Canastota Opens Street Paving Bids August 5 as State Awards to the Village Top $5.3 Million

Sealed bids for Canastota’s 2026 street paving contract are due at the village office at 205 South Peterboro Street by 4 p.m. on Wednesday, August 5, and Mayor Rosanne Warner’s Board of Trustees will open the envelopes in public at its regular 7 p.m. meeting the same night. The contract covers roughly 100,538 square feet of village pavement, about 2.3 acres of asphalt, spread across seven village streets.

The bid opening caps a heavy eight weeks for a village of about 4,500 people. Since June 30, Canastota has landed an $860,463 state grant to rebuild its Recreation Park off North Main Street, advertised the paving contract, and run a five day America 250 celebration that ended with fireworks and a first responder softball doubleheader, all while holding the $4.5 million NY Forward award for seven downtown projects that the state announced in May 2025. Counting NY Forward and the park grant together, state awards to the village since May 2025 total $5,360,463, roughly $1,195 for every resident counted in the latest Census Bureau estimate.

What the paving contract covers

The village’s request for sealed bids, posted July 16 by the Office of the Village Administrator, itemizes the work street by street. The largest single piece is First Street from Tuttle Avenue to Will New Boulevard, a 1,495 foot run 27 feet wide, where contractors will mill only the driveway approaches and add two inches of modified binder over the existing surface.

Clark Street from Roberts Street to Canal Street, 1,169 feet long and 26 feet wide, gets the full treatment: three inches milled off, then 1.5 inches of type 3 binder topped with 1.5 inches of modified binder. Tuttle Avenue from First Street to Third Street, a 780 foot stretch 30 feet wide, gets the same three inch mill and repave. A short piece of Ravine Street, 30 feet by 40 feet just north of First Street, needs no milling at all.

The notice also lists five smaller patch sections that village Department of Public Works crews will mark on the pavement: two on Madison Boulevard near numbers 1 and 51, two on Technology Boulevard, and one 8 foot by 100 foot section on Dominic Bruno Boulevard. Each gets a two inch mill and two inches of modified binder. Add up every listed dimension and the contract totals 100,538 square feet, a CNY Signal calculation from the bid document. The three full length street segments alone cover 3,444 linear feet, about two thirds of a mile.

The fine print is standard municipal contracting with real teeth. Every bid must arrive itemized by street in a sealed envelope with a bid security worth 5 percent of the total price. The winner must post a performance bond and a labor and materials bond for 100 percent of the bid, carry a $1,000,000 certificate of insurance, register with the New York State Department of Labor, and pay prevailing wages under Prevailing Rate Case 2026018147. Contractors who wanted to walk the streets in person had until July 24 to book a site review with the DPW foreman. One more detail that matters to a village budget: Canastota keeps ownership of all the millings.

The village reserves the right to reject all bids and readvertise, and the notice says the winning bidder will be notified by email or telephone after the August 5 opening.

An $860,463 rebuild for a 60 year old park

The paving contract is village money. The bigger checks this summer are coming from Albany. On June 30, Governor Kathy Hochul announced that Canastota will receive $860,463 from Round 2 of the Municipal Parks and Recreation Grant Program to rehabilitate the Canastota Recreation Park off North Main Street. The project will refurbish the soccer, baseball, and softball fields, resurface the basketball and tennis courts, build a new pickleball court, add parking, modernize the restrooms, and improve accessibility throughout the park.

“Our Recreation Park is more than 60 years old and has never had a major renovation of this magnitude. We are elated that this grant award will be used to update the park,” Mayor Rosanne Warner said in the village’s announcement.

The grant program is funded by the $4.2 billion Clean Water, Clean Air and Green Jobs Environmental Bond Act that voters approved in 2022, and it is administered by the state Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation. Round 2 awarded more than $10 million to 20 projects statewide. Awards are capped at $900,000 and can cover up to 90 percent of eligible project costs, which means Canastota is responsible for a local match of at least 10 percent. If the $860,463 award represents the full 90 percent share, the total project would run at least $956,070, with the village covering at least $95,607, a CNY Signal calculation from the program terms.

Canastota’s award stacks up well against the rest of the state. Four of the 20 projects hit the $900,000 cap: playground reconstructions in the Village of Mamaroneck and the Bronx, a park overhaul in the Town of Herkimer, and a new skate and bike park in Elmira. Canastota’s $860,463 is the fifth largest award statewide and the largest in the Central Region, where the only other winner was the City of Auburn, which received $492,555 to reconstruct the tennis and pickleball courts at Casey Park on North Division Street.

