The Lysander Town Board created the town’s newest sewer district on July 31 in about as much time as it takes to read this sentence twice. Supervisor Kevin Rode gaveled a public hearing on the formation of Cold Springs Sewer District No. 1 open at 4:01 p.m. Councilor Ed Schmitt moved to close it at 4:02 p.m. No resident spoke for or against it. The meeting minutes record the moment in four words: “Hearing no comments, all ayes.”

What the board approved in that minute was not small. Cold Springs Sewer District No. 1 is a $6,982,000 project that will run sanitary sewers to 556 properties, referred to in engineering terms as equivalent dwelling units or EDUs, along a corridor that follows Hicks Road, Cold Springs Road, North Hayes Road, Camerondale Road and New York Route 370 between Baldwinsville and the hamlet of Cold Spring. The map, plan and report behind the project was prepared by CHA Consulting Inc. and filed with the Town Clerk on January 14, 2026, according to the town’s own public hearing notice.

The financing splits the cost two ways. Developers building in the district will cover the larger share, $3,812,000, a figure that is not stated outright in the town’s notice but follows directly from subtracting the public portion from the total project cost. Onondaga County taxpayers within the new district will be on the hook for the remaining $3,170,000, to be raised through town bonds and repaid by special assessments on the benefited parcels. That means developers are financing about 54.6 percent of the project and the public portion covers about 45.4 percent, a CNY Signal calculation based on the two dollar figures in the town’s notice.

The town is also seeking public financing help through the New York State Environmental Facilities Corporation and other sources for construction and administrative costs, according to the July 16 order calling the hearing.

Underneath the dollar figures is a specific construction list. The project calls for approximately 11,000 linear feet of 8 inch PVC gravity sewer main, 40 manholes, one sewer lateral, 3,000 linear feet of 12 inch PVC gravity sewer main, one pump station, 3,700 linear feet of HDPE force main, one air release valve structure, one cleanout station, 960 square yards of asphalt and 3,633 square yards of mulch and seeding. Added together, the three pipe segments total 17,700 linear feet, or roughly 3.35 miles of new sewer line, a CNY Signal calculation.

The pump station carries its own name in the environmental paperwork: the Melvin Farms Pump Station. Wastewater from the district will flow south along Hicks Road starting just south of Patchett Road, cross Cold Springs Road, run along Hayes Road, and collect at the new pump station, which will push flow through a pressurized force main to the Baldwinsville Seneca Knolls wastewater treatment plant. The pump station is designed with multiple pumps specifically so the district can grow in stages, according to the short environmental assessment form the town filed. Dry sewers already stubbed in on Brickwalk Way, Rania Road, Nuha Street and Gloria Drive will tie into the new gravity lines, and a new gravity sewer will run along Camerondale Road, connecting at Hicks Road.

The engineering notice also puts a number on how much wastewater the district is designed to handle. Each EDU is engineered for an average flow of 270 gallons per day. Multiplied across 556 EDUs, that works out to an average daily flow of about 150,120 gallons a day moving through the Melvin Farms Pump Station toward the treatment plant, a CNY Signal calculation based on the per EDU flow figure in the town’s filing. The environmental assessment form also flags the project as a permitted use under current zoning and consistent with the town’s adopted comprehensive plan, and it lists a second layer of government sign off still required beyond the town’s own approval: design approval for the pump station from both the state Department of Environmental Conservation and Onondaga County’s Water Environment Protection division.

The per property math is where the town’s paperwork gets specific about what residents in the district will actually pay. The notice breaks the annual cost per EDU into three pieces: $327 a year in debt service on the bonds, a $475 per EDU fee to Onondaga County for water environment protection, and $186 per EDU for annual closed circuit television inspection of the dry sewer network. Added together, that comes to $988 per EDU in the first year, a total the town’s own notice does the arithmetic on. Separately, the notice puts the estimated cost for a typical property to physically hook up to the new sewer main at $5,000.

That $988 figure matters because of a New York State Comptroller’s Office rule. The Comptroller’s Office uses $1,010 per year as its threshold for what it considers a “typical property” cost when deciding whether a new sewer district needs its office’s direct approval. Lysander’s estimated first year cost per EDU of $988 falls $22 below that threshold, or about 2.2 percent under the line, a CNY Signal calculation. Staying under the threshold means the district could proceed under the standard process set out in Article 12-A of state Town Law, subject to a permissive referendum, rather than triggering a separate state review.

