The Greenest Village in the Country is certainly a high bar, but there is more at stake than just bragging rights—did you know that by 2030 (less than seven years from today), New York State must reduce Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions by 40%? That is only one ambitious, if rather intimidating, benchmark set out in the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), signed into law in July of 2019, to reduce New York’s GHG emissions by 2050. Other goals include:

The necessity behind this is clear: We have just witnessed the hottest summer in recorded history, deadly wildfires in Maui and the Pacific Northwest, damaging floods from glacier melt in Alaska, and a hurricane in California. The weather patterns we have experienced in the past month alone have been unprecedented, and this is merely the beginning of the dangerous events we will experience due to climate change, driven by unmitigated environmental degradation. As we saw recently, nature has no national or state boundary, and what happens in Canada and California directly affects the people in our community. While many of these events during our lifetime will continue, we have a responsibility to do what we can to slow the damage and use our remaining resources more responsibly. It is for this reason that one of the hallmarks of my tenure as Ossining Mayor has been a commitment to a cleaner, greener Ossining—I wanted to share the work we’ve done with you thus far, as well as the promise that we will continue to do more better and smarter.

The Village is getting serious about solar. Back in 2015, the Village participated in the Solarize! Program for home and business owners, teaming with Sustainable Westchester to offer an educational series along with pre-vetted contractors to perform the work for interested property owners. However, at that time, no programs were in place to help municipalities do the same. In the interim, the Village continued to pursue alternatives, including the all-renewable electric supply through Sustainable Westchester's Community Choice Aggregation program (CCA), which you may know as Westchester Power. It replaced our streetlights with LED fixtures (which saved us and, by extension, taxpayers money). However, in 2019, the New York Power Authority announced a Community Solar Request for Proposal (RFP) program for municipalities. The Village jumped at the opportunity, putting forth three potential sites to be considered by solar developers: two were eventually chosen, and the first (the ECOGY rooftop solar array at the Ossining Operations Center) went online earlier this summer, with 100% Ossining household participation, thanks to recruitment efforts by Sustainable Westchester. This was also the first project from the 2019 NYPA RFP to be completed. The second will likely be Ossining's other solar project, a solar canopy at the Ossining Train Station, which not only will generate electricity that will be returned to the grid but will allow for a Con Edison bill offset for several dozen Ossining families, incorporate EV charging stations at the Station. Notably, a parking solar canopy protects cars from the harsh changing weather in peak winter and hot summers. It will generate a modest revenue stream via an annual lease payment to the Village. Both of these programs will be in place for at least 25 years. We also received a $100K grant from Senator Pete Harckham, which we have earmarked for a solar array on another of our Village buildings—we are contemplating a rooftop array at the Ossining Police Station, on one or more of our Village-owned firehouses, or as part of the Community Center renovations and/or the Multi-Modal Transportation Hub (both projects for which grant funding has already been secured under the Downtown Revitalization Initiative award or DRI).

Speaking of which—let’s talk about our buildings. Unsurprisingly, the emissions from the buildings where we live, work, and play are a major driver of Greenhouse Gases, and the Village is working on that, too. As part of the DRI, the Community Center renovations will be subject to decarbonization measures as a condition of the $2M in funding awarded—from low-hanging fruit like LED light fixtures to innovative approaches to heating and cooling systems, energy conservation will be at the top of mind when planning for and implementing the new design for this beloved facility. At the same time, the Village is paying attention to all of our buildings and how we can use our resources most efficiently—for the last two summers, the Village has participated in the municipal Grid Rewards program for (4) of our most active (read: power sucking) buildings—Village Hall (16 Croton), the Birdsall-Fagan Police Court Facility (86-88 Spring Street), the Ossining Operations Center (101 Route 9A), and the Joseph G. Caputo Community Center (95 Broadway). For the summer of 2022, the Village of Ossining was the municipality that saved the most kilowatt hours (kWh) and money during what is called "peak events," or more basically, discreet windows when we were asked to lower our use of electricity across the Board but more specifically with regards to heating and cooling.

