This Fall, Mow, Don’t Blow, Your Leaves: Better For Your Lawn and the Environment
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Mowing leaves into tiny pieces on your lawn--also known as mulch mowing-- is healthier for your lawn and soil than piling or bagging them to be removed. Leaf-mulched lawns often need less fertilizer and water. It is also better for our environment because the pollutants from leaf blowers and trucks that must haul away the leaves are avoided. And, leaves piled in the streets can be a thing of the past! Homeowners around Scarsdale have been mulch mowing leaves for many years with great results. Here are the facts:
Mulch mowing does not harm your lawn—it makes your lawn healthier. Decomposing mulched leaves nestle between the individual blades of grass where weeds can germinate. Once the small bits of leaves settle in, microbes and worms start breaking them down. The nutrients from the decomposed leaves enhance the soil.
Done correctly, mulch mowing should not make your lawn look messy. As long as the mulch mowing creates small pieces--about the size of a dime--the shredded leaves quickly settle into the lawn, and your lawn should not look messy. It is important that the leaves are shredded because whole leaves left on a lawn can smother the grass.
It’s easy. Mulch mowing can be done with any standard homeowner or commercial lawn mower. Simply mow over the fallen leaves. All types of leaves can be mulch mowed. (Pine needles, which are acidic, may change the ph balance of your lawn if mulch mowed in large quantities, so consider using pine needles as a mulch around the base of pine trees.)
All landscapers have the equipment to mulch mow. If you have a landscaper, ask them to mulch mow your leaves. Many, but not all, landscapers have experience mulch mowing. If your landscaper is new to mulch mowing, the following are key points for them to know:
Equipment: To help shred the leaves into small pieces, it’s recommended that a mulching blade be used. This type of blade, which has grooves to shred the leaves, is inexpensive and available for any type of mower. Mulching kits, which include additional attachments beyond just a mulching blade, are also available at any mower distributor and can be fitted to commercial mowers.
Mulching Technique: Mowing the leaves in a circular pattern, rather than back and forth in lines, will result in smaller pieces of leaves which decompose more quickly and will avoid “striping lines.”
Time: It should take your landscaper no additional time to mulch mow leaves rather than blowing them to the curb. In fact, if done correctly, it actually saves time. It is just as easy (or easier) to mulch mow than it is to blow leaves curbside.
Cost: Mulch mowing leaves should not cost more than having leaves blown to the curb or bagged. There are many landscapers in Scarsdale who have been mulch mowing properties for years at no additional cost. If your landscaper claims it will be more time-consuming, ask them to try it for a few weeks. They will see it takes no extra time.
If you mow your own lawn, just keep mowing! You can continue using your mower without installing a mulching blade, but sometimes you may have to go over certain areas of your lawn twice to make sure the leaves have been cut into small pieces. Better yet, you can install a mulching blade yourself or bring it to any local mower shop to install. Try to mulch leaves once a week so the piles don’t build up too high for your mower, especially during the heavy drop of leaves. Remember to keep the blade sharpened and the deck height adjusted as needed.
Large piles of leaves will become markedly smaller when mulch mowed. Shredding piles of leaves significantly reduces the volume of leaves. What looks like a huge leaf pile will shred into tiny pieces and quickly settle into your lawn. Even if you need to put some leaves to the curb during the heavy leaf drop, any reduction in leaves put curbside benefits our environment.
Excess mulched leaves can be placed in your garden beds. Leaf mulch can be placed into garden beds to help prevent weed growth, to conserve moisture and sprinkler usage and to provide a protective layer in winter. Shredded leaves look great, are a healthy addition to your yard and will save you the cost of buying wood mulch. Remember, to avoid damaging trees and plants, never place mulch directly against a tree trunk or shrub and never pile mulch more than 2”- 3” high in a garden bed.
Leaf mulch mowing benefits our local landscape, reduces the number of truck trips in our community and gets large piles of leaves off our streets.
