Supervisor Blog

Welcome (or welcome back) to the Supervisor’s Update! Hope everyone is safely at home on another stormy day.

We started this week’s board meeting with a moment of silence for John Massey, a well-known member of the Ossining community. He served us as a lifelong member of our volunteer fire department’s Holla Hose Engine 100, superintendent of St. Augustine’s Cemetery, and an active member of the Old Mill Singers for the last 40 years. John will be missed by many, especially for his amateur singing career spreading joy throughout the community, including an annual performance in the Town’s summer waterfront concert series. May his memory be a blessing. 

The Board also heard from Hank Osborn and Myra Romano from the NY/NJ Trail Conference (NYNJTC), as well as Diane Alden from the Friends of the Old Croton Aqueduct, for a presentation on the 2021 season of the Croton Gorge Unique Area Conservation Corps Trail Stewards program.  This program, now in place for two seasons, has been very helpful at ensuring the Croton Gorge Unique Area, often accessed through Ossining, is properly and safely enjoyed by all as a much needed respite in nature during the spring and summer months. You can read more about the program’s activities and outcomes for the past year in this report. The Town is proud to support this program and grateful to everyone who helps us maintain our open spaces. Big shout out to Diane for her focus and persistence on protecting this critical area while still ensuring public access and enjoyment. 

By the way, the NYNJTC is looking for Conservation Corps members for the 2022 season. You can read more about that position here. Check out their Job Openings page for other employment opportunities. We’ve also added this to the Career & Education section of the Supervisor’s Update blog. Speaking of the blog - we now have a new section highlighting Black History Month programming, and some extra special updates in the Congratulations section (spoiler alert: we have a new reason to be proud of OPD chief Kevin Sylvester, as if we needed any more!).

As a reminder, our Town e-mail system is undergoing maintenance this weekend, so all Town staff will not be able to send or receive e-mails over the weekend.  As always, the Ossining Police Department non-emergency phone line is available if anything urgent arises over the weekend, just call (914) 941-4099. You can also reach out to me directly at (914) 598-7842. Thank you for your patience - we will be back up and running (and probably responding to quite a number of e-mails!) on Monday.  

We will see you soon - stay safe and be well!

--Dana

If your business, non-profit, or community group has an event that you would like to submit to be a part of the Supervisor's Update, please email a flier and brief description to . We are happy to pass along events that provide a benefit to the community and support our local economy. Thank you for helping us to highlight all the best Ossining has to offer!

Happy Friday! I hope everyone is safely inside and off the roads as this winter storm gets underway. If you’re reading this email, you also received an email earlier with winter weather reminders. Please refer to it, and do be careful this weekend! 

Some good news on the COVID front: the COVID-19 surge that we experienced in the New York metro area in late December and early January seems to be decreasing significantly.  Case numbers in Ossining and Westchester County are down by more than half, at 673 for the Town of Ossining including both Villages and 16,093 for all of Westchester County.  Of course, this is not the time to let down our guard. We need to continue masking, testing, and getting vaccinated and boosted.  Vaccines and boosters are available at the Ossining Volunteer Ambulance Corps – visit their website www.ossiningvac.org/covid19 for more information, or vaccines.gov to find other locations and dates. 

Recall that the Biden Administration launched www.covidtests.gov last week; all US households can order four free at-home test kits from this site. You can also use it to learn more about other available testing resources, such as insurance reimbursement for at-home test kits you purchase out of pocket. If you’re in need of a PCR test, you can make an appointment at the new testing site at SUNY Purchase, the Westchester County Center, or Westchester Medical Center, or use the state’s database of testing locations to find another site that meets your needs. 

Victoria Cafarelli in my office has been working with the Village of Ossining to ensure we are ready for a return to hybrid meetings in the Town Board meeting rooms at 16 Croton Avenue as well as at the Courthouse. We recognize that even if we need to return to in-person meetings, the hybrid meeting format with the Town Board appearing in person and most members of the public, consultants, and other special guests choosing to appear remotely is definitely here to stay.  Zoom offers products that will make that format seamless for the Board and the public that are cost effective, so we are looking into those offerings for the Town and Village. More to come on that front in the coming weeks!

We are very excited to share that a draft of the new Comprehensive Plan will be available for the public to view next week.  We will be scheduling a Town Hall meeting for later in February to present the plan to the community, and then we will be scheduling Public Hearings on the Comprehensive Plan in the coming months.  We are grateful to the Comprehensive Plan Steering Committee, our consultants at WXY Studios, and all of YOU who contributed to this important planning document.  If you are looking for some light reading for the weekend, there are plenty of materials already posted to the project website, Sustainable Ossining, that you can review as some homework before the full draft plan is released. 

