Bedford: New blast of cold air for Town House; online permit portal enhanced

By JEFF MORRIS 

The town board dealt with a few different issues at its Tuesday meeting, but none was quite as pressing as the heat in Town Hall.

Emergency air conditioning authorization In the midst of a heat wave on Monday, Supervisor Ellen Calves revealed, the Town House air conditioning broke down. “This was the major drama yesterday,” she said. The building had two old units, one of which was already down; the other one was limping along. “We hoped it would limp along for another year, because we are undergoing a major project to insulate this building, and then moving to design the new system.”

The Town House is located at 321 Bedford Road, Bedford Hills.

She said the problem created a need to come up with a temporary solution, and a temporary unit was installed early Tuesday morning. “That is cooling the building now,” said Calves. “We had 190 people in here for court this morning, so we were trying to get it done in time for that.”

The board authorized a retroactive emergency agreement and ongoing rental to keep the building cool through the summer. According to the authorization passed by the board, they were advised by Building Inspector Al Ciraco that on May 18, the chiller for the air-conditioning system for Town Hall “failed and was not capable of being repaired in a cost effective manner.” 

That failure was determined to be a “public emergency” and “could not await competitive bidding because it was an unforeseen condition affecting a public building which poses an immediate danger to the life, health, safety and property” of the town, and all occupants of  the building.

Installation and first month rental for the temporary chiller by contractor Atlantic Westchester was $23,960. Rental for chillers and fencing is to be $14,780 for each additional month.

Calves noted a fence had not yet been installed around the unit, generator, and transformer that are outside the back door of the Town House, but it was to be put in the next morning. 

Online property and permit portal Kim Kowalski and Donna Arroyo of the Building and Planning departments shared the features of the town’s new City Squared Online Property and Permit Portal. City Squared is a public access portal that gives people the ability to accomplish a multitude of tasks.

After registering, people will be able to submit an online permit application, conduct property searches, track the status of an application or permit, and make payments online.

The system is now available for all building permit applications. Parcel history, which includes all open building applications, permits and certificates, is also now accessible. Other applications, including wetlands, historic properties, planning and zoning, will be coming soon. 

The town website has detailed step-by-step instructions on how to use the application, which may be found on the Building Department’s page under “Online Permit Portal.”

Kowalski and Arroyo provided an overview of the portal and described some of the enhancements they are planning to enhance usability.  

The end goal of the project is to make the permit process less paper dependent and more streamlined. One advantage they cited is the ability to access property information without the need to submit a FOIL request.

Kowalski said they’ve been working with the system for five months, and while there had initially been some complaints from constituents, after people had become used to it they found it the system made accomplishing tasks much easier. 

Arroyo noted one change they had requested from the system developer was to make emails generated by the application have more specific subject lines, as the ones it had been generating were too generic to be useful.

Town Attorney Eric Gordon wanted assurance that personal email addresses and information would not be available to the general public. Arroyo demonstrated that no identifiable information is available to anyone who is not registered and logged in.

Improvements to Katonah Town Park The board held a public hearing on improvements to be made to the Katonah Memorial Park at a maximum estimated cost of $500,000. Improvements are to include replacement of the playground. A public hearing was required because it is a special park district.

There were no comments from the public, the hearing was closed, and the board approved the issuance of a bond resolution for the project.