Yorktown officials set aside funds Tuesday to repave sections of some of the town’s travel-worn roads, including parts of busy Hanover Street.
Acting on an open-ended appeal by Highway Superintendent Eric DiBartolo, the town board voted, 4-1, to pull $100,000 from money budgeted but unspent in the town’s general fund. DiBartolo had asked for as much as twice that amount, saying that level of funding would “put us a year and a half ahead of where we’re sitting right now.”
But, he acknowledged, “I’ll take whatever you want to give me.”
Councilman Dave Paganelli, who oversees the paving program, said, “We don’t know [right now] exactly what roads will be repaved.” Hanover, from St. Patrick’s Church to California Road, is part of the package. Paganelli said he expected to know more after huddling with DiBartolo.
Sitting with the town board as members met in a four-hour work session Tuesday evening, DiBartolo, who has been the highway superintendent for almost two decades, recalled years “when we did over a million dollars in paving.” Today, he told the board, “I’m just looking for any penny that I can get.”
Supervisor Michael Grace supported DiBartolo’s bid for taxpayer dollars to fund the paving. “They’re paying for it, one way or the other,” Grace said, noting the wear and tear on automobiles if needed paving goes undone.
Chicken coops in the condo?
The board asked Town Attorney Jeanette Koster to draft a proposed resolution governing chickens as, well, an “accessory use” in the home.
Councilman David Paganelli said the number of chickens a homeowner could keep would relate directly to the size of a person’s yard, with someone living on, say, a half acre allowed to keep four to six of the birds and larger lots permitted larger and larger broods.
“Who’s gonna count them?” Councilman Nick Bianco asked, calling the proposal “craziness.”
“You’ve got to have some restrictions,” he insisted. “What if you live in a condominium?”
Grace, the town supervisor, said, “I’m all in favor of it,” but Bianco continued to call the proposal “the wild, wild West.”
The town attorney, for her part, joked only that the ordinance should be called Harry’s Law, a personal reference, Koster said, to someone devoted to keeping chickens.
Water-meter mishap
A two-year-old town effort to upgrade the town’s water meters—replacing units that must be read individually and on-site with devices that can report their readings remotely, in bunches—has stumbled slightly, the board learned.
In the program’s $1 million first phase, the town was scheduled to replace its oldest 2,500 meters, which can be tallied only by someone who reads the numbers off a dial. The town accepted a bid for the new radio-controlled units and their supporting infrastructure and began in May to remove the old meters.
Inadvertently, however, some units, employing a more-advanced, read-by-sensor technology were also removed, Water Superintendent David Rambo said. The total number was put at between 100 and 200 meters. While those units, which also require on-site reading, were scheduled ultimately for replacement, doing so in Phase I technically appears to violate the 2010 bid specs.
As Town Clerk Alice Roker noted, “If I called the state auditor, that bid would be a big problem for the town.”
