Paul Szmal: Joining us in studio for his regular monthly visit, the Supervisor, Town of Geneva, Mark Venuti's here. Welcome back.
Mark Venuti: Thanks, Ted.
Paul Szmal: One of the things you always like to do, you and the board at the board meetings, is to thank people who do great work, and there were a few of those at this week's meeting. Jennifer Grant with the Town Sustainability Committee and the Sustainability Coordinator, Jacob Fox, for another great free stuff day and Fix-It Clinic. I'm told it went well.
Mark Venuti: Yes, we had another successful event. People really love it. We have people dropping off from 10 to noon, and people picking up, and they're both happy. It's so neat that there's always that perfect match. You get all this stuff in, and then it all goes out.
Paul Szmal: Well, yeah, and when the yard is filling up and all the tables around noon, I was getting a little nervous, but then people come, and we have to hold them back in the beginning, and then they're okay, go, and it gets knocked down in about an hour, and then slowly pickers come, and I swear, I had one box that I threw it with stuff in it into the trash. Everything else was gone. Some recycling. We took a few things out to the road because the event was over, and then they people go by and take those. There's almost nothing that was wasted, and happy people on both ends.
Mark Venuti: Yeah, it's a great thing.
Paul Szmal: We also had the Fix-It, and we had the attack of the lamps, which is kind of normal, and chairs, and wobbly tables, and that all got done. That's the more happy people. So that's another successful event that was just this past week.
Also, Supervisors Assistant and Bookkeeper Eric Roisher helped out with the September 24th meeting at the Town Hall on the landfill. So you took part in two different meetings, the one that you hosted and then another one last week. So what's the future, or is there one for the landfill?
Mark Venuti: Well, we are at the Board of Supervisors as a decision to make, and we've been having these I went to one in Manchester. I was on a panel there, and actually my topic was the negative aspects of a landfill, of which I am very familiar being a Geneva area person. Then the one at the Town Hall, they had another one in Bloomfield. So basically, the board has been hearing from their constituents, and we're gonna vote, I think, in the next month or so before the end of the year. Thumbs up or thumbs down on being a garbage importer.
I tell people I'm guardedly optimistic that we're gonna end the era. Now, it goes through the end of 2028, and our feeling is we've done our share. We've got four years from now until that time, and we've got money coming in still from the landfill to put things, you know, an infrastructure into place so that we can handle our trash in a different way. Reducing it more, you know, we're gonna work on diversion aspects, especially food and the organics, which really is all of it together is about 50% of what gets landfilled. So, you know, the report was talking about the negative, you know, well, you know, your tipping fee is gonna go up because you're gonna have to ship, and but my feeling, you know, if you reduce what you throw out by half and the price doubles, you're in the same place you were in before.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, the other gratitude at the meeting was all the pickleball fanatics. They got the the courts are all ready to go now, and some people raised money for to put the nets on. So pickleball is ready to happen in Geneva.
Mark Venuti: And they're open down at the high school. It looks beautiful, and right, the enthusiasts raised some money for some of the nets, and the town pitched in. It was a great joint project with the school. So we've got eight pickleball courts behind the high school.
Paul Szmal: There's an application before the board for a planned unit development for a rolling hills subdivision on Carter Road. What's that gonna look like?
Mark Venuti: So west of Carter, if people have been around for a while, it was really a woods, and then a person bought it who cleared the woods. But it's a nice area, and I've been looking, you know, we do, everyone acknowledges there's a housing crisis, and it's really, it's affordable housing. Things that are getting built in the town now, three hundred, four hundred, five hundred thousand dollar homes, and that's not accessible to most people. And we have people that have decent jobs. They're working in wineries. They're working in your restaurant. They're doing all kinds of things. Well, they can't afford a five hundred thousand dollar home.
So we've reached out to one of the developers who does manufactured homes, and this is a nice, gonna be a nice project. It's in the early stages, but they've laid it out. These are going to be purchased, not rent. But smaller lots, but the home is like eighteen hundred square feet, so it's not really a small home. And garage, you can have a two-car garage if you want, and so I've told them, you know, we want these, we want some of these at least under two hundred thousand, and that's the target. So you can, depending on what you want, you might be able to get a hundred and twenty-five, a hundred and fifty. If you want everything, and you want a basement, maybe you'll be two twenty-five, but that depends on what you can afford. So they're all ranch style. It's going to be a nice little park in the middle, a trail around it. So these are, you know, something, it can either be a first-time buyer, or maybe somebody that's downsized and selling the big house. Nice little ranch with a small yard.
