Message from the Mayor: Upcoming Election, Affordable Open House, Water Tower, FNL
Posted on: March 13, 2019 - 10:09pm
Fellow Residents,
A few items worth an update:
Local Election on Tuesday
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Local elections for Mayor and two Trustee positions) are next Tuesday, March 19th from 7AM to 9PM at the Community Center. Trustee Armacost seeks the Mayor’s seat, and Trustees Lemons and Leaf are running for re-election. They are uncontested. I had previously announced that we would be trying out an experiment to offer rides to the Community Center using the senior bus. As luck (or lack thereof) would have it, a few hours after I sent out that email, a storm that came through managed to knock a branch onto the senior bus (which we intended to use), damaging the bus beyond immediate repair. While we have temporary and episodic use of a loaner bus, the weather gods have spoken here and this will not be the election where we run this experiment.
Affordable Housing Open House
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The latest result of an ongoing effort to build affordable housing throughout the Village has come to term. The house, with an accessory apartment, is located at 190 Farragut Avenue and the Hastings Affordable Housing Committee will host an open house this Saturday from 2PM to 4PM. These two units are the latest addition to the inventory of at least 33 other units of both rental and purchased housing developed over the last fifteen years. Affordable housing is developed with the intent to be affordable (defined as costing no more than a third of the annual income) for people earning a certain percent of the median Westchester income. These percentages can vary depending upon project – our target is to be affordable to those making 70% of the median income. Those units for sale are priced so that the payments plus taxes would be in that income bracket, and must stay priced affordable and can only be resold to someone within the affordable definition.
Water Tower
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The last standing structure on the waterfront is the iconic water tower that for many is a legacy of the industrial past of the waterfront and a symbol of Hastings – easily the most painted and photographed structure in town. It stands on one of the more polluted patches of the waterfront and so will ultimately have to come down so the metal-tainted soils can be removed. However, the Village secured from BP a few years ago as part of ongoing negotiations the monies to help in the orderly deconstruction of the tower, and matching funds so that the tower (or a replacement tower) would rise again once the remediation is done. We polled the public a couple of years ago on whether to keep or dispose of the tower, and the sentiment was clear enough – that this legacy was something to preserve.
The negotiations also established a timeline – the tower must be down before remediation begins, and as the engineering design for the remediation advances and the remediation will soon follow, this has triggered the requirement that the Village specify how we will manage this process. We have submitted a document describing it to BP and BP has, in turn, acknowledged receipt and discussions over the next few weeks will sort out the remaining details and open questions. The tower is slathered with lead paint – that will have to be stripped – and then it will be moved (in pieces) to its temporary resting location for the next number of years (just a few hundred yards away up the river coast). It sounds like a lot of work (and it has been and will be), but the structure stands for an important part of our history and we have worked to ensure this outcome.
Friday Night Live
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Set aside Friday, April 6th, for our first Friday Night Live of the year. As has been our tradition now for a while, this first one is always literary-themed in nature, with poetry and book readings and a downtown-wide activity for children. Details to come.
Sincerely,
Peter Swiderski
Mayor