Lewisboro Town Board OKs Technology Upgrades

LEWISBORO, N.Y. - The Lewisboro Town Board unanimously approved a resolution at its Sept. 24 meeting in favor of some technology upgrades, including a proposal for a new phone system for town offices and new computers for the police.

The new phone contract from Lightpath spans five years for $2,419 per month and includes phone equipment for 60 users, a total of 94 phone lines and a support portal. There was some urgency to signing the deal with Optimum, according to Joel Smith, the town’s facilities maintenance manager.

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“Optimum is offering a deal of one free month per year for five years if we sign by the end of September,” Smith said.
Lightpath is a service of Cablevision, which is owned by Optimum. The total savings would be approximately $10,000 over the next five years for a step the town needs to take, due to the obsolescence of its current equipment.

“Our current phones are 20 years old, and their end of life was about seven years ago,” Smith said.

Deputy Supervisor Mary Shah, who chaired the meeting, noted that they don’t make spare parts for the town’s old phones anymore.

“We get [the parts] refurbished from a guy in Texas somewhere …out of his garage,” Smith added, “and he’s out of them now.”

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Smith noted that approximately 45 other government agencies in Westchester use Lightpath. The telephone equipment is designed to function with the fiber-optic network that’s now in place in Lewisboro.

“That the best part of it because anybody else’s phones are not going to be fiber in this part of Westchester,” he said.
Because of that fiber optic network, the Town House building has not experienced a weather-related phone or internet outage for the past 20 years. The only service interruption took place when a backhoe hit a fiber line, resulting in an outage that lasted just a day.

The contract includes internet service for the Town House building and other town-owned buildings that are connected via Optimum/Cablevision lines.

“There’s no fiber anywhere else [among the town buildings],” Smith said.

The Town Board also approved purchases that will ultimately be funded through a New York State Law Enforcement Technology (LETECH) grant. This is a one-time grant the state provides to local law enforcement agencies, which enables them to purchase a wide range of technological equipment.

“We will be approving the purchase of four laptops, four additional computers as well as scales for commercial vehicle checkpoints,” Shah said.

The grant money has already been received. The purchase of the assorted equipment was made on a sole-source basis because there is only one manufacturer of the scales in the entire country. Expenditure caps were set at $42,000 for the computer equipment and $33,000 for the scales.

Old business

The town recently learned that it obtained an additional $100,000 in grant funding through the state’s Community Resiliency, Economic Sustainability, and Technology (CREST) program. This was in addition to the $125,000 in CREST funding it received earlier, which the town has dedicated to the purchase of new trucks for the Highway Department.
The new $100,000 in funding was obtained for the town with the assistance of state Sen. Pete Harckham. Accordingly, the Town Board passed a resolution approving the purchase of a new vehicle for the town’s Parks and Recreation Department. The board set a cap of $62,500 on the expenditure, which will enable Parks and Rec to replace its current Ford Explorer with a new one.

Among other noteworthy business, the Town Board authorized the advertisement of bids for the new pickleball courts at the Lewisboro Town Park. Kellard Sessions, the Armonk-based engineering firm that is overseeing the project, is putting the final touches on the bid package for the work. The pickleball courts will replace older tennis courts at the park.

The work will also include building an Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)-compliant access trail from the entrance to the upper parking lot, and removing the stairs.

“It will all be included in the bid package,” noted Recreation Supervisor Nicole Caviola. “The engineers are comfortable that the [underlying] surface is structurally sound so that whatever we put in there by way of pickleball courts will also be structurally sound. The life expectancy of the courts would be 15 to 20 years.”

Among other town business, the board OK’d a resolution approving an interim report on the town’s Stormwater Management Program Plan and accepted a bid for $850 per day from Vista Tree for arborist services. It also discussed proposed changes to fees assessed to producers who film on location in Lewisboro.

“Janet Donohue, our town clerk, brought to our attention that commercial has had quite a discount [in comparison] to other towns in our [area],” Shah said. “A perfectly acceptable proposal is to charge $2,000 a day for public property and $1,500 a day for private property.”

One caveat would be that all such permits would need to be approved by Chief of Police David Alfano to ensure that such filming doesn’t negatively impact traffic and other town operations. In addition, the proposed fees would just apply to commercial projects and not to student film crews.

During the public comments, Councilman Dan Welsh fielded additional criticism from several town residents over remarks on his Facebook page critical of Israel’s government, with commenters specifically citing posts made by a visitor to his page. Fellow Councilman Rich Sklarin also voiced his concern.

“What really disturbs me is that you have someone who’s posting on your Facebook site with comments about your constituents and townspeople that you serve, calling them racist, genocidal, terrorists,” Sklarin said. “You haven’t responded to any of those. Your being silent is really disturbing … and leads me to conclude that you agree. So, I’m asking you to please publicly condemn those comments or remove them.”

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