For information on mulch mowing, including video tutorials, see the Love ‘Em and Leave ‘Em Mulch Mowing site at leleny.org.
If you have any questions or comments, email Scarsdale’s Conservation Advisory Council.
New Curbside Textile Recycling Program – Starting October 5
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- Written by Joanne Wallenstein
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Cleaning out your closets? Wondering what to do with old linens? Here's your answer: Westchester County has partnered with Helpsy to offer free curbside textile pickup to residents in the Village of Scarsdale. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, textile waste is the fastest-growing type of trash in the country. This program will provide a convenient way for residents to keep textiles out of the waste stream.
What happens to the clothing? According to Helpsys website, "Helpsy’s mission is to keep clothing out of the trash. 95% of what we collect can be reused or recycled. Clothing is sold primarily for reuse where higher grades are resold to thrift stores in North America and other secondhand markets around the world. The lower grades can be turned into rags for industrial use or stuffing and insulation. Clothing reuse is a big deal and it reduces the enormous environmental burden of the second most polluting industry in the world."
Beginning Saturday, October 5, residents can sign up online for curbside textile collections, which will take place weekly on Saturdays between 7am-5pm. Helpsy accepts clothing, accessories, shoes, linens, blankets, curtains, and more. See the attached flier for more information about accepted items.
Interested residents can sign up at https://www.helpsy.com/pickup or by calling Helpsy directly at 1-800-244-6350.
Police Pursue Stolen Ambulance in 3 am Cross County Car Chase
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A patient who was released at 3 am from an emergency room in New Rochelle found a novel way to leave the hospital. He stole an ambulance. He was pursued by police officers from New Rochelle, Eastchester and Scarsdale, and collided with both the Eastchester and Scarsdale Police. But even that didn't stop him. He drove through Greenburgh, White Plains and to Irvington where he was finally stopped by a collision with a utility pole.
Here's a report from the New Rochelle Police Department
At approximately 03:01 am on September 17, 2024, New Rochelle Police received a report from Empress Ambulance personnel that a patient recently released from the Emergency Room had stolen an ambulance. NRPD officers quickly located the stolen ambulance on Lawn Avenue. The vehicle, however, fled from officers who then pursued the ambulance. The pursuit led the ambulance into Eastchester, where the Eastchester Police Department and Scarsdale Police attempted to stop the vehicle. The stolen vehicle collided with both Eastchester and Scarsdale police vehicles during the chase.
The ambulance then continued to evade capture, moving through Scarsdale, Greenburgh, White Plains, and eventually into Irvington. The chase concluded when the vehicle struck a utility pole in Irvington. The suspect was taken into custody at the scene. First aid was administered, and he was transported to Westchester Medical Center for evaluation. He was later discharged after suffering only minor injuries. Remarkably, no officers or citizens sustained injuries, and no NRPD vehicles were damaged during the incident.
The New Rochelle Police Department commends the officers and supporting agencies for their swift and effective response in resolving this dangerous situation. The collaborative efforts of local law enforcement agencies ensured a safe conclusion to the incident.
ARRESTED:
Ernest Burkett, 41 years of age, of New Rochelle, NY.
CHARGES:
New York State Penal Law Sections:
120.25 Reckless Endangerment 1st Degree – D Felony
165.52 Criminal Possession of Stolen Property 2nd Degree – C Felony 155.40 Grand Larceny 2nd Degree – C Felony
270.25 Unlawful Fleeing a Police Officer 3rd Degree – A Misdemeanor 145.10 Criminal Mischief 2nd Second Degree – D Felony
Governor Signs Law to Allow Scarsdale to Remit Tax Penalties to Residents
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At long last – tax penalty relief should be coming to over 200 residents who say they never received their school tax bills last September. They missed the first installment of their school tax bills and were therefore assessed penalties for the late payments. See what happened here.
