve the technology that the Village employees use as far as going into a system, selecting their benefits. Then having the process be more automated so that you don’t have paper going everywhere.”

“Everything would run through [Village Clerk] Janine [Gandy] of course.”

If the Village were to move all of its employees to the Private MVP health plan, they would save $455 in change for every single they have enrolled in that plan.

In pertaining to couples, the Village would be saving almost $1400 in Premium per month. If covering children and no spouse, the Village would be saving almost $1700 in fixed-cost premiums.

This was the brief summarization of the fixed premium-cost savings that was stated, should one  shift from the states plan to the current MVP coverage.