Bedford continues lawn sign discussion, passes 'battery farm' moratorium

BEDFORD, N.Y. - Bedford’s Town Board will consider legislation next week to regulate the size and number of lawn signs but not what they say.

A local law—sought by Supervisor Ellen Calves, shaped by the board over the summer and placed in a legal framework this month by Town Attorney Eric Gordon—will have the board’s attention at a rare Thursday meeting, Sept. 4. The board is expected to seek formal community reaction by early fall.

“We talked about this at our last meeting, [but] we haven’t adopted a local law yet,” Calves said. “We try not to set public hearings in the dead of summer on things that may be of interest to the public to possibly come and talk about.”

Among other things, the proposed law would limit a homeowner’s lawn to a maximum of two nonilluminated signs, each with writing on one side, or both. Signs could be no larger than 6 square feet and no closer to a neighbor’s property than 5 feet.

The sign legislation occupied the board for about a third of its 45-minute meeting on Aug. 5. Another third was devoted to the latest six-month freeze on applications for large-scale—more than 80 kilowatt hours—batteries for energy storage.

Outlining the proposed sign ordinance, Calves drew a  distinction between signs on someone’s property and those posted on the roadside, which are directed to a specific event including elections and limited to 30 days.

“Lawn signs in the right-of-way are defined and regulated,” the supervisor noted, “but signs in people’s front yards are not. Our code is silent on those.  Basically, it says you have to have a permit for any type of sign that’s listed in the ordinance. 

 “However, a lot of people do have signs in their front yards, and there’s sentiment that . . . they should be able to have some amount [of them] under the First Amendment.”

Battery Moratorium

For the third time in a year, the Town Board has ordered a six-month freeze on applications for large-scale battery installations.

The unanimous vote followed a public hearing on Aug. 5. No one spoke.

“This is a moratorium we’ve had going for about a year as we work on drafting a local ordinance to better manage battery energy storage systems,” Calves said, noting that BESS  applications “have been increasing.”

Last August, the board imposed its original six-month moratorium, then extended it at the beginning of this year for another six months.

While even car batteries and the triple A’s in our TV remotes might be called “battery energy-storage systems,” the BESS drawing official scrutiny in Bedford and neighboring communities are large units, producing more than 80 kilowatt hours of energy.

Bedford’s latest ban specifically exempts personal devices like batteries that power electric vehicles or store a homeowner’s solar-panel output.

“They’re very small,” Calves said of the personal-use applications. “So, this is to continue the moratorium on anything larger than that, which encompasses the ones that are usually on commercial properties for on-site use.”  Such installations, she said, were “the size of a couple of refrigerators.”

Over the summer, Albany promulgated regulations intended to make New York State’s fire code for BESS more vigorous as well as define what they need to make them safer.

Calves said “we’ll be looking at that and looking at the model ordinance and looking at our own zoning and requirements to see if we can put something forward that adequately regulates them. In the meantime, we don’t want any applications coming in without a law in place to understand how to deal with them.”