Mayor’s Message: Hastings-on-Hudson Year in Review 2019 to 2020
Posted on: April 17, 2020 - 12:31pm
Dear everyone,
It’s been just over a year since our last Village elections and despite all the recent upheavals, we’ve been able to accomplish an enormous amount in this short time. What follows are some of the highlights as well as a broad outline of our plans for 2020.
People
Over the past year we had many big transitions. We appointed a new Village Manager, Chief of Police, Lieutenant, several Sergeants and Police Officers, an Assistant Court Clerk, Payroll and HR Clerk, and Assistant to the Village Manager. The Fire Department elected a new Fire Chief as it does every two years. The hiring process took up lots of time but we are thrilled with the results and have an incredibly capable and responsive team in place. We also had transitions on the Board of Trustees. Mayor Peter Swiderski stepped down last March after 10 years leading our Village, and I was sworn in as Mayor on April 2, 2019 (Peter has told me multiple times recently how serendipitous his timing was!). My transition from Trustee to Mayor meant that there was a vacant Trustee position that needed to be filled in order for us to have a full roster of decision-makers – I chose Morgen Fleisig to fill that role. Just before the New Year, Trustee Lemons announced he planned to step down in January 2020 due to work commitments. I appointed Mary Lambert to fill his unexpired term. Trustee Lambert has already proven herself equal to the task in taking up the sustainability related initiatives Trustee Lemons was leading – more on those accomplishments later. As per the Governor’s Executive Orders, Village elections have been postponed until June 2020 and all Board Officers (Trustees) have been held over. Trustees Fleisig and Lopez are both up for election when the election eventually happens. We are awaiting further direction on timing and the manner in which they can be conducted.
Budget
Back in April 2019, one of our first acts as a newly formed Board was to approve a budget of $17,381,271 with a tax rate of 6.03 per thousand, down from 6.13 the prior year. We were able to stay under the State imposed 2% cap and kept our Fund Balance at a healthy $1.7 million. Creating the budget for this coming fiscal year has been an ongoing challenge as everything is in flux due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The current budget was created several months ago, and we recently went through a rigorous reevaluation and paring down process. We are now in the final phases of delineating the 2020-2021 budget taking into account the impact of the pandemic on revenue, as well as expenditures, and hope to approve the budget within a few weeks. Special thanks goes to Mary Beth Murphy our Village Manager, Joe Cerretani our Treasurer and the Finance team for all their hard work on this incredibly challenging task.
Grants
We’ve had great news on grants this past year with over $675,000 in funding committed from various sources, over half of which was allocated to parks. In late December, we were notified that we won a $50K grant from the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) to develop a plan addressing erosion at MacEachron Waterfront Park. Early this year, County Legislator Mary Jane Shimsky pledged $100K from the County toward the Hillside Woods preservation effort. And in February 2020, Legislator Tom Abinanti pledged an additional $250K from the State toward that effort. Legislator Abinanti also pledged $50K from the State for improvements related to traffic safety and Senator Andrea Stewart-Cousins pledged $75K for improvements to the commuter staircase. We were awarded a $150K Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) for improvements to the downtown streetscape – work will start in 2021. We also learned that Westchester County won a grant for $100K to work with several municipalities including ours under CAPI – the Climate Action Planning Institute – to help us create a climate action plan for the Village.
Policies and Regulation
In response to the 2018 Comptrollers report, we spent a lot of time last year on the decidedly un-fun job of revising and creating new policies relating to finance and security. Thanks to the diligence of our Village Manager, the only policies we still have to address relate to employee benefits. In the same vein, we’ve worked on cleaning up the Village Code and have made several revisions to our Zoning Code – most recently we updated senior housing definitions and improved our accessory apartment law. Trustee Leaf was the point person for the Board and worked with Attorney Whitehead on these issues.
