Two local business owners are proposing a night street market in the Village of Saugerties that would include vendors, music and entertainment on one Thursday night a month.
The market would be open on the third Thursday of each month from 5 to 9 p.m. between June and September. Organizers Jessica Mannhaupt and Laura Huron told the village board at its regular meeting on Monday, May 6 that a 150-foot section of Jane Street would be closed on market nights. The board voted to grant the applicants permission to operate the market.
The market would be “something to drive commerce, but also a family friendly place with entertainment, including a DJ. We would get local businesses to participate, like maybe a loyalty program,” said Mannhaupt. “We would shut down Jane Street in order to have a band or a DJ.
“Jane Street is a perfect street,” said Village of Saugerties Mayor Bill Murphy. “Traffic is not going to be impeded too much, but you’ll have to get the residents on board.” The mayor also said the partners should avoid the portion of Jane Street that could affect public parking. Since they were planning a June start, Murphy suggested they may want to wait until schools are closed for summer vacation.
The First Friday event in the village commercial area were cut off by the pandemic and the Thursday proposal is a replacement. “We’re trying to do something new and exciting,” said Huron.
Trustee Donald Hackett said that Jane Street is a one-way street and he asked whether the proposed market would hinder residents going in and out. He also reminded the board that a local club regularly had a band and asked whether an additional band would clash.
The board discussed the question of blocking Jane Street, and Murphy said the area of the street to be closed would be limited to prevent interference with municipal parking in the area.
Huron said the thought had been to line up the vendors along Jane Street and possibly have the band located at the parking lot end of the street. The band or DJ would be different each month, Huron said.
The board acknowledged that there are still details to be worked out regarding relations with neighbors and traffic patterns with the closure of part of Jane Street.
Following the vote, Murphy assured the two entrepreneurs that the village could supply such equipment as traffic cones.
Murphy asked that Mannhaupt send him a detailed plan, which he would review with police chief Robert Nuzzo. The police, fire department and ambulance need to be aware of the planned activities, he said. The event would also be listed on the website the village and town are working on to bring information now scattered on several websites into one place, Murphy said.
Trustee Andrew Zink said the plan is “awesome. It’s not every day that two people just come along and want to do something like this.”
Saugerties Village Board adopts $600,000 bond for repairs, improvements
The Saugerties Village Board is embarking on a series of renovations and upgrades of village property adding up to as much as $600,000. The board passed a bond resolution for that amount at its regular meeting on May 6.
The board authorizes:
• Renovations at a run-down house in Seamon Park.
• New pathways and landscaping at Tina Chorvas Park, which is adjacent to the Arm of the Sea Puppet Theater and has frontage along the Esopus Creek.
• Resurfacing the Lions Club pool and removal of metal playground equipment at the pool. The equipment does not meet current safety standards.
• Maintenance and upkeep at the village beach, including additional parking, new pavilion and picnic tables.
• Repainting the public works garage.
The decision to bond the work, rather than include it in the regular budget, would avoid the shock of the large amount of money it would add to taxes in a single year, said Kevin Brown, who heads the parks, buildings and grounds department. “This is an idea that [treasurer] Paula [Kerbert] and I came up with. This will help me achieve repairing, replacing, doing anything in any of the parks.” The list could include new bulkheads and docks for the beach, pavilions in some of the parks, “so we can get some revenue out of the beach, some revenue out of the parks, so you get a little money out of this as well.”
The idea was “not to burden the taxpayers every year with a massive increase,” Brown said. Trustee Jeannine Mayer said the unspent money could be invested in a certificate of deposit, yielding interest that could help pay off the debt.
Combating check fraud
Saugerties treasurer Paula Kerbert told the village board at its regular meeting on May 6 that fraud is an increasing problem in checking accounts, and she is working with M&T Bank to minimize the possibility of losses to the village resulting from possible fraud.
“I got in touch with Tom Murphy [no relation to mayor Bill Murphy] at M&T Bank and asked him what I could do to be proactive about this. He got me set up to go into a program where I have to okay the checks that go through. Instead of them just writing them and going in the bank, I have to go in and approve them for payment so there’s no fraud.”
Kerbert clarified that she does not have to physically go to the bank; the checking can be done online. She will be joined in the training for the new system by village clerk Peggy Melville, to assure that the process will work if she is not present on a given day. The banker also suggested increasing the use of Automatic Clearing House (ACH) payments for regular recurring payments, such as utilities, reducing the number of checks to be reviewed. Some accounts are being paid through ACH payments already, Kerbert said.
Trustees discuss getting a greater share of sales tax
While Ulster County sales tax revenue has increased, the amount Saugerties receives has not, village trustee Andrew Zink said during a meeting of the village board on Monday, May 6. “I saw that in the first quarter of this year, Ulster County gained 5.7 percent in sales tax overall,” he said. “Separately, I saw the Town of Saugerties was number one among towns in the Hudson Valley of places with increased property value and average home sales, so I have a really strong feeling that the percentage we’re getting back from the county on our sales tax is very unequal to what we’re generating for the county, and I have a strong feeling that, especially in the last couple of years, this inequity has gotten bigger and will continue to as Saugerties becomes a real tourism hub. I wanted to do some research on this.”
Trustee Terry Parisian said towns have complained of the way revenue is split from time to time. That was made up 40 or 50 years ago.
“What I would like to know is how much we generate,” Zink said. Towns have successfully increased their share if the inequity was too big, and if Saugerties were to calculate the discrepancy, the town could seek to get the amount changed. Village treasurer Paula Kerbert said she could get the numbers.
“If we generate, say, four percent of the overall number and get one percent back…” Zink said.
“That wouldn’t be fair,” replied trustee Vince Buono. Zink said the difference may be even greater than that.
Mayor Bill Murphy said the Town of Saugerties gets three or four percent of sales tax revenue, which is then split between the town and the village. “The argument here is that we should get a bigger cut than what the town gets,” he said. “The town could go to the county and say, ‘we want five percent now because our village is driving more, and we want to give our village a greater percentage.”
Zink suggested that the town and village could work together on such a request, “but whether the county does anything about it, it’s worth looking into.”