The Village Board of Larchmont held a regular meeting on April 27, 2026, to adopt the 2026-27 tentative budget, hold a public hearing on amendments to entertainment permit regulations, make key staff appointments, and receive reports from the police and fire departments. The board also addressed several consent agenda items and community events.
Good evening and welcome to the Village Board of Trustees regular meeting for the Village of Larchmont. It is Monday, April 27, 2026. Please note that the entire board is in attendance along with Administrator Katine, Assistant Administrator O'Neill, and the village attorney Stout. Everyone, please rise for the pledge. I pledge allegiance to the guy of the United States of America and to the Republic for which you stand for one nation under God in principle with liberty and justice for all. Just a few quick comments this evening. So I just want to say a huge thank you to both our police and our fire departments for their incredible work over the past several weeks. Firstly, for to both our police department and our fire department for dealing with the explosion of the sewer over by the train station. And then also to our police department for their amazing arrest that was national news on Good Morning America. But I will I will make sure that the chief has his moment to shine. And I won't steal his thunder. All right. All right. Next up are the public hearings. So the first is going to be a local law to amend the code regarding the entertainment permits. And we wanted to make sure it was clear, and we went back to look at the law to kind of figure out who was responsible for issuing them, what the rules were around them. And so in order to modernize and streamline the process, we've made some tweaks to the law, which essentially, you know, just makes it clear who is issuing the permits. If somebody wants to deviate from the rules for the permit, who do they ask? Then a couple of other sort of cleanup changes to the law. It doesn't impact any of the permits that have been issued. It's not going to result in any changes to the to the three establishments that have existing permits. So I seek a motion to open the public hearing on the uh local law to amend the entertainment permits. Do I have a motion? So moved. Do I have a second? All in favor? Aye. Aye. Does anybody want to comment? All right. So Peter Sherman and locals. I read the law. So my confusion, or I should say my question, I have three basic questions. But it seems like you're trying to, I think you said at the last meeting, um, sort of bring fairness and bring everybody kind of underneath one umbrella where everybody understands kind of what the provisions and everything are. But when I applied or when I presented my concept to you for locals, it was specific that you weren't going to allow my concept underneath just a restaurant use permit or a um theater use, both which were permitted in the new in the zone, but you were uncomfortable allowing both of those things to exist underneath either one of those permits. So we created a special use permit that combined both of those uses. So my question is if you're now trying to combine that, what was the purpose of the special use permit that I've got? Maybe because I was involved in drafting a law. I don't think the intention is to um to allow somebody who only has an entertainment permit to do what somebody who has a special permit for the entertainment use can do. The entertainment most notably the entertainment permit is very constrained by saying that you can only have entertainment as an accessory to your principal use, and even gives an example that uh and and it the entertainment can go only go on while your principal use is being conducted, and even gives us an example that you if you are a restaurant, you can only have the entertainment as accessory background while you are serving the food to the patrons in the restaurant. And that's the reason that the law, however, exempt those who have a special permit use for entertainment for the type of special permit use that locals has it exempt uh those who have a special permit from some of the provisions of the entertainment law and instead says they'll be guided by their special permit. So it was was not. I was not given the task of uh of drafting an entertainment law that would in effect expand our entertainment uh permits to allow the places that have them to become a a special permit use. If you want to do that, there was even discussion, I think, in our work session about if they want to go beyond the limits of an entertainment permit, they would have to apply for a special permit. So I think I think the difference was when you applied for your special permit, it was as an event space, which is not allowed under our code. It wasn't as a restaurant as a primary usage that then had entertainment during dinner hours. So it was a different use that did not exist under our code, which is why we created the special permit. This is you're a restaurant and you want to have a band playing while people are eating dinner. But wouldn't that essentially be the same thing? I mean, anyway, that we any event that we would have always has to have food.