Boards and Commissions
The Chairs of Planning and Zoning Boards presented a high level overview of the functions of their committees to the Board of Trustees and public in September 2019 to enhance a common understanding of the Boards’ roles, and we also heard interesting presentations from the Conservation Commission, the Senior Council, the Parks and Recreation Commission and the Climate Smart Communities Task Force. Trustee Leaf is responsible for membership on our Boards and Commissions and we are proud to have had a 100% occupancy rate for most of the year. We owe thanks to each of the Trustees, our amazing volunteers – from the volunteer Fire Department to each of the members of our Boards and Commissions – for their dedication and service to our Village.
Downtown and Special Events
During most of this past year, our Downtown was humming with the addition of many vibrant new businesses including Mossy Fern, Hudson Line, Found Herbal, NUR Space, Wild Culture and the Good Witch. During the holiday season we enjoyed the now annual holiday light displays, Shop Local Guide and Downtown Holiday Message video. Our Downtown Working Group helped us to identify a consultant who is generating a menu of ideas for initiatives that will improve the look of the Downtown. We continued the delightful tradition of the Village Crawls, Octoberfest and Friday Night Live thanks to our Downtown Advocate, and we hosted marines and sailors at our annual Memorial Day Parade organized by our Fire Department and Parks and Recreation team. The Library launched the Local Luminaries lecture series and the Police Department initiated Coffee with a Cop. We celebrated special occasions including the 100th anniversary of the VFW and the 80th anniversary of the Wizard of Oz (starring two of our famous villagers). Although many of our downtown businesses have had to close temporarily, and some of our events have been canceled, we look forward to seeing our downtown bounce back and to seeing all of our shopkeepers and business owners again soon.
Community Outreach & Parks and Recreation
In the early part of the year we were delivering all our usual much-loved youth, senior, community outreach and recreation programs, and in fact many programs were expanded. The pool was enjoyed by residents of all ages and we invested in upgrades to the spray pool and in needed improvements to the ball fields. We were also awarded a significant amount of grant money to improve our parks, as outlined above. The ongoing remediation efforts at Quarry Park moved forward in fits and starts, and while considerable progress was made, the project will not be completed before the fall. Our parks require continuous investment, and we will be looking for more grants to expand our efforts moving forward. Special thanks to the Parks and Recreation Department and Commission, the Hillside Woods Steering Committee, and the Quarry Park Committee on these efforts. Over the last month or two, a number of programs and events have had to be cancelled, but our intrepid team has managed to work out how to connect with our residents in new ways and our hope is that we will be able to offer our normal array of services before too long.
Waterfront
When we talk about the Waterfront, most people think of the undeveloped 42 acres west of the train platform and southwards, but we have a vibrant Waterfront to the north of that area, too. The $50k grant from the DEC Estuaries Program will be focused on developing a shovel-ready plan for stopping and reversing the shoreline erosion in MacEachron Park, where we will incorporate lessons learned from the Conceptual Shoreline Study of the southern BP/Arco property. In the undeveloped 42 acres, while progress has been slow there has been some movement. Trustee Fleisig has been the main point person and has ensured we have open lines of communication with all three parties to the Consent Decree – BP/ARCO, the DEC and Riverkeeper. BP/ARCO is working to finalize its remediation design with the DEC, and is developing a detailed plan for dredging and creating a wetland habitat to mitigate encroachments into the river. Scenic Hudson has also been a vital supporter of the Village’s efforts, and together we met with the DEC and BP/ARCO last summer to share our ideas about the shoreline. The plans to preserve the Water Tower also moved forward – our engineering firm drafted the Water Tower Preservation Plan, assembled the Water Tower Prequalification Package and is currently working on the bid documents for dismantling and storing the Water Tower. Assuming BP/ARCO approves these plans, and we have no reason to expect they will not, we expect to go to bid before summer. The rezoning of the undeveloped 42 acres of the Waterfront continues to be an open item. You will recall that in January 2019 we issued a Request for Proposals (RFP) for a consultant to help us with rezoning efforts. This was to be funded by the developers but not all the funding has materialized and so this project is on hold. The Waterfront is an important asset to the Village and we remain committed to the comprehensive planning and rezoning of these three parcels. Our goal is to get the rezoning in place so that we can generate vibrant and inspiring plans for our most remarkable asset.
