Town boards share responsibilities for improving downtown Chappaqua

Town Board work session
March 14, 2008
by Susie Pender and Christine Yeres

At a League of Women Voters-sponsored gathering Thursday, March 13, Supervisor Barbara Gerrard announced that the town was very close to filling its new full-time town planner position. By mid-April a planner will be in place, she stated. To the thunder of little feet and drums in the preschool music class overhead, Gerrard gave the audience of 25 in the church hall at St. Mary the Virgin an overview of town issues.

Planning Board work session

In the past, she told them, New Castle board members and residents had thought a planner was a needless expense, that there weren’t enough issues in town to make it worthwhile. There certainly seem to be enough issues now, and a fair degree of consciousness about them.

The purpose of the in-house town planner is to interact with the planning, zoning and town boards, as well as with the newer, more short-lived downtown steering committee which was formed in the aftermath of Projects for Public Spaces’ work with New Castle to develop a list of improvements to the hamlet that could be executed relatively quickly and easily.

Downtown steering committee to focus on aesthetics and pedestrian safety

In its monthly meetings, the twelve members of the steering committee, headed by town board member Elise Kessler-Mottel, discuss steps to be taken in the areas of sidewalk repair, plantings, benches, lighting, signage and pedestrian safety. They are in the process of choosing an engineering consultant to assess the state of the underground infrastructure downtown, such as where the water lines are. They are exploring the possibility of burying above-ground wires, creating “bump-outs” that calm traffic and adding crosswalks that draw pedestrians to use them.

Redesign of Citibank parking lot

Changes to the parking lot behind Citibank are imminent. This summer the awkward entry way on the Citibank side of the lot will be closed and made into pedestrian park space. The lot’s current exit will become an entrance, and cars will leave by way of the train station parking lot.

Planning board to take seriously its mandate to plan, not just react

In the last few months, the town board and planning board have conducted conversations in work sessions in which they have resolved to look at the town “from 30,000 feet” above, thinking in terms of what the planning board calls an “area design plan.” Previously, planning board members have noted wistfully that their powers to actually plan are impeded by the necessity of reacting to applications that come before them.

Now that the town board has asked them to put on their planning caps, they’re excited. Planning board chairman Robert Anesi said “yes” without hesitation to the town board’s invitation to take a look at the parking lot across from Susan Lawrence, happily, a lot owned by the town of New Castle. The space is seen by those in the business of planning towns as “dead” space, offering no street appeal to make the journey on foot from the Starbucks intersection to, for example, the Opportunity Shop and Second Story Bookshop. Planning board members, while musing about how they might approach the job, decided that their look must be “big picture,” and include not just retail possibilities, but resulting parking constraints as well.  They resolved to look at a much larger piece of the downtown than just the lot.

Downtown steering committee