A permissive referendum means the board’s July 31 vote is not automatically final. Under Article 12-A, residents in the town have a window to petition for a public vote on the sewer district’s formation. If no valid petition is filed within the legal window, the board’s resolution stands without a townwide vote.

The town’s own environmental paperwork shows the project sits in ecologically sensitive ground even as it clears a “no significant impact” finding. In the short environmental assessment form filed with the state, the town checked “yes” that the roughly nine acre project site is located in or adjoins a state listed Critical Environmental Area, checked “yes” that the site is in the 100 year or 500 year flood plain, checked “yes” that the site contains wetlands or other regulated waterbodies, and listed two species associated with the site under the state and federal threatened or endangered list: the Indiana bat and the Lake sturgeon. The form also identifies forest, agricultural and grassland, wetland and suburban land as the habitat types on or near the site, alongside rural, commercial, residential and aquatic land uses adjoining the project. Despite those checkmarks, the town, acting as its own lead agency under the State Environmental Quality Review Act, classified the sewer district as an “Unlisted” action and determined in Part 3 of the assessment form that the project “will not result in any significant adverse environmental impacts.” The board formally adopted that SEQR determination in the same July 31 meeting where it closed the one minute public hearing.

Supervisor Rode signed the environmental assessment form on July 14, and it lists Rode himself, using the town’s general email address for the supervisor’s office, as both the applicant and sponsor of the project. The meeting record shows Rode presiding alongside Councilors Vince Mangan and Ed Schmitt, with Councilor Jeff Kudarauskas marked absent for the July 31 special session. Town Attorney David Herkala attended along with what the minutes describe only as “several guests and residents,” none of whom rose to speak during the one minute hearing window.

Beyond declaring itself SEQR lead agency and adopting the sewer district resolution, the board took five more financial actions in the same eight minute meeting. It authorized a project fund of $3,170,000 for the district. It authorized the town engineer to go out to bid for construction. It authorized a $250,000 loan from the town’s general fund to cover the engineering and design phase of the project, roughly 7.9 percent of the total public portion, a CNY Signal calculation. It amended the town budget line SS-08110-428 by that same $250,000. And it approved the Town of Lysander’s procurement policy, a separate housekeeping item unrelated to the sewer project.

The board closed out the July 31 session with three items that had nothing to do with sewers. It approved a $5,000 payment to Comptroller Linda Pease for completing the town’s 2025 Annual Financial Report. It accepted the resignation of Tony Caputa from the Parks and Recreation Department, effective July 20. And it accepted the resignation of Bonnie Kisselstein as town historian, effective July 16.

The legal notice for the sewer district hearing ran in the Post-Standard on July 21, ten days before the hearing, which Town Clerk Dina Falcone confirmed met the Article 12-A requirement that notice be published not more than 20 nor less than 10 days before the hearing date. The full legal description of the district’s boundary, covering parts of lot numbers 89, 90, 93, 94, 95, 97 and 100 in the town, runs more than five pages in the filed order and traces a line along the centerlines of Route 370, Brick Walk Way, North Hayes Road, Hicks Road, River Road and Melvin Lane, threading between dozens of individually named parcels recorded in the Onondaga County Clerk’s Office.

Lysander’s population stood at 23,074 as of the 2020 Census. The 556 EDUs in the new sewer district represent a slice of that population concentrated in the Cold Springs corridor between Baldwinsville and Cold Spring, an area the town’s own filing describes as a mix of forest, agriculture, wetland and suburban residential land use, not the urban core of the town.

Sources and verification

This story is built from primary documents filed by the Town of Lysander: the July 16, 2026 Order Call for and Noticing Public Hearing Concerning the Creation of the Cold Springs Sewer District #1, including its attached legal boundary description; the Short Environmental Assessment Form for Cold Springs Sewer District #1 dated July 31, 2026; and the July 31, 2026 Town Board Special Meeting minutes recording resolutions RES#147/2026 through RES#159/2026. All three documents are publicly posted on the Town of Lysander’s website. Population figures are drawn from the 2020 U.S. Census. Dollar totals, EDU counts, linear footage and per EDU fee figures are quoted directly from the town’s filings; percentages, per foot costs and the developer financed dollar amount are CNY Signal calculations performed on those underlying figures, as noted in the text.