“These grants will help communities with a range of projects to encourage New Yorkers to ‘Get Offline, Get Outside’ and enjoy healthy, active recreation,” Hochul said in the announcement. State Parks Commissioner Kathy Moser said the program is “creating new opportunities for communities across New York to expand access to outdoor recreation.” State Senator Rachel May, whose district covers the Central New York awards, put it more plainly: “Parks are where families spend time together, neighbors meet, kids play, and people enjoy the outdoors.”

The park the state is paying to rebuild was in heavy use nine days before the bid deadline. On Sunday, July 26, it hosted the Hometown Heroes Softball Showdown, the closing event of Canastota’s America 250 week, with Canastota American Legion Post 140 facing VFW Post 600 and the Greater Lenox Ambulance Service in game one, and the Canastota Police Department taking on the Canastota Fire Department in game two, first pitch at 9 a.m. The five day celebration, which ran July 22 to 26, also packed in a kids pool party at the village pool at 100 Spencer Street, three nights of the Canastota Community Carnival at Douglas Chandler Firemen’s Field on Hickory Street with rides from Ontario Amusements, and free fireworks at dusk on Saturday, July 25.

The $4.5 million already in the pipeline on Canal Street

The park grant is the newest state award, but not the largest. In May 2025, Canastota won $4.5 million in Round 2 of the NY Forward program, the state’s downtown revitalization fund for smaller communities. The seven funded projects, announced by the state on May 15, 2025, sum to exactly $4.5 million and cluster around the village’s Erie Canal era core.

The largest single award is $1,706,000 for the North Canal Street Park and streetscape, which includes Rotary Park improvements, a canal overlook, a pavilion, water circulation features, and a boat launch. Another $575,000 goes to converting a historic Canal Street building into a farm brewery with a tasting room, and $172,000 will restore the commercial building at 138 Canal Street with a new facade, porch, and walkways, with ground floor space leased below market rate. The Farr Building gets $450,000 for a taproom and welcome center, the ZEMS and Penny’s site gets $239,000 for a two acre community gathering space with 600 feet of new sidewalk, a gazebo, and a music stage, and $500,000 seeds a mixed use pocket neighborhood with approximately 51 housing units on a vacant downtown site. The Canastota Fire House rounds out the list with an $858,000 renovation covering an elevator, ADA compliant restrooms, and window replacement.

“The Village of Canastota is very excited about the economic and social benefits these NY Forward projects will bring to our community,” Warner said when the awards were announced.

The paving contract touches that same geography. Clark Street, the most intensive repave on the 2026 list, dead ends into Canal Street, the corridor where four of the seven NY Forward projects sit. The Canal Town Museum at 122 Canal Street anchors the block the state plan is built around.

A small village carrying a large project load

Canastota is a village of 3.34 square miles in the Madison County town of Lenox, with an estimated 4,487 residents according to the Census Bureau’s 2020 to 2024 American Community Survey. Median household income in the village is $74,015 and the median home value is $144,800 per the same survey, which is why a summer with $5.36 million in state awards, plus a village funded paving program, reads as an outsized construction season. Measured against the ACS population estimate, the two state awards work out to roughly $1,195 per resident.

The village is best known as the home of the International Boxing Hall of Fame, and the Hall’s campus near Thruway Exit 34 doubles as village infrastructure in the summer. The Canastota Recreation Commission’s free 2026 Summer Concert Series runs Thursday evenings from June 25 through August 20 at the Hall of Fame’s Events Pavilion, 6 to 8 p.m., weather permitting. The night after the bid opening, Thursday, August 6, is a scheduled concert night.

What happens Wednesday night

The bids come out of their envelopes at the Board of Trustees meeting at 7 p.m. on August 5, and each one must be itemized street by street, so the board and the public will see exactly what every segment of Clark, First, Tuttle, and Ravine costs per the bid form. The board is not required to award that night and can reject every bid and readvertise. Its next scheduled meeting is August 19, per the village meeting calendar.

Between now and then, the park money comes with homework: the state pays Municipal Parks and Recreation grants on a reimbursement basis, so the village fronts the costs as the work happens and bills Albany afterward. The concert series has three Thursday dates left at the Events Pavilion, including one the night after the bid opening.

The first number to watch arrives at 7 p.m. Wednesday, when the sealed envelopes come open and the low bid on 100,538 square feet of Canastota pavement goes into the public record.