Thanks to all who reached out with feedback, mostly positive, on the new Supervisor’s Update format! We will continue on this way, with some additional improvements thanks to those who shared input on how we can make it even better. There are now links to each page at the bottom of the new Update pages to make it easy for those who like to go through every section to do so. Happy reading!

Last call for the upcoming tax deadline! Village of Ossining taxes are due on January 31, 2022, as well as the second half of this year’s school taxes for both Ossining and Briarcliff School Districts. Click here for the Village of Ossining payment link and here for school taxes. 

We initially indicated that the Tax Receiver’s office will be open from 9 AM until noon tomorrow, January 29 to enable extra time for people to pay their taxes in person, but have to cancel these hours due to the weather. The Tax Office will be open from 8:30am until 6pm on Monday, January 31. Please e-mail or call (914) 762-8790 if you need assistance, and do not wait until the last minute! Pay your bill online and sign up for updates directly from Tax Receiver Holly Perlowitz on our website.

Till next time, please stay safe and warm during this cold, wintry weather! (If staying warm is a challenge for you, definitely check out our Assistance Programs page - there are resources listed for home heating assistance and more.) 

--Dana

If your business, non-profit, or community group has an event that you would like to submit to be a part of the Supervisor's Update, please email a flier and brief description to . We are happy to pass along events that provide a benefit to the community and support our local economy. Thank you for helping us to highlight all the best Ossining has to offer!

Welcome (or welcome back) to the Supervisor’s Update! I hope this week has treated you kindly. 

At this week’s Town Board meeting, we accepted, with much regret, the resignation of recently elected Town Board member Gabrielle Hamilton. We wish her all the best as she moves forward with cancer treatment. We will fill her seat, and are currently soliciting letters of interest for a one-year appointment to the Town Board to end effective December 31, 2022. While all residents of the Town of Ossining are welcome to apply, the Board will be giving special consideration to those who live in the Unincorporated area of the Town of Ossining, since there are currently no members representing that area. All interested parties shall submit a letter of interest and resume by noon next Friday, January 28, 2022, to Victoria Cafarelli at  . We look forward to hearing from you!

Please note that this seat will be up for election in November of 2022 for the remainder of the 3 years of the unexpired 4 year term, beginning January 1, 2023. You can learn more about the election process and how to run for office at the Westchester County Board of Elections website. 

In other news, you’ll notice that the Supervisor’s Update has a new look this week! We are experimenting with a new format that we hope will make it easier to find the information you’re interested in. Administrative updates from the Town will always be in the main body of the email. Click the graphics to learn more about upcoming events, COVID-19 updates, assistance programs, and what have you. We will add to and update these pages weekly. 

We hope you like the new format - please let us know what you think! (Be sure to click on the Nonprofits & Charity section - the Escape from Sing Sing Polar Plunge is back once again, and I’m looking forward to seeing many of you there! See the flier for details.)

Lastly, a tax reminder: Village of Ossining taxes are due on January 31, 2022, as well as the second half of this year’s school taxes for both Ossining and Briarcliff School Districts. Click here for the Village of Ossining payment link and here for school taxes. The Tax Receiver’s office will be open from 9 AM until noon next Saturday, January 29 to enable extra time for people to pay their taxes in person. 

We will see you soon - till then, be safe, enjoy the snow, and stay healthy!

--Dana

If your business, non-profit, or community group has an event that you would like to submit to be a part of the Supervisor's Update, please email a flier and brief description to . We are happy to pass along events that provide a benefit to the community and support our local economy. Thank you for helping us to highlight all the best Ossining has to offer!

Looking back on 2021 as we approach 2022, I'm struck by the resilience and determination of our community. The various constituencies that comprise the Town of Ossining - residents, Town government, first responders, health care workers, business owners, not-for-profits, community leaders, and elected officials - have all pulled together admirably to keep moving Ossining forward. I am grateful to be able to say that the Town is greener, fairer and more prosperous at the end of this year, in spite of the daunting circumstances we faced. 

This year, we made major progress on environmental initiatives. We adopted the New York Stretch Energy code, which will increase our energy savings and make us eligible for more state grants down the line. We passed legislation to make the Town more pollinator-friendly, and began planting native species in our parks to help revive dwindling local populations of bees, birds and butterflies. We also passed battery energy storage legislation and approved our first battery storage development, at St. Augustine’s. We ordered an electric bus, hosted a watercraft stewards program, initiated our habitat stewards program in our parks, and approved our first community solar project, which turned a parking lot at Maryknoll into the largest solar canopy in Westchester County. 