Though they were never announced the exact cause of the mail failure, the Village Trustees agreed to take steps to remit those penalties to those who missed the deadline for the first payment of the two-part process. However, since it is a matter of state law, it was necessary to introduce home rule legislation in both the NYS Assembly and the NYS Senate and once passed, have the law signed by Governor Kathy Hochul.
Now the Governor has signed the bill and here is a note from the Village explaining next steps:
On September 20, 2024, Governor Kathy Hochul signed Assembly Bill 9946 into law. This law now allows Scarsdale to provide taxpayer relief to specific residents who incurred penalties due to the USPS’s failure to deliver certain school tax bills.
As a reminder, the Scarsdale Town Board passed a home rule request in response to concerns from residents who had not received their school tax bills via USPS and consequently incurred school tax penalties. Over the summer, the corresponding bills were approved by both the Assembly and State Senate.
Next Steps: The law requires the Scarsdale Town Board to approve a process to refund the 2023-2024 real property school taxes to qualified residents. Approval of this application form will be the first item on the Town Board’s Agenda at its next meeting on October 8, 2024. Assuming the form is approved on October 8, it will be available for residents on our website on October 9. Once all necessary information is received, it is anticipated that refunds will be processed within 4-6 weeks.
The Village/Town of Scarsdale thanks Governor Hochul for signing this into law and Assemblywoman Paulin, and State Senator Mayer for making this possible.
Commenting on the news, Assemblywoman Paulin said, ““I was pleased to author a bill to help Scarsdale residents. I’ll always be responsive, legislatively or in any way I can, to help constituents and the community.”
Paulin and Westchester Assemblymembers Issue Recommendations on School Foundation Aid
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In order for NYS to determine how much funding they will grant to each school district in the state, they use a complex formula called Foundation Aid. The formula was created in 2007 “to consolidate thirty separate school aid programs into one formula, and to then distribute funds based on specific information about each school district, including enrollment, student demographics and needs, expected local contribution, and other factors.”
The current formula incorporates old or outdated data and statistics. For example, student poverty rates in each school district are currently measured based on data from the 2000 US Census, and the labor costs in the formula are based on information from 2007.
Commenting on the formula, Assemblymember Amy Paulin said, “The foundation aid formula is primarily based on property wealth without consideration of cost of living, The only correction for cost of living is the regional cost factor, and instead of combining us with New York City and Long Island they combined Westchester with counties north of us where the cost of living is significantly less. If you look at the loss of state aid to Mount Vernon alone it is $2.3 million a year. That loss is devastating to the children in that school district. In Scarsdale we can’t afford to lose the little state aid we get. My concern and the reason I authored the letter was to protect our districts from more cuts.”
The Rockefeller Institute is currently studying the formula and collecting feedback. Paulin along with Assemblymembers Gary Pretlow (D-89), Nader Sayegh (D-90), Steve Otis (D-91), MaryJane Shimsky (D-92), Chris Burdick (D-93), and Dana Levenberg (D-95) have sent this letter to the Rockefeller Institute for consideration in the Institute’s Foundation Aid Study.
Dear Foundation Aid Study Group,
We are writing as members of the State Assembly Westchester Delegation to identify issues you should consider as the Rockefeller Institute develops recommendations for changes to the Foundation Aid formula. We represent districts serving students with a wide range of needs and districts carrying the full range of classifications from high-needs to low-needs districts.
We want to take this opportunity to point out some of the financial barriers preventing school districts from providing the highest quality education to all students. We write to detail some of the funding challenges faced by the districts we represent.
As the institute continues to review the current formula, we urge you to consider the following:
1. The existing formula places high value on the use of assessed property value as a factor in determining aid. Currently, and for decades, school aid formulas used by New York State, including the Foundation Aid formula, have penalized districts in higher assessed value counties and shortchanged high-needs districts in those counties. In Westchester, high-needs districts have been penalized compared with districts with similar student profiles, economic metrics, and funding needs in other parts of the state. All our districts have been impacted negatively.
