There is Little Logic to Reducing Monthly Yorktown Town Board Meetings
Opinion Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the author/producer’s interpretation of facts and data.
By Susan Siegel
With so much unfinished business from 2024, plus a likely host of still unknown issues that will surface, why are some Town Board members so reluctant to return to having four meetings a month.
Two “regular” meetings have been for when the board schedules presentations, holds public hearings and when the public has an opportunity to address the board during courtesy of the floor, now renamed public comment.
Then there were two work session meetings when board members consider options for addressing specific issues, e.g., the need for new or amended legislation, rezoning requests or plans for capital improvements.
It’s the way previous Town Boards functioned for decades.
An abbreviated work session discussion before a regular meeting, as the board plans to do, is an ineffective substitute for a separate work session with its own distinct agenda. And it makes for longer regular meetings.
If anything, there’s been an increase, not decrease, in the number and complexity of issues today’s Town Board has to deal with. Based on my five months on the board, here’s a sampling of some unresolved issues from 2024 that need the board’s attention – and action.
- Three moratoriums were passed last year; two had to be adopted twice because the board failed to act during the first moratorium.
- The second smoke and vape shop moratorium expired on Dec. 31.
- The second solar law moratorium expires on Mar. 31.
- The battery storage law moratorium expires on Apr. 1.
The board still hasn’t come to a consensus on the content of these three laws. And the town attorney can’t draft a local law until the board tells him what they want included in the new law.
- Recreation fee. The board has known, for more than a year, that the current laws governing the fee developers have to pay, either in cash or a dedication of land to the town, need to be amended.
- Two long-delayed Request for Proposals (RFPs).
- For installing solar panels on town property, e.g. roofs and parking lots, that could reduce the town’s energy bills and generate much-needed new revenue.
- For the Field Home. The town has a deadline for deciding if it wants to accept the deed for the building from Toll Brothers and then sell or lease it to a third property for an appropriate adaptive reuse.
- Two major rezonings: The 185-unit AMS proposal on the former Contractors’ Register site and the 242-unit mixed-use Navajo Fields development in a proposed expansion of the Lake Osceola Overlay District.
- Sewer issues, including addressing a 2019 DEC Consent Order for the Peekskill Sanitary Sewer District, and the long-delayed need to upgrade pump stations in the Hallocks Mill Sewer District.
I don’t understand my colleagues’ rationale for eliminating the fourth meeting. Are they concerned that a fourth meeting will interfere with their personal lives? If that’s the case, why did they run for office?
Or, do they think there’s not enough town business that requires a fourth meeting, at least until so many unresolved issues are satisfactorily addressed?
The board also seems reluctant to streamline its meetings so they can end at a reasonable hour. Public hearings often start so late into a meeting that residents who came to speak at the hearing leave before it starts. And many residents have either stopped attending the meetings or stopped watching them live-streamed or on video because it takes so long for the board to get down to real town business.
As the board starts a new year, we have a full ̶ and important ̶ agenda ahead of us. We need to get down to work, even if that means adding a fourth meeting to our schedule.
And we need to make board meetings more convenient and more informative for our residents.
Susan Siegel is a councilwoman on the Yorktown Town Board.
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