BEDFORD, N.Y. - Through a string of summer public hearings, one just past and two next month, Bedford lawmakers are taking up matters of land use, energy conservation and, yet again, those large-scale storage batteries.
In its only August meeting, the Town Board ruled out development, for six months, of five homes or more on a property larger than 20 acres. And on Sept. 8, the board will likely renew its ban on big battery storage systems and ask the community’s views on a proposed tweak to the town energy code.
The public hearings were only part of a lengthy Aug. 11 agenda, which also included a call for voluntary purchases of green-energy subscriptions and agreement on a new site for a Katonah cell phone tower.
In a deal with New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection, the proposed 135-foot stealth monopine tower will move from a site on Jay Street, near the American Legion post and Katonah Museum of Art, to a wooded area on Maple Avenue, off Route 35 near the Cross River Reservoir.
While the agreement still needs final city signoff before Homeland Towers can begin constructing the wireless facility, Supervisor Ellen Calves was upbeat. “We've done all the hard work,” she said. “Hopefully now it will just get approved [by city officials].”
The new tower is expected to address a major gap in cell phone coverage. “This is certainly not going to solve all the problems,” Calves said, “but you always see people pulled over on the side of the road on [Route] 35 because they get off [Interstate] 684 and they don't want to lose their call as they're heading down 35.”
She called the new site “a good location to fill that gap.”
LARGE-PROPERTY FREEZE
A long-discussed moratorium on residential development of properties more than 20 acres in size won board approval after one key clarification.
The revised local law makes clear that the freeze applies only to proposed development of five homes or more, not to an individual homeowner’s plan to install, say, a swimming pool or make other site changes.
The moratorium is meant to give the Conservation Board time to propose “changes that they'd like to make to the town code to protect wildlife corridors that may affect large parcels that are considering using a conservation subdivision or conservation development tool,” Calves said at the hearing.
“It also gives us time to get a report back from our town housing task force, which is considering amendments to how the town law treats middle-income housing or affordable housing, which also could impact development,” she said. “So that's why the pause on those types of applications.”
Sally Slater, the lone community member to speak at the hearing, disagreed. In a Zoom call, she said, “I feel that it's targeting the one big property across from DeCicco’s,” adding that the land “has been held up from any kind of development” for more than 20 years.
An associate real estate broker at Douglas Elliman, Slater said, “I believe that people have rights when they own property, and it takes long enough to get any kind of subdivision done anyway. And now this is just prolonging it.”
The Town Board, with Councilmember Thomas Catoliato absent, voted 4-0 to impose the freeze only on the large-lot housing. “It doesn't make sense to put a moratorium on all development,” Calves said. “That would be too onerous.”
BIG-BATTERY MORATORIUM
The board set a public hearing for Sept. 8 on a proposed continuation of its two-year-old freeze on applications to install any Battery Energy Storage System over 81 kilowatt hours.
“I think this hopefully will be the last extension,” Calves said of a moratorium that has continued in six-month iterations since August 2024. The pauses were voted to provide time for a town working group to study safety issues, especially fire, as well as how to site these systems, which can often be sprawling installations of multiple tractor-trailer-sized containers.
The batteries are critical for transitioning to green-energy generation, providing temporary storage for electricity produced from renewable sources. But a BESS, as the Battery Energy Storage System is shorthanded, most often relies on potentially volatile lithium batteries. That’s already prompted revision of the state fire code and led local governments besides Bedford to impose short-term freezes on their use.
“It's highly unlikely that battery fires occur with these types of installations, but from a fire department perspective they need to think that way, that something could happen,” Calves said. Working group members have been meeting with experts in fire prevention and hazardous materials.
“Our working group,” Calves said, “is still working on a draft model ordinance” to regulate the oversized systems. She hoped “the working group can present something to the Town Board, a draft law to be considered for adoption that would regulate [BESS installations] fairly restrictively.”
ENERGY CODE REVISION
Sept. 8 will also be the date for a public hearing on a small tweak to town energy-compliance standards.
Bedford’s town code (Chapter 52.1) enforces the NYStretch Energy Code, with Home Energy Rating Services (HERS) professionals certifying compliance with the town’s local standards. Adopted in its current form in 2021, the town’s stretch code had been stricter than the state’s energy baseline.
“The state code has now caught up to the stretch code,” Calves told the board. “So, we are now just going to follow the state code.”
The only difference: while the state code authorizes three ways to achieve compliance certification, Bedford’s code will continue to be limited to a HERS rater’s report.
In other action, the board:
HIRED a consultant for Thrive, Bedford’s partnership with Lewisboro and Pound Ridge to fight substance abuse. Jessica Neufeld of Bedford Corners will work 25 to 40 hours a week at $34 per hour, up to a monthly maximum of $5,546 in federal grant money.
ACCEPTED the resignations of Lynn Becker from the Conservation Board and Bill O'Neill from the Housing Committee. The board issued a call for community members interested in filling those vacancies.
SCHEDULED work sessions for Sept. 15 to discuss both a proposed draft of a new code governing signs as well as recommendations from the Conservation Board with respect to a conservation development/subdivision.
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