2. For decades, the Save Harmless protection has guaranteed school districts continue to receive as much operating aid as they received in the prior year. Save Harmless must be kept in place. State aid and locally raised revenues rarely keep pace with increased costs. In last year’s executive budget proposal, approximately half the districts in the state would have suffered a reduction in state funding.
Many school districts, including some districts in our region, receive very little state
aid, as little as 3 percent but still have tremendous State obligations. Elimination of Save Harmless protection results in reductions in services, often to districts already funding practically all their education budget through local property tax dollars. Elimination of Save Harmless will require more districts to seek tax cap overrides. To compound the problem, higher needs districts are far less likely to be able to succeed in winning voter approval of a tax cap override than other districts.
In the last budget, the proposal to eliminate Save Harmless would have damaged school districts for all the above reasons. Additionally, proposing to take away crucial monies from schools so abruptly and at a time they are trying to prepare their budgets for the following year, puts our schools, and our students, in an unfair and precarious financial position.
3. Foundation Aid is intended to drive unrestricted aid to districts according to need and ability to pay. However, the current formulas are based on average income and assessments, which can never adequately reflect all the nuances in each district. Any updated formula should be based on the median, not the mean, which is a more accurate measure of a district’s property wealth and ensures a few extremely wealthy outliers, a common occurrence in many school districts, are not skewing the data.
4. Since the implementation of the Foundation Aid formula, state aid has reduced reliance on expense-based or categorical aid categories. This shift has reduced the ratio of state support based upon actual experience of school districts. In most years, state aid does not adequately consider increases in the number of students with disabilities (SWDs), transportation aid, or other categorical aid lines. Within Foundation Aid, state aid does not adequately account for increases in student population or for funding of English Language Learners (ELLs).
Expenditure-driven aids are especially important for districts receiving a small percentage of their total budget in Foundation Aid. Categorical aid lines have allowed schools to continue to provide critically important services, like educating SWDs and transportation aid. The State should increase the number of expenditure-driven aid categories and increase funding to those budget lines.
Importantly, the number of SWDs, ELLs, and transportation needs vary from year to year, requiring districts to use more of their Foundation Aid to pay for these costs, meaning there is less funding available for services and programs for other students. In categories where these numbers fluctuate from year-to-year, expense-driven aid is the only fair way to ensure our schools have the resources they need for specific populations, while not adversely impacting the distribution of school funding to other students.
5. Regarding Building Aid, keep the Select Aid Ratio and do not opt for Current Aid Ratio as has been proposed in prior Executive Budgets.
Eliminating the Select Aid Ratio option in favor of a Current Aid Ratio would force many school districts to forego much needed building projects, as the cost to the taxpayer would be prohibitive.
6. The Regional Cost Index (RCI) needs to be updated to accurately reflect the cost of doing business within a region. The current RCI groups Westchester and Rockland County with rural counties, as far north as Sullivan, that have a significantly lower cost of doing business. As a result, Mount Vernon City School District has lost $2.3M annually since the inception of Foundation Aid or about $36M in state aid over the last 17 years. Each year, other school districts in our region have been adversely impacted by the inaccurate RCI like Mount Vernon has since 2007. A new formula should align Westchester school districts with the NYC and Long Island regional factor index.
7. When the Foundation Aid formula was established in 2007, a “High Tax Aid” category was included. Prior to the creation of a High Tax Aid category, Nassau and Suffolk counties had received a certain “share” or percentage of the overall State Aid budget each year and the new category allowed for these counties to maintain those “shares.” Since 2014, High Tax Aid funding has been frozen at $223.3M. Of that amount, Suffolk and Nassau Counties receive $88M and $58M, respectively, or about 65% of the total aid category. In contrast, Westchester County receives approximately $11M, or 5 percent.
