Town sticks with Westchester Power but Harvest Fest is cancelled

Noam Bramson, executive director of Sustainable Westchester, talks with the Pound Ridge Town Board. Staff photo.

By THANE GRAUEL 

The Pound Ridge Town Board on Tuesday voted to extend its contract with Westchester Power for another year.

Also at the meeting, it was announced that Harvest Fest had been canceled this year. 

“Unfortunately, Pound Ridge will not have our Harvest Fest this year,” Town Supervisor Kevin Hansan said. “The Pound Ridge Partnership has announced, sent an email last week, that they have to cancel. As you know it’s a very complex operation, it’s a huge operation. I think they had some issues with the band, organizing the bands at the last minute so there will not be a Harvest Fest this year,” he added.

At the same meeting, the town board gave approval for a new animal adoption event, Wooffstock. It will be held from 1 to 4 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 29, at the Pound Ridge Community Church, 3 Pound Ridge Road. Organizer Nadine Ashby said the event will include a blessing of the animals from 1 to 1:30 p.m., rescue groups, vendors, family activities and a silent auction.

The board’s unanimous vote on Westchester Power came after a presentation by Noam Bramson, executive director of Sustainable Westchester, which offers a community choice aggregation program. It started in 2016 and was designed to control costs and increase the use of renewable energy in Westchester County. 

The program is the default setting in town, but homeowners can opt out and go with New York State Electric and Gas, or other contract providers.

Pound Ridge’s positive endorsement was in contrast to recent actions by the Lewisboro Town Board. That board on July 8 passed a 90-day moratorium on discussion of renewing the yearly contract with Sustainable Westchester, which would have to be approved by Sept. 7. At that board’s July 22 meeting, it was clear there wouldn’t be enough votes to stop the contract from lapsing.

“There’s sometimes a tendency when it comes to issues related to climate to have a certain numbness that has set in,” Bramson told those at the Pound Ridge Town Board meeting. “And that’s not a feeling that we can afford. We know that although climate change may once have seemed like a distant abstraction, it’s very much present with us here and now.”

“Temperatures are rising faster in this part of the country, the precipitation is increasing at an extraordinary rate,” he said, mentioning area homeowners being flooded out more than one time.

“In many cases, in neighborhoods that are becoming uninsurable and uninhabitable,” Bramson said.

“It’s not just flooding,” he said. “We all remember last summer the strange experience of the wildfires in Quebec and that eerie sky that surrounded the entire Northeast United States. If you are someone with a respiratory ailment that is something more than just a surreal experience it is a real threat to your health.”

He said that in 2023, the Westchester Power program mitigated about 311,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide.

“That number is equivalent of nearly 74,000 cars being removed from our roads,” Bramson said. “You can think of it as trees being planted — not that there’s any shortage of trees here in Pound Ridge — if you translate that into the number of trees you’ll see it’s more than 5 million.” 

Bramson’s abundance-of-trees comment drew laughs from the board and the small group of people attending.

One man attending said that if he’d gotten an opt-out notifications from the group, he must have thrown them out thinking they were something other than bills.

Bramson said his group was committed to improving communications and would work with municipalities to do that.

The man also said his bill increased dramatically after his electric meter was replaced with a smart meter. 

Westchester Power is not involved in the monitoring equipment, but a casual discussion involving board members and attendees ensued. It included billing issues and spikes in billing totals. 

Town Board member Dan Paschkes said he happened to be home one day when a NYSEG worker showed up in his driveway.

“I said, ‘What are you doing here?’ And he said, ‘I’m here to install your smart meter,’” Paschkes said. “I said ‘No you’re not,’ and I declined. Had I not been home he would have slapped it on my house and I wouldn’t have had the option ...”

Other board members agreed that homeowners do have a choice about their meters being replaced.

The town supervisor pointed out the smart meters have some real advantages, including automatically notifying the utility during an outage. He said that with the old meters, in an outage, “they won’t know you’re out.”

“With the smart meters, now they know down to your house level — they can turn it on, but they can’t tell you if the wire between their pole and your house went down,” Hansan said. “They don’t know that, now with smart meters they know that.”

Paschkes lamented the ever-decreasing privacy new technology brings.

“I’m a little old school. The fact that everybody, you can’t go to the library it seems, without everyone knowing what you’re reading, every page you’re reading. The smart meter’s like the same same thing. It’s just me wanting to live off the grid, not feel like everything I do is being watched.”

When someone mentioned the word ‘luddite,’ in a not unkind way, he didn’t object. 

“Yes, proud luddite,” he said.