New hope for Todd’s Pond as Bedford weighs dredging options

BEDFORD, N.Y. - Troubled Todd’s Pond could soon undergo yet another try at restoring that venerable waterway as a Katonah neighborhood’s popular spot for recreation and relaxation.

The latest plan, more modest and far less costly than efforts proposed or launched in recent years, calls for dredging a small part of the pond, down “just deep enough to see some water,” Supervisor Ellen Calves told The Katonah-Lewisboro Times last week.

“We aren’t going to dredge the whole pond [because] that’s prohibitively expensive,” she said. “But the Town Board has put aside funding in our capital plan that we could spend.” So far, $200,000 has been allocated, and Calves plans to ask for, and expects to get, another $100,000 for the project.

Earlier proposed solutions have carried price tags in multiple millions of dollars. But even at $300,000 in spending, there could be pushback from people “who think putting that amount of money into fixing the pond is not a good use of funds,” Calves said. “We have to hear from the public.”

The new dredging proposal would scoop out a part of the muck from a part of the pond, which lies just west of Cherry Street at Lakeside Drive. The dredged material would then be dried before it’s spread across the pond’s surrounding land. That would eliminate the cost of trucking away that sludge, which has been “a huge part of the expense” in other proposed remediation efforts.

Spreading sludge on the pond’s banks comes at its own cost aesthetically, Calves acknowledged. Some trees will be lost and “the cattails that are growing up all around the edge will have to come out,” she said.

Todd’s Pond has been a hot topic, off and on, since 2019, when more than 30 speakers, most of them residents of the area, addressed the Town Board’s June 4 meeting.

For more than an hour they lamented the pond’s decline, by turns wistfully recalling its halcyon days as a popular spot for picnics, fishing, ice skating and other pursuits, as well as darkly warning of potential flooding. A catastrophe loomed, they admonished the board, if town officials did not rehab this precious wetland, nature’s fundamental bulwark against flooding in a major storm.

The Town Board’s immediate reaction had been to create a fact-finding body, the Todd's Pond Advisory Committee, which in the years that followed has looked at several possible remedies and restoration plans.

After further number-crunching to arrive at “the full price of this,” Calves hopes to meet with the advisory committee next month for further discussion of the latest proposed attempt.

Calves understands that some residents may want the town to launch a more-ambitious cleanup, such as returning the waterway to its previous 6- and 8-foot depths.

“There are certainly people who remember the pond and want it restored to perfection,” she said. “The committee has kind of devised a compromise, where it’s not a full dredge, it’s not a full restoration of the pond. But it brings back some of the things that people want, and at a price that’s more reasonable.”

In time, “after the $300,000 is spent,” the supervisor said, “there’ll be some open water [and] we’ll need to figure out some landscaping along there, so that once again it’s a nice place to sit and fish and be near the water.”

PARKS AND REC UPDATE

“We have 237 days till the pools open back up,” Greg Pitz, a supervisor in Bedford’s Recreation and Parks Department, told the Oct. 6 Town Board meeting, drawing laughs as he assured the members, “I counted.”

Pitz was with a contingent of rec specialists, led by Superintendent Chris Soi, in an hour-long presentation of the department’s recent accomplishments and future programs.

“Our department website [bedfordny.gov and click on Recreation] is an active and updated site,” Soi said, “where you can find all of our programming as well as updates on upcoming events, reminders and just alerts and all sorts of information Rec and Parks-related.”

The department actively keeps up the website and wants to “make sure that it's a landing site for folks to look and see what is currently going on,” he told the board.

In addition to Pitz, Kim O’Brien, the department’s deputy superintendent, and recreation supervisor DJ Goldman joined Soi in making separate presentations to the board.