Croton Sign Rewrite Nears a Public Hearing, With Deadlines for Signs Already Up

Croton-on-Hudson's rewrite of its sign rules is one step from a public hearing after the Board of Trustees worked through a revised draft at a Sept. 9 work session and came away asking for a single change: strike the word "harmonious." Local Law Introductory No. 7 of 2026 has been before the board since earlier this year. Village Manager Bryan Healy said the revised draft is the product of a first round of comments and is meant to be easier for the general public to understand. "We got comments from this board. We got comments from the county, the WAC, the planning board," Read 8:40▶ Healy said. Who still gets to look at a sign The longest argument of the night was over which signs the Visual Environment Board, the advisory committee that reviews how signs look, would still see. Under the draft, a sign that arrives as part of a site plan or change-of-use application would go to the Planning Board alone, skipping the VEB. Healy said that is meant to shorten a path that can now require an applicant to sit through at least three meetings, because the VEB meets once a month and applications must be in 15 days ahead of a Planning Board agenda. Trustee Maria Slippen, one of the board's liaisons to the VEB, objected. "I don't think they would want to be cut out of a process of reviewing a sign because we wanna speed up the process," Read 14:47▶ Slippen said, adding that "that is where that expertise regarding signage exists in the village." Read 14:47▶

Trustee Nora Nicholson said the present arrangement has been hard on applicants, who have made corrections for the VEB only to hear fresh comments from the Planning Board. Healy said he found consensus for streamlining when he met with the VEB in the spring, but that the committee now has three new members, including a new chair, so its perspective may have shifted. The board left the draft as written and settled on a different fix: Planning Board agendas will be forwarded to the VEB, which Healy said the code already allows to comment on any application on its own initiative. Village Attorney Lori Lee Dickson traced the streamlining to an effort to give village staff enough time to review applications; the draft sets hard submission deadlines in place of a practice that had been "kind of loosey goosey for quite a long time," Read 21:22▶ Dickson said. One word struck The draft asks the Planning Board and the VEB to weigh whether a sign is of harmonious design with what is around it. Nicholson asked whether that was deliberately nebulous, since the Planning Board "can interpret that in a variety of ways, I would think." Read 12:09▶ Slippen went further. "I don't like the word harmonious," Read 26:54▶ Slippen said, calling it, to Nicholson's point, too vague a word, though she added that she would not fight over it. Trustees agreed the word could simply come out, and near the end of the review Dickson said the only change to the draft was to remove it. Fifteen square feet, eight feet tall For signs not tied to a business, the draft caps sign area at 15 square feet and sign height at eight feet — limits Healy asked the village attorney to confirm apply at once. Nicholson was not comfortable with eight feet. "I still feel like eight feet is a very tall sign," Read 30:45▶ Nicholson said, suggesting five feet instead. Healy said the eight-foot figure came from the village's planner; Dickson said it was based on a search of what other communities are doing. The board left the text alone. Elsewhere in the draft, a window sign may not exceed 25% of the window and a temporary commercial sign is limited to 45 days. Nicholson said the old limit on how many signs a property may have is gone, and Healy said regulation of sign content and time of year is gone as well. Deadlines for signs already up The draft starts several clocks once the law takes effect. Nonconforming temporary signs would have 30 days to be modified, altered or removed. A sign that lawfully exists but has no sign permit would have six months to submit one. A sign not lawfully existing would have 270 days — about nine months, by Healy's reckoning — to be removed or brought into conformance. A sign that is lawful today but would become nonconforming under the new rules would have two years. Healy said the 270-day figure is a placeholder that will be swapped for a calendar date once the board knows the effective date. One trustee called the 30-day window appropriate for what it addresses and the longer deadlines generous. Nicholson said going to the zoning board for a variance would be an option for anyone who cannot comply. Healy said he would bring the law back on Sept. 30 to set a public hearing, which he expected would be held Oct. 21 rather than Oct. 7 because there would not be time to get notice into the paper. Dickson said a zoning code change carries an extra layer of notice. A hearing moves a week The board's one formal action was procedural. Trustees voted to move the public hearing on Local Law Introductory No. 14 of 2026 — an amendment to Chapter 223 clarifying how land use applications are reviewed for consistency with the local waterfront revitalization plan — from Sept. 23 to Sept. 