Hope you’re doing well despite the heat! It’s a Summer Friday, so here’s your Ossining RiverJam news, followed by an administrative update (including ways the Town is helping residents stay cool).
Tonight, enjoy a river breeze and food from the following vendors, starting at 5 PM: Brothers Fish and Chips, Cravin' Jamaican Cuisine, Delicias Peruvian Kitchen, Homestyle Desserts and Creamery, Jegoma Food, New England’s Finest Lobster, Weenie Wagon, Wrappers Delight, Bigfoot Creamery, Paradise Taqueria & Birrieria and Dough Nation Pizza Truck. Defiant Brewing Company and Nine Pin Cider will be joining Sing Sing Kill Brewery at the Craft Beverage Corral. Also, the Chamber will once again host menus for some of your favorite local eateries in case you want to order delivery to the park. We will have a designated area to make that super easy and to support our local brick and mortar businesses. Note that parking near the waterfront area is extremely limited on Friday evenings - you are likely to have more luck if you look for parking in the train station area before the overpass.
Tonight’s musical guest is a performer who needs very little introduction here in Ossining - the incomparable (and our very own!) KJ Denhert! We are extremely fortunate to have this critically acclaimed artist in our midst. Her act has been a favorite of this series for many years and we cannot wait to welcome her back tonight.
As always, I am extremely grateful to those who help make this series possible - our Ossining RiverJam partners Mike & Miriam Risko, Eric Gearity of Sing Sing Kill Brewery, Gayle Marchica and Johnny G of the Greater Ossining Chamber of Commerce, Jermain Smith of ENU Builds, Brian Sheridan of Hothouse Design, Recreation Superintendent Bill Garrison, our Town Parks crew, and of course, Keith Heilmann our fantastic soundman. And I cannot forget our event sponsors: New York Presbyterian, Gracelane Kennels, Bigfoot Creamery, Coral Sea Pools, Seiden Real Estate Team, Matero Fine Jewelry, PKF O’Connor Davies Accounting, who join the Town and Mike Risko Music, Sing Sing Kill Brewery, the Chamber of Commerce, and Ossining Recreation in providing the funds that make this event possible.
If you need help staying cool in this heat, here are some options for you. The Joseph G. Caputo Community Center will be open as a cooling center through 9pm tonight, then tomorrow, Saturday from 9am to 6pm, and also Sunday from 9am to 3pm. The pool will be available for open swim today, Friday from 7-8:45pm, Saturday from 12noon-5:45pm, and Sunday from 12noon-2:45pm. There is a fee of $5 per person for those in the community who are not members. The spray park at Louis Engel Park will also be open extended hours from 11am to 8pm during the heatwave.
Please remember that swimming is not allowed at the Louis Engel Park beach – there is no lifeguard on duty and we cannot determine that the water quality is safe for swimming. See the pic below: ducks only may swim there (and maybe a few geese!) Please be safe, hydrate, and if you can, try to enjoy summer until we find ourselves complaining about the cold weather again!
At this week’s Town Board meeting, we discussed a proposed local law regulating bikes, e-bikes and e-scooters in the Town. We are planning to re-open the public hearing on this draft local law at our meeting coming up this Tuesday, July 26. The discussion comes as the Village of Ossining’s Project MOVER proposal has become a finalist for a $7 million NYSERDA grant aimed at building clean transportation infrastructure. If successful, the Village, the Town and surrounding communities would become eligible for a portion of the funding and begin installing e-bike lending and charging stations. You can read more about the program and its potential in this River Journal article.
In other grant news, requests as part of the State’s Consolidated Funding Application are due next week. This year, we are submitting applications for Louis Engel Park Stage Improvements via Empire State Development, Ryder Park Planning & Design via NYS Parks, Recreation, & Historic Preservation, and Beach Sanitary Survey for Louis Engel Park via the NYS DEC Non-point Source Planning Grant program. These projects will help improve our parks and hopefully make all of the things we enjoy doing over the summer even better - an incredible performance space for RiverJam and other live shows, improved drainage for little league games, tennis and pickle ball courts, and strolls along the trails at Ryder Park, and hopefully one day, swimming at Louis Engel Park Beach. Big shout out to our grant writers with Millennium Strategies and the amazing Victoria Cafarelli, Budget Director, for their tremendous work on these grant applications!
If you haven’t already, be sure to take some time to learn about the Clean Path New York project this week. We have asked the folks from this project to come speak before the Town Board, but there will also be open houses for the public to attend in Ossining this coming Tuesday, July 26 from 10:30am-12:30pm and from 4pm-6pm at the Ossining Public Library. At this time, Clean Path New York is proposing an approximately 175-mile underground/underwater transmission line that will transport up to 3,800 megawatts of new solar and wind power generated in New York State, increasing the reliability of the state’s transmission system and helping transition New York to a clean energy economy. They are in the process of developing the siting for the transmission line, which will need to exit and re-enter the Hudson somewhere between Peekskill and Ossining. We encourage members of the public to attend an open house to learn more. If you cannot attend in person, you can view the virtual open house here.
A quick note about an upcoming road closure. The Town of New Castle will be closing Hawkes Avenue from July 27th through August 2nd, excluding Saturday and Sunday, for the hours of 7am to 5pm to complete some repairs necessary for paving. A large excavator and other machinery will be working on the road. Provisions for emergency vehicles will be made.
That’s all for now! For ideas for what to do this weekend and beyond, keep scrolling! A reminder about summer schedules for the Town. Summer hours started on July 1, with most Town offices (except for the Town Clerk) closing at 3:15pm on Fridays through Friday, September 2. Please stay safe and healthy and we will see you soon!
--Dana
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