The City Council of New Rochelle met on February 10, 2026, starting at approximately 4:45 PM with a Committee of the Whole to review the 2026 City Manager Work Plan and proposed Downtown Overlay Zone updates, followed by a regular meeting at 7:00 PM that included a public hearing, adoption of a consent agenda, and public comments. The meeting concluded with three executive sessions.
Public Hearing (Hudson Country Montessori School): No speakers.
Citizens to be Heard (seven speakers, plus group statements via translation):
2026 City Manager Work Plan (presented by Deputy City Manager)
Downtown Overlay Zone (DOZ) Updates (presented by Development Commissioner, Kevin Kane, Sarah Eagle)
Good afternoon and welcome to the February 2026 committee of the whole meeting. Madam City Clerk, please call the roll. Mayor Raymond Serber here. Council Member Lopez. Here. Council Member Tarantino. Councilmember Peters. Council Member Astin Layeth. Here. Council Member King and Council Member Stern. Here. Good afternoon once again. The first two items on the agenda this evening, or afternoon, rather, are presentations. The first being the 2026 City Manager Work Plan. We have a presentation. We have a deputy city manager at the steering wheel. I will turn it over, City Manager. Well, thank you. Thanks for the opportunity to present the work plan for 2026. Okay. So each year we develop a work plan that reflects the priorities and projects that we identified during the budget process and the planning process. And we incorporate city council initiatives and departmental operational and capital priorities for the upcoming fiscal year. So just one thing to highlight for this work plan. And some of those initiatives are incorporated into the 2026 work plan. So that was a step that we wanted to formalize. I know it happens organically every time every year, but we formalized it by adding that step in the process. So this work plan highlights some of the major initiatives planned for 2026. But a common theme you'll see it also continues on the initiatives and the successes of the 2025 previous work plan. So it serves as a roadmap, it outlines the strategic priorities and operational steps that we're going to take to achieve our goals, focusing and enhancing on the quality of life of Neurishell residents now in years to come. So keeping to the same theme, 2025, we developed the work plan pillars, so we kept that theme. We thought it was it was it worked well. But if you look at this slide and compare it to 2025, one thing you see we added city council. So city council and departmental priorities is what went into the work plan. So next slide. So the theme, um we put we talked about this internally, and we said, you know, we said land the planes, because last year was a big year as far as like initiating different things and there was a lot of things that we put up like planes that are in the air. So if for 2026, we're going to try to focus on landing some of those initiatives. So that's really a big focus for this year. Um so in 2025, we identified some pretty big buckets, right? So some public safety, community engagement initiatives, we had the bicycle units downtown, we had this, we added additional CSOs. We, you know, our law enforcement career program, we had uh initiatives with the Red Cross. So we're just going to build on that for 2026. And we'll see that we're going to expand some of those uh community public um safety meetings and that'll be one of the items that you see. So we're gonna just expand that in that um uh collaboration for community engagement. Infrastructure and planning. So last year uh we embarked again on our stormwater mitigation uh and our complete streets initiatives. We had a lot of planning that went into those projects and through the course of our stormwater mitigation program that was based on our um drainage studies that we had uh completed previous years ago, um, found out that a lot of these projects are very complicated. And there's a lot of things to work through, and um I don't want to steal Albarose Thunder for the stormwater presentation, but he'll explain what those challenges are. So that meant that you know the project stood in the queue, but just took a little longer to to initiate. So this year we're looking to really um see those projects through in construction and planning and implementation. Another thing in environmental planning, last year we adopted uh updated Green NR, we completed uh a climate study.