30 at 7 p.m. in the Georgianna Grant Meeting Room of the Stanley H. Kellerhouse Municipal Building. Deputy Mayor Len Simon moved the resolution and Trustee Nora Nicholson seconded it, by Mayor Brian Pugh's call from the chair, and it carried on a voice vote. Healy said the move followed a rearranged meeting calendar. A tax break for seriously disabled veterans Trustees also told Healy to have a local law drafted adopting a state property tax exemption for veterans with 100% service-connected disabilities. Healy said the exemption's status has flipped twice: the state legislature adopted it in 2025; a chapter amendment agreed with the governor made it mandatory rather than something municipalities opt into; and a provision in the state budget adopted in May made it opt-in again, which the village learned only recently. Healy described the exemption this way: a veteran considered seriously disabled under a definition set by the federal Department of Veterans Affairs, for a service-connected disability, "would be exempt from all village taxes," Read 4:16▶ and would not receive a village tax bill. A surviving spouse can keep it if the couple was married and the house was in both names, as with other veterans' exemptions. "If you do get remarried, you lose the exemption," Read 5:38▶ Healy said. Healy said the exemption would not take effect until assessment rolls created after October — the 2027 assessment roll, used for the 2027-28 village tax bills — so the board has time to act. New York Forward The last stretch of the session went to Croton's developing bid for a New York Forward award, with Harmon as the project area. "Although the funding for this program has been allocated in the state budget, there has been no formal announcement of this grant as of yet," Read 62:11▶ Healy said. He said the village had already held a town hall last Thursday, with the video available on the village website, and that it is assuming the regulations and requirements will be the same as last time without knowing that for certain. He said he assumes the application will be due toward the end of the year. Pugh drew a line between the application and what follows it. "We are putting together a package, a portfolio, a set of concepts here," Read 61:13▶ Pugh said, and if the grant is awarded there is a separate process in which specific projects are funded. Healy said the state wants a slate of projects worth roughly $8 to $10 million while the award itself is $4.5 million, so by its nature not everything submitted gets funded. Dickson said the numbers move too. "You'll ask for a million for this particular project, and then they might actually fund 600,000 for that project," Read 71:34▶ Dickson said. Pugh said the village's 2024 application earned what he called a gold star for holding an initial town hall — which is why Croton held one prospectively, before any announcement — and was flagged for improvement on its geographic area of focus. Healy said reviewers liked the 2024 projects but found the old area short on private development opportunity and housing potential. Three public projects are on the current list, Healy said: upgrades to the train station parking lot, streetscaping around Riverside Avenue and Benedict Boulevard, and bike lanes from Oneida Avenue to Croton Point Avenue to close what he described as the missing link in the village's bike network. The parking lot is the costly one. "Our parking lot is susceptible to tidal flooding. It's happening with increasing frequency as the ground continues to settle," Read 83:48▶ Healy said. A completed first phase of a resiliency study recommended exploring a seawall with a pump system, and Healy said the village is working on a county grant for phase two. He put the job at roughly $7 million in today's dollars. "The other alternative is we abandon however many number of spaces at the parking lot," Read 84:49▶ Healy said. Nicholson said the most controversial project in the village right now is part of the plan. Pugh said it needs to be taken out. "It's not zoning compliant, which is not to say that it can't be done," Read 75:18▶ Pugh said of the current proposal at 425 South Riverside, but it requires a variance, and that is a highly contingent process. Another trustee agreed the village's approach does not suffer by removing it, and Healy said that if the project were approved by the time an award came through, it could potentially be added back. Nicholson said she sensed at the town hall that some residents felt they were being given lip service, and credited the village manager with making clear that this was the first of many opportunities. Slippen pushed hardest on what comes next. "I would like to see more town halls planned," Read 93:40▶ Slippen said, along with an FAQ built from questions asked at the first one, a clear place on the village website for the material and a way to submit comments by email. "The vast majority of Croton does not know we're talking about this," Read 95:36▶ Slippen said. Both laws now converge on Sept. 30: the waterfront revitalization hearing is on that agenda at 7 p.m., and trustees expect to set the sign law's hearing for Oct. 21. Healy said more town halls on New York Forward are planned for the fall.