Paul Szmal: Do you know, I've been hearing equipment when I go out to my car at the end of the day. Are they building more or doing work down here at the apartments over the hill? I don't think so.
Mark Venuti: Oh, I know what you're hearing. I know what you're hearing. They're putting in a solar field back there.
Paul Szmal: Oh, okay. There's a solar farm going in behind there. It was old, red jacket, you know, an orchard that they weren't using anymore, and they've sold it, and they're installing more solar. I've been hearing that equipment running when I come out of the station every day.
Mark Venuti: [No response recorded]
Paul Szmal: We have a hearing on the proposed twenty-twenty-five budget set for November 12th.
Mark Venuti: Yeah, so we've gone through our steps. First, I, the supervisor, puts together what's called the tentative budget based on requests by the department heads. Then the town board had a work session. It was, I think, October 2nd, where the whole town board goes over it, and the result of that is called the preliminary budget, and that's what we've scheduled for a public hearing. So the public can weigh in if they like, and that's at our November 12th meeting. And if we don't have any problems or don't need to make changes, we'll probably pass the budget at that meeting.
It's nothing, there's no surprises in it, no new taxes or anything like that. We're doing our normal, buying a few vehicles, selling a few, deciding what roads need to be paved, and basically, you know, running the operation.
Paul Szmal: The board had a discussion this week. Ontario County has put together a hazard mitigation plan. What sort of things does that look at, and how does that work, and what will the town's participation be?
Mark Venuti: Yeah, so this went on about a year ago. Myself and the code officer, and in consultation with the town board, every town had to look at their own town and answer a bunch of questionnaires. What kind of hazards could hit your town? For us, it was mostly flooding. You know, it could be fire, flooding, wind, invasives, we had some of that. So you identify these hazards, and then it all goes into this county plan, and then that now has been finalized. And that goes before government agency that'll put the final swipes on it. But, you know, we all participated in it, and then now we've passed, approved the county plan. And that's kind of our guidebook.
We identify areas that are susceptible to flooding. This is mostly what we have to deal with. We don't have fires, you know, we don't have occasional high winds. We do have invasive species, both in the lake and in some of our trees. Those kinds of things are identified, and, you know, hopefully some grant money will come up that will help with those things. But it basically was a push, I think, federal government down to state, all the way into the counties and towns, to identify potential hazards so you're not just surprised by it.
Paul Szmal: You've renewed your contract for IT services with a company called Integrated Systems, and it's kind of neat. The way it works is you buy repair time in advance, and it drives the cost down when you need, inevitably, as you always will, somebody to come out and look at computers and things.
Mark Venuti: Yeah, so we renewed with this company. We've been working with them for quite some time, and yeah, we buy a block, and then the price is almost half if you buy it and pay for it in advance. So basically, we can call them up, and they're on the phone with us. Sometimes they can remotely connect, sometimes they come down, but they keep our system running, they keep all the security in place to keep us from getting hacked.
Paul Szmal: You also have a town, a public hearing was held on the written notification of dangerous conditions law, I guess you'd call it, local law. What was the result of the hearing? Any input? And remind us what that law is going to do.
Mark Venuti: So when we pass a local law, we have to have a public hearing on it, and so those were scheduled for this last meeting. Nobody came. It's not really a controversial thing. It's basically something the town attorney recommended. It says for roads and sidewalks, if you see a dangerous condition, you've got to let us know before you can sue us, basically. So we have an opportunity to fix it, and that's basically what it turns out to be. And the law, we passed that local law, nobody came to the hearing, and that'll go into our law books.
Paul Szmal: All right, Geneva Supervisor Mark Venuti, we're going to get a Yankees-Mets World Series, you got your Yankees hat here. I got my Yankee hat on, they pulled it off last night, all close games, all kind of nerve-wracking. We'll see. The Mets are moving, the Yankees are moving.
Mark Venuti: Yeah.
Paul Szmal: All right, thanks again as always, appreciate the update.
Mark Venuti: Thank you, Ted.
