Mayor's Weekly Update

August 23, 2022

MAYOR'S UPDATE

From the desk of Mayor Rika Levin

Back to school … I had the pleasure of welcoming the cohort of new teachers to our community once again. I am so proud of the caliber of educators we attract yearly. A shout out to our folks from the Ossining Public Library and the Ossining Youth Bureau who joined us this morning.

The Dark House program is a free service offered to Village and Town residents traveling or leaving their homes vacant for any reason. When a resident signs up for the program, the Ossining Police Department will conduct random security checks on the house. If there are any problems, the Ossining Police Department alerts the resident via the contact information provided.

To sign up for the Dark House program, please visit the world-famous Birdsall-Fagan Police Court Facility, located at 88 Spring St, to complete the application.

At the Village’s Work Session, held on August 10th (click here for the agenda & video from this meeting), the Board discussed the state of our roads and quality of life issues. The objective of the Quality Roads, Quality Village initiative is to improve the quality of Ossining’s roads. This will be accomplished by improved communication about road work, clearer methods for submitting complaints, complete street remediation after utility work, and passing legislation that supports high quality roads. The following were proposed solutions:

Village-Owned Roads

Explain the Village’s approach toward repaving damaged roads on the Village website. Currently, the Village has a triage model. In the spring, Village employees evaluate Village roads for damage and prioritize repaving based on which streets are the most damaged.
Create an annual survey in the spring of all the damage on Village roads and submit them to the Village Clerk, allowing for more vehicles to get reimbursed if their car gets damaged. This could be done by the Village or by community members.
Create a map on the Village website that catalogues the last time that a road was paved.
Explain how repaving funding works on the Village website.
Explain whose responsibility it is to fix damaged sidewalks on the Village website.

State-Owned Roads

Create an annual survey in the spring of all the damage on State roads and submit them to the Department of Transportation. This could be done by the Village or by community members.
Ask candidates for State Assembly and State Senate for commitments to maintaining quality roads in Ossining.

Utility Work

Create a more robust section on the Village website with information on utility work. This should include the purpose of the projects, the timeline ConEd has given the Village (and updates to that timeline when it changes), and the process these projects will entail.
Invite (or require by local law) a representative from ConEd to a Board of Trustees work session once or twice per year whenever utility work is happening so that the public can hear directly from them and easily ask them questions.
Explore legislation that could force ConEd to decrease the disruptive nature of their work (to the extent practicable) and increase the quality of their restoration. For example, other communities have passed minimum pavement restoration limit laws, which requires ConEd to fully pave the road after they’ve completed their work and not just the strip they worked on.

Please join me for this week’s upcoming RiverJam event, held weekly through Labor Day weekend, featuring the music of The Track. Food trucks open at 5, with the concert beginning at 7:00 PM. I can’t wait to see you there!

There will not be a Village of Ossining Board of Trustee Work Session this week. We look forward to our next Legislative Meeting, scheduled for September 7^th, 2022.