Can Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown Get Together?

Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow are sister villages in so many ways, but sit in different town boundaries, and retain their own divisive loyalties.

Halloween – to name one example – is such a point of pride for both villages but a holiday when each goes their own way: Sleepy Hollow with its hayride; Tarrytown with its parade. You can say this on smaller scales for almost every holiday and event – two Easter egg hunts, and so on.

On a much grander scale, and when you look at all the agencies and services each village must duplicate within such close quarters, the question necessarily arises: couldn’t we play nicer and share better each other?

This issue seems to come up every election cycle, when – like last year – a few “outsider” candidates talk more about their vision of consolidation and kinship. This year there’s no such debate, though one incoming Trustee with many years of other kind of service under his belt did speak at the Sleepy Hollow Democratic caucus of one of his top priorities. Glenn Rosenbloom said he'd like to improve our relationship with sister village Tarrytown, “building bridges to find ways to share services.”

Of course there’s the elephant in the room these days – that threat that any moment up until the April deadline Tarrytown may still appeal the court’s decision to dismiss their suit against Sleepy Hollow and its in-limbo development on the GM site.

Though most conversations on the matter happen in closed-door executive sessions, Tarrytown Mayor Drew Fixell was pretty forthright with Patch on his hopes of getting together further down the road (however narrow and traffic-congested that road…).

Fixell said the villages once got close to making a consolidation deal with the parks and recreation and the schools, but ultimately it was the school system that backed out of the deal. “The actual nuts and bolts of putting these things together is what these things often flounder on, such as an uncertain financial environment and coming up with different entities’ financial decision-making processes,” Fixell said. For now, one thing that does get shared successfully is Tarrytown’s summer camp program which serves all district children very affordably.

There’s plenty of mutual aid going on regularly between ambulance corps and fire departments, and collaboration between police departments. But Fixell noted that beyond these necessary gestures of support, real consolidation might not make for better efficiency.

“Most of what we do is service-related,” he said. “Over last several years, there’s been a reduction in staffing, and not a lot of room out there for much change – you have to clean the streets, pick up garbage, police the neighborhoods.”

He said the villages share equipment when necessary but he did not see major changes coming to how operations would go. Fixell thinks we’ve surpassed a certain tipping point as far as our population sizes.

It’s one thing, he said, if each village were a few hundred in size, then consolidating would obviously be important, but it’s a different matter when you reach 10,000 (times two) and there are needs that must be met in each neighborhood.

Fixell doesn’t see any of this debate as off the table, rather he thinks once that “GM issue” gets resolved, then maybe the two villages really could come to the table in the first place.

“We can consider consolidating special skills, there’s potential there, but at moment no active move to do so,” Fixell said. “Probably having some resolution of GM issue – once that happens it provides greater stability financially, knowing what the future will look like better, knowing more what facilities are out there and the tax base – that could open the door in the future to more sharing and consolidation.”

Fixell looks forward to the day when he can put all “legal wrangling aside.” GM, as far as he’s concerned is “still up on the air. We’d like it to be resolved, that’s for sure. Our primary goal is to have the impact reduced.”

Only then can there be room for better relations or at least some collective brainstorming, with a caveat:

“I am certainly open to good ideas and to doing stuff together to be better and more efficient," Fixell said. "On the flip side I’m wary of a magical notion of consolidation being a cure. It’s easy to say but less easy to realize. It’s not a miracle cure.”

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