We look forward to learning from our results from the 2023 events sometime in January of 2024. As an aside, if the Grid Rewards program sounds like something in which you may want to participate, please follow the link above and download the app—anyone with a Con Edison account can help decrease our dependence on "peaker plants"—the rewards are not only a lower electric bill from Con Ed, but an incentive check mailed to you by Grid Rewards!

A fortunate aspect of “going green” is that, in many cases, it helps us (homeowners, businesses, and your local government) to save money, sometimes in the present but often amortized over the lifetime of a project. For example, in the spirit of the Village’s ban on gas-powered leaf blowers, the Village Parks Department began working with electric landscaping equipment in Sparta Park, Snowden Park, Arthur Jones Park, Richard Wishnie Park, and the Williams Street Tot Lot in Summer 2022. We were able to replace gas-powered equipment that had reached its useful life with equipment that, while slightly more expensive at the onset, will save us thousands of dollars in unleaded fuel over the course of its working life. However, the main reason for the legislation (which we, along with many other Westchester communities, passed in 2017) is to protect our environment from GHG while enhancing the health and quality of life of those living and working in our community through reduced air and noise pollution. Our Parks Department employees have embraced this shift, and while the technology is not yet perfect, their ears and lungs (and yours, too!) are better for it.

Earlier this year, with the help of Ossining resident and Master Gardener Donna Sharett, we dedicated a demonstration pollinator garden at Richard Wishnie Park (at the corner of Pleasantville Road and Orchard Road) to our longtime former Assemblywoman (and avid gardener) Sandy Galef, which is accompanied by an installed plaque that explains to visitors how they may do the same on their own property. Not only does this save time, effort, and fuel (electric or otherwise), but it also helps our flying friends to have a safe haven as they travel throughout our community doing the important (and hard!) work of sustaining plant and animal life. I encourage our residents, landlords, and developers to educate themselves and duplicate such efforts. Our Environmental Advisory Council has studied and posted a list of native plants on our site to help. 

We also applied for and received $ 5,000 in grant funding through the NYS Clean Energy Communities (CEC) program to introduce a similar concept in the form of a demonstration rain garden. We are working with our engineering team to choose a highly visible area where we can collect stormwater runoff (which will alleviate flooding conditions and, on colder days, ice!) while creating a beautiful garden that will attract bees, butterflies, and birds, and have accessible information where others can learn to do the same on their own property. Added bonus? It's a natural drainage system for the many areas in Ossining that collect water. It's a working garden!

We are also developing ways to generate our own electricity and help our community to be less dependent on fossil fuels in our everyday activities, chief among them transportation. As of this writing, the Village Building/ Code Enforcement Department’s fleet has (2) all-electric Nissan Leafs and (1) plug-in hybrid Rav4 Prime (one of the only hybrids with All Wheel Drive, which is necessary for driving in poor weather conditions), and we recently replaced (3) gas-powered Ford Explorers with plug-in hybrids as well. The Police Department fleet is also headed in a green direction, with two marked patrol cars transitioning to Ford Explorer hybrids late last year, with more on the way. Though the market for alternative fuel vehicles continues to tighten, in large part due to Governor Hochul’s legislation setting goals for zero-emissions vehicles in November of 2022, we are procuring these vehicles when we can, and the Board’s directive to staff is to prioritize greening our Village fleet as gas-powered vehicles reach their end of life.

The Village Board and staff are exploring ways to help our community become less auto-dependent. Project MOVER, a $7M grant from NYSERDA, will help residents of Ossining and four neighboring communities get access to pedal-assist e-bikes, regardless of ability to pay, and will also introduce a network of "bike boulevards" on secondary and tertiary streets throughout the Village to help bikers get around more safely.

