Of all the ridiculous messy stinking problems that former mayor Jerry Jennings left current City of Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan to clean up when she took over City Hall, disposing of the three adjacent parcels of land owned by Albany in the Town of Coeymans in the southern part of Albany County has perhaps been the most persistently odorous. Well into her second term, Mayor Sheehan continues to spend way too much time trying to find some way to dispose of this frightful waste of City taxpayer money. Perhaps the mayor’s efforts may finally be heading for a sanitary resolution, unfortunately we can’t yet say for sure.

Now, I don’t want anybody’s eyes to glaze over, so here’s the quick read teal deer version of the history behind this sordid mess. Shortly after taking office as mayor in 1994, Jennings started buying up 363 acres of fallow farmland, woodland and wetlands in Coeymans with City of Albany taxpayer money so that he could plant a gigantic garbage dump that he expected would be enormously profitable. That’s right, a garbage dump. Anticipating those profits, he eventually paid three Coeymans landowners the ridiculous sum of $5.2 million of taxpayer cash for land that was worth maybe, at most, half a million dollars. Maybe. What landowner would refuse such inflated offers? Of course they sold him the land.