Friday, June 12, 2015
~ From the Town of New Castle

Last Spring over 250 community members attended workshops to discuss what you liked and didn’t like about New Castle. These ideas and thoughts have been transformed into goals and objectives related to a vision for our community’s future. Pace Land Use Law Center is hosting a public workshop on Monday at 6:00 p.m. at Bell School to share the transformation of your ideas into goals and objectives for the Town’s Comprehensive Plan. The meeting will include a presentation by Pace followed by breakout sessions so if you are interested in a particular topic, come and talk about that topic. Interested in more than one, you can talk about more than one. Our future depends on you!  We hope to see you there. For more information and to refresh your sense of what we told Pace last year, see New Castle Master Planning Public Engagement Report, July 2014

Excerpts from the report; video of the presentation
Monday, March 9, 2015
by Christine Yeres

At the end of February, representatives from the County’s Planning Department visited a Town Board meeting to give a brief summary of long-awaited baseline data on New Castle, significant material in master planning.  The extensive report resides on the County’s website; it begins:

While much of the Town’s civic life revolves around New Castle, no residents have a “New Castle” mailing address. Community identity can vary between the five school districts serving the Town, the proximity to either the hamlets of Mount Kisco or Millwood, or even just a resident’s mailing address (the zip code with the largest area is Chappaqua, while other portions of the Town have an Ossining, Millwood or Mount Kisco address).

Reprinted from: Tuesday, August 5, 2014

Editor’s Note:  Below are excerpts from the New Castle Master Planning Public Engagement Report produced by Pace Land Use Law Center from sessions conducted in May and June of this year with close to 300 participants.  For each of five topics—Commercial Development, Environment & Habitat, Pubic Works & Infrastructure, Public Services & Recreation and Housing—Pace facilitators asked residents, “What’s good now”?  “What’s not working?” and “What are some strategies to overcome what’s not working?”  Pace did not conduct a survey; its informal discussion groups were a qualitative, rather than a quantitative, effort to identify what residents considered “priority issues, assets, and challenges facing the town.”  The report is just shy of 300 pages, much of it in simple list form, with some narrative summary, analysis and conclusions.