The next court date in the Jamestown Board of Public Utilities Dow Street substation annexation case between the city of Jamestown and the town of Ellicott, village of Falconer and Falconer Central School District has been set.

According to the Fourth Department Appellate Division website, ad4.nycourts.gov, the next court date will be Jan. 4, 2022. The court hearing will focus on the appeal filed by the town of Ellicott over State Supreme Court Judge Lynn Keane’s November 2020 ruling.

Keane ruled against two issues raised by the town of Ellicott — that the substation does adjoin the city as required by the state’s General Municipal Law and that the assessor’s certificate attached to the annexation petition satisfies state General Municipal Law requirements.

One argument made by Ellicott officials over the past five years is that Tiffany Avenue is a county road maintained by the village, which they argue is a barrier between the substation and the city’s boundaries, making the substation non-contiguous to Jamestown. That reasoning is based on a county tax map, but Keane ruled that the property proposed for annexation extends to the centerline of Tiffany Avenue, where it adjoins the city’s existing municipal boundary and not the BPU parcel.

Falconer and Ellicott also argued that an affidavit signed by former city assessor Kevin Okerlund did not expressly state that the property to be annexed extended to the centerline of Tiffany Avenue. Keane ruled that Okerlund’s affidavit was more than adequate under the state General Municipal Law.

Elliot Raimondo, city corporation counsel, said if the Appellate Division upholds Keane’s ruling that Ellicott will then have two options. They can accept the Appellate Division’s ruling and then the court will create a panel that will judge the merits of whether the annexation is in the overall best interest of the public or not. Also, Ellicott could appeal the Appellate Division’s decision to the highest court in the state – New York State Court of Appeals.

“It will depend on what happens Jan. 4,” Raimondo said about the next step in the annexation case.

The annexation case between the entities has had its ups and downs, including more than a year’s wait between court hearings. In 2019, a three-member Fourth Department panel dismissed the city’s annexation request on a technicality, ruling the city hadn’t filed its initial court filings in state Supreme Court within a 30-day window prescribed in state law. As part of that 2019 ruling, the Appellate Division did not make any ruling on the merits of the case.

The Board of Public Utilities and city then started a new annexation proceeding in March 2020, with the first step of the case being Keane’s November 2019 decision.

The annexation case originally started in January 2017. The BPU has been looking to save money in property tax payments it makes to four entities for the Dow Street substation. As of 2019, the BPU’s property tax payment to each of the four entities includes $153,262 to the Falconer Central School District; $73,305 to Chautauqua County; $72,641 to the village of Falconer and $34,681 to the town of Ellicott – a total of $333,889.

If the annexation is approved, the city of Jamestown and Jamestown Public School District each would start to receive an additional tax equivalency payment of around $78,600 a year from the BPU, which totals $157,200. The BPU would save around $177,000 a year in property taxes if the annexation was approved.