We also won a number of grants to support green initiatives, including an urban forestry grant that supports much of our tree maintenance work and a $125,000 Department of Environmental Conservation grant to design a living shoreline project at the Henry Gourdine and Louis Engel Waterfront Parks. Speaking of parks, we did much to improve our parks this year, including new kayak racks at Louis Engel, improvements to refuse bins, repairing and re-lining our tennis and pickleball courts, and the total restoration of Sally Swope Sitting Park. In the midst of completing a variety of major repairs to that park’s systems, our Parks department also teamed up with staff from Teatown Lake Reservation to identify and remove invasive plant species and replace them with native plants. 

Our green initiatives built on progress we began in previous years. We continued our partnership with Sustainable Westchester to promote community programs like EnergySmart Homes and Grid Rewards, and enjoyed another year of 100% green Community Choice Aggregation. We received Tree Bank Fund payments from local developments who needed to remove trees but could not replace them onsite, compensating us to find appropriate places to plant new ones. And we celebrated the one year anniversary of our Food Scrap Recycling Program with our first compost giveback day!

Our efforts to make Ossining greener often dovetailed with efforts to make Ossining more equitable. For example, we adopted a Complete Streets Policy, establishing a goal of designing and operating streets that are safe for all users, regardless of age, ability or mode of transportation. In the coming years, as we make it safer for anyone to travel the Town without a car, we’ll reduce our carbon emissions and become healthier together. On Car-Free Day, we took some time to imagine the possibilities of car-free and car-lite travel. 

Equity has long been one of the key principles that guides my administration. In 2021, we took our commitment to equity to new levels. We supported our young people by signing an intermunicipal agreement establishing Ossining’s Youth Bureau, and our seniors with the reopening of indoor dining in the senior program (unfortunately on hold once again for COVID, but we will be back!). A new organization, Ossining for Refugees, was born in Ossining in collaboration with volunteers in Briarcliff, Croton, and Mt. Pleasant in an effort to help with the Afghan refugee crisis. We are fortunate that our Town is well-positioned and well-resourced to be able to do that. The Community Equity Task Force held a number of informative events, including, most recently, The New Giving Tuesday. We also participated in Ossining’s first-ever Juneteenth celebration, and have dedicated funds in the 2022 budget to support an annual Juneteenth program. Juneteenth is now also a paid holiday for all of our workers.

The 2022 Budget we passed this year made considerable investments in equity. The Town recently negotiated a new contract with its CSEA bargaining unit, which contains nearly two-thirds of its unionized workforce. The new contract adds parity adjustments for some titles that were determined to be underpaid in comparison to similar positions in other municipalities, and applied a similar parity analysis approach to salary increases in 2022 for the rest of its workers as well. Although the Town of Ossining has traditionally been more conservative in budgeting than other municipalities, it is important to ensure our staff is equitably compensated for their work, especially in a unit that is mostly composed of women and people of color. 

Our commitment to equity is born of a desire to ensure that everyone shares equally in the benefits of living in Ossining, which are substantial and increasing. Investments in capital projects like the Morningside Drive repaving and the McCarthy Drive project will result in smoother, safer streets. We’ll be using the ARPA funding we received this year to continue making improvements to our infrastructure. Strong local institutions like our school districts, partnering governments, and Ossining-based not-for-profits improve our quality of life during normal times, and rose admirably to help us meet the moment when COVID struck. Together, we assisted residents with accessing emergency benefits programs and distributed food, masks, vaccines, and, most recently, home test kits. Our new Public Health Emergency response plan will enable us to draw on what we’ve learned during this pandemic to improve response during future public health crises. 

Effective policy and planning, from seemingly peripheral undertakings such as this year’s new boat launch and events policy legislation to major endeavors like our Comprehensive Plan revision, position Ossining to become an even healthier and more prosperous community in the years to come. Our approach to new cannabis legislation, reflective of community support for dispensaries but not on-site consumption, will enable us to take advantage of a new source of tax revenue in future years. Our participation in the Westchester County Hazard Mitigation plan will help us secure our safety and prosperity as climate change increases the need for disaster preparedness, and will also position us to apply for and win more grants in that area. (Speaking of grants: this year we engaged Millennium Strategies to supercharge our efforts at grant writing and management, in a continuation of our commitment to seeking outside funding to offset the cost of improvements for local taxpayers.) 

Ossining is a beautiful place, with thriving local businesses and organizations led by motivated, compassionate people. This year, we honored our neighbors, living and departed, at every opportunity. 

We restored one of our local landmarks, the Superintendent’s Cottage at historic Dale Cemetery, and won a planning achievement award in the process.

And we enjoyed ourselves, with the much-anticipated return of Food Truck Fridays and the Summer Concert Series. 

We have so much to treasure and be proud of today, and so much to look forward to in 2022. From the bottom of my heart, I thank the Town of Ossining for a fantastic year, and send my best wishes for the new one!