The distribution of High Tax Aid monies is inherently inequitable given the formula is significantly based on the RCI, which, for reasons outlined above, in unfair. While the $11M in High Tax Aid our communities receive is nominal, schools have grown reliant on this funding, so it must not be eliminated. Rather, the formula should be updated to ensure a fairer distribution of funds and one that reflects the high property taxes a community pays.
8. While the Tax Cap is not a part of the formula directly, it has an impact on how school districts address rising costs. We suggest the Institute make a recommendation on the Tax Cap and consider:
a. Now that inflation is significantly higher than 2%, absent state support, districts won’t be able to even maintain programming at current levels as inflation on existing costs consumes more and more of the levy. Therefore, the 2% limit should be converted to the greater of 2% or inflation, so that districts are more able to address rising costs.
b. The Office of the State Comptroller (OSC) calculation of “available tax levy carryover” limits a school district’s ability to return tax savings to taxpayers. As a result, districts will tax to the maximum allowable under the Tax Levy Calculation. If the carryover calculation were simply the difference between the maximum allowable and what was actually levied, districts would know if they needed to raise more dollars in a subsequent year. The difference should be allowed to carry over to a subsequent year when the funds are needed and the capital tax levy amount from bonding should not count when determining the formula for “available carryover.”
c. By not counting the value of properties assessed under a Payment In Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) agreement in the Tax Base Growth factor, the current tax cap law ignores increases to a community’s tax base. The intent of the Tax Base Growth Factor is to ensure that, as a community grows, so too should its revenues to recognize that the community is providing services to more residences. The quantity change factor, used to determine the Tax Base Growth factor, should include the value of new assessment exempted under a PILOT agreement.
9. Currently, 89% of NYS school districts are participating in the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP). The CEP is an alternative to the household eligibility applications for free and reduced-priced lunch (FRPL). As a result of more districts participating in CEP, fewer families are completing FRPL applications and as the FRPL 3-year average declines, districts see a reduction in their Foundation Aid amount. A multiplier of the average FRPL should be considered.
10. School districts outside of New York City, which enroll more than half of the students in the state, would like to participate in the Statewide Universal Full-Day Prekindergarten (SUFDPK) program but are unable to do so due to inadequate state funding. Fully fund the SUFDPK program for the rest of the state to ensure all New York children can benefit. In addition, a standardized per pupil rate cannot work for all school districts because it does not consider the accurate cost of living in some counties outside of NYC, including Westchester County. The institute must update the Universal Prekindergarten per pupil rate to accurately reflect the true cost of educating in this area so that schools in Westchester can compete for high-quality educators.
More than 30 years ago, the Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) filed a landmark case against the State of New York, asserting the State’s school funding system violated the constitutional right of students to a “sound, basic education.” The New York State Court of Appeals ultimately ruled in favor of CFE. Subsequently, in 2007, the State enacted legislation that would increase school aid over four years by $7 billion annually and consolidated thirty aid programs into a “Foundation Aid formula.”
Our statement has outlined some of the challenges in updating the Foundation Aid formula to address gaps in the formula when it was originally crafted and new problems that have evolved over time. This letter is not an exhaustive list. Among other emerging issues are the increased need for school mental health services, ever increasing demands for school security infrastructure and staffing, and emerging public health challenges as we learned with COVID-19.
The legislature and the Governor will ultimately determine the level of state funding to education next year. It is clear from the issues we have outlined here, and from others under discussion, that a no-growth or marginal growth budget for state aid to education will not be acceptable. While this judgment may not be the central mission of the Institute in the work of this study, we hope that your report will acknowledge that increased state aid continues to be a necessity.
We appreciate the opportunity to share our thoughts on current school funding formulas. If the required timeframe does not allow the Institute to complete this study thoughtfully and thoroughly, we urge you to come back to the legislature and ask for the time that is needed. Our districts, our communities, and our kids deserve funding that provides for a quality education.
Thank you
