The Edgemont Incorporation Committee has two goals:
Provide the best information possible to the residents of Edgemont about Incorporation, and its potential impacts.
Give Edgemont residents the choice to become a village.
To that end, we are leading an effort to work with Edgemont community volunteer lawyers and finance professionals along with outside experts to gather, analyze, and assess information in order to understand what’s required to become an excellent village.
A decision to support incorporation is unlike many decisions we have made in the past: when we vote for one candidate or another, we vote based on the candidate’s word or their record. This decision is different because we can’t promise anything with certainty, nor, prior to an affirmed vote, does our village even exist.
Furthermore, we don’t know what the elected village will do, nor can we make any representations for the yet-to-exist-village. We don’t know if the village will keep existing services or look to improve the services by looking elsewhere. We don’t know if the town will change land use code, create a comprehensive plan, or just simply operate as it has always operated. What we do know, is that between the New York Village laws and the Edgemont revenue, we have tremendous potential as a Village.
We expect a new village of Edgemont will look to work as much as it can with Greenburgh, and we expect the Town to good faith negotiate with the Village once it exists. Until then, we also understand, based on its comments to day a discussion isn’t in their interest, and in fact, the interest is quite the opposite. We hope to engage in a more collaborative conversation with the town as this effort matures.
This is a campaign of ideas, not candidates. The idea that a village can foster and align itself to the values that you, as residents have communicated to us:
1. Edgemont is a great place to raise families and to retire. Excellent schools committed to all children & programs for adults - those gifted, those average & those needing special attention; intimate, vibrant community; and commitment to public safety.
2. Edgemont is a highly desirable location & investment. Our proximity to NYC, historically strong and sustainable appreciation in property values & great services.
3. Edgemont is a diverse and inclusive community. A community that embraces and celebrates the diversity of our residents, with governing principles and institutions that foster inclusion.
4. Edgemont provides a great quality of life. Strong programming, community aesthetic, parks & greenspace, spirit of community involvement & volunteerism.
5. Edgemont maintains a responsible budget and strong fiscal health. Opportunities to provide our residents and the surrounding communities with a well managed infrastructure, services, and programming. Fund a healthy contingency fund for extraordinary issues while managing to tax neutrality relative to Greenburgh.
Here’s what our research so far has shown: New York State law allow us to create a village, and provides us with rights for transition services and the procurement of services. We have also proven to ourselves that a village of Edgemont would have the funds to operate an excellent village, with options for those services and capital projects, within a neutral or favorable (to taxpayers) budget growth trajectory compared to what we live with today in unincorporated Greenburgh.
The question is what can we do with all this information? What we can do is set up a municipality, with the guidance from the experts who have set up villages before (not just operated one that has always existed), that has a structure and governance that protects our values and encourages positive thinking and action, not just responds to complaints.
How do we know a new government is possible? Because after studying the problem and possibilities and talking with experts who have done this before, we’ve learned that this is how most government entities began, from the birth of our country all the way to the smallest villages. We have the right reasons and wherewithal that prior generations had to accomplish the task, too.