Examiner recently reported<\/a>, debt service appears to have increased 40.53% from $1,143,575 in the prior budget to $1,607,090.\u00a0 I was advised in a recent FOIL response that Village debt at the end of February 2026 was $17,881,200, up from $4,255,710 for fiscal 2021.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\nIf you go to the 2025 Village Financial Statements, you will see some of uses of the debt.\u00a0 Among the bond anticipation notes, there is a total of $3,655,000 for \u201cMunicipal Center Improvements.\u201d\u00a0 (A figure dwarfing both the cost of parking lot remediation and fire truck mentioned by Deputy Mayor Carpenter at the meeting approving the budget.)\u00a0 According to a FOIL response, these improvements included the following:<\/p>\n
Furniture for Municipal Center:\u00a0 $675,000
\nAudio-Visual Infrastructure for Municipal Center: $335,000 (2 Phases)
\nIT Infrastructure for Municipal Center: $450,000
\nLow Voltage Access Control for Municipal Center: $375,000
\nOutdoor and Miscellaneous Furniture for Municipal Center: $125,000
\nWindow Treatments for Municipal Center: $150,000<\/p>\n
Allowing for the fact that some of this may relate to the Police and Fire Departments, some of these amounts, including the size of payments for furniture, audio-visual, and window treatments, would seem to fall in the \u201cdiscretionary\u201d bucket, and hardly \u201cnecessary,\u201d as Deputy Mayor Carpenter described the current budget.<\/p>\n
In terms of flood mitigation, borrowings appear to be $3,786,200.\u00a0 A FOIL response states that some of these costs include:<\/p>\n
Engineering Fees on Flood Mitigation: $1,664,483
\nLegal Fees in Relation to Eminent Domain Against School District: $255,709<\/p>\n
To date, the Village has been frustrated in finding hard commitments from other governmental entities to fund the flood mitigation project, the price tag of which is now approaching $50 million.\u00a0 Nothing from FEMA, a $500,000 earmark from New York State, and an earmark of $18 million from the County; neither of the earmarks has been legislated.\u00a0 The Village Board certainly did have \u201cdiscretion\u201d on how to approach flood mitigation and seems to have rubber-stamped Mayor Mullen\u2019s view, expressed early in the process, that a larger project, as opposed to doing the less costly Highbrook remediation first, would be more likely to receive grant funding.\u00a0 (A publicly available law review article on FEMA grants calls such an approach into question with respect to the federal government, and of course, no FEMA funds have yet been received.)<\/p>\n
In addition, the Village paid the same law firm as handled the eminent domain against the School District, the not-inexpensive Duane Morris firm, at least $147,332 in connection with the Village Board\u2019s recent ham-handed approach to development in the Picture House corridor.\u00a0 Although practicing law pays my mortgage, I\u2019ve always believed a wise use of \u201cdiscretion\u201d is doing what you can to avoid running up lawyer time.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Deputy Mayor Carpenter also confirmed what was also clear from another FOIL response when he was unable to give an exact number for debt service next year.\u00a0 Despite plunging headlong into a now-nearly $50 million project with negligible outside support, the Village Board has apparently received no projections for the future $25-45 million in Village debt necessary to complete it.<\/p>\n
In response to a FOIL request for projections for debt, debt service, and amount of property tax levy for fiscal years 2026-2028, carrying into May 2029 \u2013 which cover the next three years of the flood mitigation project \u2013 I was given only the amount of debt service for outstanding bonds and bond appreciation notes (the latter just on May 12, after a FOIL request of May 1).\u00a0 This amount required to service outstanding debt appears to be about $1.7 million for 2027-2028 and 2028-2029.\u00a0 But no modeling of the debt necessary to complete the flood mitigation project has apparently been done (or, for that matter, any additional debt the trustees may be considering for other expenses), even though the Village Board is well aware of the overall flood mitigation project costs and has made no changes to project schedule.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s wholly fair to require the same approach to budgeting and spending at the Village level as one requires at home.\u00a0 I suspect most homeowners plan their renovations keeping in mind mortgage, tax, and, if applicable, college tuition payments before they take out their credit cards for window treatments.\u00a0 And most homeowners certainly don\u2019t put off modeling mortgage payments because the numbers are alarming; they buy a home whose numbers make sense.\u00a0 These failures by the Village of Pelham Board, with not a single substantive dissenting view or challenge \u2013 reminiscent of the embarrassing Picture House RFQ process \u2013 are a cause of real concern.\u00a0 As was said in a recent School Board election statement, it\u2019s not prudent to expect money to \u201cfall from the sky.\u201d<\/p>\n
Arthur Long
165 Boulevard<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"To the Editor: In recent articles on the Village of Pelham\u2019s breaking the tax cap, Village officials \u2013…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10154,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[128,9,24,63,129,131,130],"class_list":["post-230845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-the-bronx","tag-bronx","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-the-bronx","tag-the-bronx-headlines","tag-the-bronx-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230845\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}