BEDFORD, N.Y. - A small section of sediment-choked Todd’s Pond will be dredged starting next month as efforts begin to restore at least some of the Katonah waterway to its former sheen.
The Town Board awarded a $269,500 contract last week to the sole bidder on the project, New England Aquatic Services LLC of Sherman, Conn.
“It's not a full restoration of what the pond used to be,” Supervisor Ellen Calves said. But “it's not nothing. ... I think it's worth doing.”
Working on a December-January hydraulic dredging schedule, the company expects to extract some 3,500 cubic yards of sediment and vegetation. Once on the pond banks, the material will be placed in large containment bags and allowed to dry over a period of months. By spring, the bags will be opened, and the material will be spread on-site and seeded.
Reduced over the years in size and depth by accumulated sludge, the pond no longer supports fishing, ice skating and other waterborne activities that once made it a popular recreation site off Cherry Street at Lakeside Drive.
Winter weather is not expected to interfere with the dredging operation, budgeted at $300,000 and meant to deepen the pond and improve its health.
“It's an expensive project,” Calves said. “It's going to take time, and there's going to be noise and these bags on the shoreline for a while. And then it's going to be restored and hopefully look much nicer ... with good landscaping.”
The Town Board proceedings on Nov. 4 marked Calves’ second meeting of the week on Todd’s Pond. It has been a hot-button issue since 2019, when more than two dozen neighborhood residents addressed a Town Board meeting, calling for action to restore the pond.
The week’s first meeting, on a crisp Nov. 2 afternoon, brought more than three dozen residents to an informal gathering on the green separating Lakeside Drive from the pond.
Joining the supervisor were Matthew Vogt, owner of New England Aquatics; Parks Superintendent Chris Soi; and Todd’s Pond Advisory Committee members Mike Dwyer, Fiona Mitchell and Don Scott.
Residents heard details of the dredging, asked questions and aired their concerns. Vogt addressed one concern by saying the muck pulled from the pond “typically doesn’t have much of an odor.”
Calves has called trucking that sludge to a composting facility or other disposal area “prohibitively expensive,” making the on-site bagging necessary. To accommodate the bags, she said, trees and brush will be removed for about 400 feet along Lakeside Drive near its intersection with Elm Road.
The new dredging plan is a more modest, far less costly effort than others considered or undertaken since residents demanded action in 2019.
An immediate outgrowth of that 2019 meeting was the formation of the pond’s advisory committee. At last week’s Town Board meeting, Lou Sorrel, the committee chair, reviewed previous steps taken or considered — some with estimated price tags in the millions of dollars.
“In the summer this year,” he said, “we finalized a partial-dredging action plan within the scope of that $300,000 budget and ... put it out for bid.”
New PFAS standards
Stricter new federal water-quality standards will force the Cedar Downs Water District, serving the Stanwood neighborhood of Bedford Corners, to upgrade protections against PFOA and PFOS contamination, town officials heard at their Nov. 4 meeting.
The water district’s two groundwater wells are well within state limits of 10 parts per trillion (ppt) for the chemicals. But PFOA in the Cedar Downs supply was detected this year at 6.36 ppt and PFOS at 5.14 ppt, exceeding a new federal standard of 4 ppt set by the Environmental Protection Agency and scheduled to take effect next May.
In a presentation to the Town Board, Deputy Public Works Commissioner Nok Siriphonlai recommended buying water from New Castle, which already meets the stricter limit, rather than outfitting the wells with new treatment equipment.
At about $1,200 a year, she said, buying water would be less expensive for the average homeowner than the treatment option, estimated to top $1,400 a year. The current annual cost averages $787.
The state Health Department established New York’s 10-ppt standard in 2020, far tougher at the time than Washington’s advisory-only level of 70 ppt. Now, the EPA has leapfrogged Albany in the regulatory race to establish a 4-ppt limit.
Studies have linked these man-made, so-called “forever chemicals” to serious health conditions, including cancer, effects on the liver and immune system, and impaired fetal growth and development.
To visualize the EPA’s 4-parts-per-trillion standard, imagine distributing four drops of water over 20 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
Tentative budget presentation
A tentative budget of $39.4 million for next year is now in the Town Board’s hands for possible changes and a mandatory public hearing before it is adopted by Dec. 20.
The budget would increase spending by $1.1 million over current outlays, raising property taxes by 96 cents, to $41.65 for each $1,000 of assessed value.
Complying with the tax cap, the townwide levy would see a half-million-dollar, or 2.3%, increase to $25.2 million. For the sixth straight year, the allowable statewide levy increase was capped at 2% (vs. an anticipated 3.1% rise in inflation). Local growth factors set the ceiling on Bedford’s levy increase at 4.5%.
The Town Board scheduled a public hearing on the spending plan for 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 17.
Bedford Hills mural
A committee of Bedford Hills residents has chosen Connecticut artist Patrick Ganino to paint a welcoming mural on the now-vacant side wall of Bedford Grab & Go on Adams Street, directly facing Metro-North’s commuter rail station.
“It is going to be a series of windows,” Calves told the Nov. 4 board meeting. “Each one has a different sort of character and different elements on the shelves behind them.”
She said the mural will incorporate “lots of little [fun] details ... and you'll probably see something new every time that you go by it.”
An accomplished muralist, Ganino has created works for corporations and celebrities, including Sylvester Stallone, Rosie O’Donnell and Chevy Chase.
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