Circulation
Trustee Lopez has led the charge on circulation and traffic calming issues and Trustee Fleisig has been the main point person on the Ravensdale Bridge project. Our street repaving and curb replacement work has continued with an emphasis on brightening crosswalks and putting up stanchions to enhance pedestrian safety. This past year several streets were repaved including Crossbar, Jordan, Cliff and parts of High Street. The County repaved and restriped Warburton Avenue and improved sidewalks, which made an incredible difference to citizens living in that part of town. Work is planned on Farragut Avenue for 2020, and the State plans to make improvements on Broadway/Rt 9 in the coming year. The issues faced by residents in the Southern Corridor have been a big concern to us. We banned trucks on several streets including James, High and Pinecrest. We engaged Streetlight Data, a company that tracks origins and destinations of vehicles so that we are able to measure traffic volume more effectively. We initiated a new traffic study on James and High Streets and are in the process of obtaining the State’s permission to include a test involving the U-turn on Broadway. We created a Safe Routes to School Committee to work on improving pedestrian safety especially for children. Our plan for 2020 includes putting in traffic and pedestrian safety measures on High Street and improving circulation in the area near the School.
Environmental Sustainability
Finding creative ways to address climate change right here in Hastings has been a top priority for me, and I am very proud to say that we were awarded Bronze Climate Smart Community (CSC) certification by New York State in early March 2020. Not only does this show our leadership on climate change mitigation efforts at the County and State level, but it means we will have access to more grant funding. We’ve been part of the New York State CSC program since 2010, but have recently ramp up our engagement, both by documenting important actions we have spearheaded over the past decade and by completing new actions. Here are some examples of things we accomplished last year: we commissioned a comprehensive report on actions the Village can take to reduce Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions, installed an electric vehicle charging station in the Steinschneider parking lot, installed LEDs in most Village traffic lights, introduced a food scrap program, expanded recycling and composting efforts in government buildings, and adopted an Anti-Idling Ordinance. Now we are working toward achieving Silver CSC status, and to that end have already approved policies to help better plan for a heat emergency and ensure there are sufficient shade structures in Village parks. We’ve also implemented HeatSmart, an energy reduction campaign aimed at helping residents reduce their energy usage. Even though we are sequestered at home, we’ve been moving forward with our Climate Vulnerability Assessment, which in turn will inform our Climate Resilience Vision. Later this year we’ll begin the process of creating a Climate Action Plan. These achievements are incredibly exciting and we owe a debt of gratitude to Trustee Lemons and Trustee Lambert, who were the main leads on this work, in collaboration with the Climate Smart Communities Task Force, the Conservation Commission and the Parks and Recreation Commission.
Covid-19
The last two months have passed in a blur. A great deal of our time has been consumed with preparation for, and implementation of, our Covid-19 strategy, including developing protocols and procuring Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), as well as reviewing the Village finances to best position us to weather this unprecedented event. We have seen incredible acts of kindness and generosity …. There were the calls to check in on seniors and the stocking of the food pantry. There was the $46,000 raised for the Family-to-Family GoFundMe campaign to feed our needy families and seniors. There were the 200 volunteers who have made more than 2,500 cover masks for health care professionals. And there were our first responders – the Fire/EMS Department, the Police and the DPW – who have been impeccable … they have simply done their jobs without complaining just like they do every other day of the year …
As many of you have written to tell me, now more than ever, we are incredibly fortunate to live in this special, magical place … Thanks to each of you for doing your part – let’s continue to keep everyone in our Village safe!
Sincerely,
Nicola Armacost
Mayor