The New Rochelle City Council held its first Committee of the Whole meeting of 2026 on Tuesday, January 13, 2026, starting at approximately 6:45 PM (local time). The session featured a detailed presentation on the Local Safety Action Plan (LSAP) and an overview of a new Participatory Budgeting (PB) pilot program. Council also acted on a series of administrative and legislative items, including parking regulation changes, grant awards, and eminent domain proceedings for two key properties. Several items were bundled into a consent agenda and approved unanimously. The meeting concluded with public comments from four residents.
Commissioner of Development, Adam, along with consultant Jesse Minzroth of Stantec, presented the LSAP. The plan aims to reduce traffic fatalities and severe injuries by creating a data-driven “high injury network” using crash data (2020-2024) and predictive risk factors (e.g., proximity to schools, senior centers). Key details:
Council Member Matt Stern introduced the initiative, which was adopted as a priority in the 2026 budget. The pilot will allocate $200,000 from capital funds (less than 1% of the city’s capital budget) plus $20,000 in operating funds for administration.
Council Member Kay proposed directing staff to develop a proposal for dedicating cannabis tax revenues to specific community programs (e.g., education, mental health, substance use treatment). She noted that two licensed businesses are now operating, with more in the pipeline. Council members voiced support for reinvesting the funds. Consensus was reached to have the city manager return with a formal proposal.
Good afternoon, happy 2026, and welcome to the first committee of the whole session for the city of New Rochelle. Madam City Clerk, please call the roll. My name is Herbert. Here, Councilmember Lopez, Councilmember Tarantino. Here, Councilmember Peters. Councilmember Aston Laye. Councilmember Kay. Here, and Councilmember Slick. Here. Good afternoon again. The first item on our agenda this afternoon is a presentation for a local safety action plan. City managers, our commissioner development and team will be presenting today. Yes. Excellent. She looked. Okay. Love it. And just the right intersection. Literally. I was hoping Sarah Spicer would join us this evening, but I think she might be wrestling with the copier in the development department fortuitous struggles and our local safety act presentation. But good evening, good evening, Mayor, City Manager, and City Council. I'm joined here today. That's all right. I said you were less than how they printer in staff here. Thank you. So we're joined this evening by some staff from development and some outside folks who I'll introduce Deputy Commissioner for Planning and Sustainability Safety K, Sarah Spicer, our senior resiliency development manager, and Jesse Minz Roth, a consultant of Stantec, who was selected via RFP to help us with the preparation of the local safety action plan. So Jesse, tonight we'll walk through what the local safety action plan is, how we're developing it, and the tools and techniques that will be used to compile it. Yes, that matters because it builds on our complete streets network and provides a data-driven framework to evaluate our capital and policy pipeline to identify those projects that are along what we coin the term high injury network and helps us to identify also important priority locations such as uh schools uh to assist with the development of a safe walks to school program. Um the this plan is important because it positions us for additional federal and state funding, uh including the Safe Streets for All program, which you may have read in your updates to council. We were uh very fortunate to receive money for a demonstration project for tactical urbanism improvements in the downtown. But again, that was just a demonstration project and was limited in sort of size. This plan will position us and make us more eligible and competitive for larger real infrastructure-based uh transportation improvement projects. So we're really excited to work with uh Jesse and Stantec to develop the plan. Uh finally, the approach to the plan is holistic. It takes data that we obtain from various data sources, state and uh state sources, county sources, and integrates it with uh robust public engagement. So we get uh real we take the data and we work with uh individuals in the city to uh compile uh input and arrive at uh recommendations that are based on real lived experience. So uh with that I will hand it to Jesse Minzroth of Stan to uh walk us through the safe local safety action plan and uh we can answer any questions you may have. Uh well thank you for the introduction. So my name is Jesse Minzroth, and um stand tech, and excited to work with you all on this local safety action plan. Um as Adam mentioned, you might see SS for A on some of these slides, and that stands for Safe Streets for All. Um just a little bit about myself is that I have a lot of experience working in this area. I worked for the New York City Department of Transportation for a while, um, and I redesigned streets in all boroughs of New York City. Um I also worked on the West Coast uh in Silicon Valley for the city of San Jose. Um and so it's great to be working with communities like yours on this plan. So let's go ahead. So our agenda today is what is a local safety action plan, what its context is in New Rochelle's work on complete streets, and also the Safe Sheets for All federal grant program. Its required components. So the local safety action plan will serve as a roadmap for achieving safer streets in New Rochelle. It'll have those elements that I just mentioned, where in addition to data analysis and public engagement, we'll go through existing plans and policies and create a prioritized strategy list. And we will work on and really focus on reducing traffic fatalities and serious injuries.