The Route 9 Road Diet, which will narrow a one-mile stretch of Route 9 between Snowden Avenue and Cedar Place, will use $4 million in federal infrastructure funds to allow for safer pedestrian and bike crossing, as will $250K+ of Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funds to improve walkability along Spring Street (which will nicely compliment the recent accessibility improvements at the nearby 5 Corners Intersection at Main, Spring, Central, and Brandreth).

We have also joined eight neighboring municipalities in participating in Westchester CAPI, or Climate Action Planning Institute. This program has challenged us to think more about how we, as a local government, can better assess, monitor, and control our Greenhouse Gas Emissions through, in large part, the activities that take place in our buildings. We are hoping to start a benchmarking program in 2024 to track our utilities by building, which we will be able to compare year over year as we implement cleaner and greener technologies, such as the roof garden planned for the new Indian Brook Water Treatment Plant (funded by $160K in Green Innovation Grant Program dollars through the NYS Environmental Facilities Corporation).

As we learn more, we are also encouraged that some developers in our community are becoming more mindful of the environmental impact of construction and new buildings—Wilder Balter Partners, the developers of 109 units of all-affordable, mixed-income housing at 30 Water Street (a Village-owned brownfield site that will be remediated beginning in 2024) will introduce solar arrays and roof gardens on the outer shell of the building to enhance the sustainable efforts taking place inside and have plans to do the same at their building on the Village-owned lots at Main and Spring, where roughly 100 units of market-rate housing will be constructed in 2025/2026. In the same vein, the MacQuesten Development, which will be developing 74 units of affordable senior housing at 136-140 Croton Avenue, has announced its plans to follow a “passive house” model for the building, which will lower energy use through various elements such as ventilation and insulation. This would make it the first passive building in Westchester. It is worth noting that we already have one residential single-family passive home in Ossining, and we hope to encourage more passive housing to be built here and across the county.

While we have made great strides, we certainly have more to do. I will discuss with the Board later this year some ideas I'd like us to incorporate into the 2024 Village Budget. Items such as Big Bellys, our solar-powered trash compactors, are not inexpensive, but we are already seeing a tangible change in the volume of street trash in neighborhoods where they have been installed. In addition, we will be delving further into the enhanced Clean Energy Communities (CEC) program to take advantage of added financial incentives and begin in earnest tackling Climate Smart Communities certification. We will be taking a look at our current Tree Law to see where some updates, informed largely by our Environmental Advisory Council, may be warranted, perhaps in consideration of a tree bank or other regulations that will help us preserve a diverse range of native species trees while raising our Tree Equity Score and lowering the Urban Heat Index in our neighborhoods. We will look to enhance and simplify our building codes and ensure that our wetlands regulations are properly observed as large and small developments increase in our community.

I look forward to hearing your feedback on these projects as they begin to take shape, and thank you for doing what you can in your own home and routine to double down on efforts to improve the environment. We are truly all in this together.

Please note that starting on Tuesday, September 5, the Village of Ossining's Building and Planning Departments will begin offering the community the ability to apply and pay for permits online via Municty/City Squared. Users will also be able to check the status of permits and inspections electronically. Online permitting will significantly assist in expediting the review and approval process.

To use the online permitting system, a user must first register. The one-time registration process is simple and takes only a few minutes. Once registered, a user can log in, and information will auto-fill on permit applications. Applicants can easily add attachments (plans, pictures, specs, etc.) to the form. Once submitted, applicants can perform an online review of their application status, the results of inspections, and comments from inspectors. Users can also electronically track all recent permitting history for any parcel in the Village. Payments can be made for their permit online as well.

We have created a set of training video tutorials on YouTube to learn how to register for an account, search for a property on the website, and apply for an online permit - located here:

Access to the Municity/City Squared site will be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, directly from the Village's homepage and the Building & Planning Departments' landing pages beginning September 5 @ 9:00 AM.

I would like to wish all of the Village of Ossining’s hardworking employees a very Happy Labor Day! Thank you all for making our community such a wonderful place to live, work, and play.