ALEXANDRIA — All three town board members who attended Thursday’s public hearing for a moratorium on island development in the marine residential district voted in favor of the yearlong measure.
ALEXANDRIA â The town of Alexandria has received about $668,000 in grant funding and more than $2.5 million in interest-free financing for its ongoing project to add sewer lines to a stretch of Route 12 between Alexandria and Clayton.
The awards came as part of a $48 million grant and low-cost loan award from the state Environmental Facilities Corporation announced April 8. Alexandria is one of 15 recipients of money to be used for drinking water or environmental protection facilities, like sewers, wastewater treatment plans, drinking water filtration facilities and other infrastructure.
âWe had applied for that grant a while ago,â said Town Supervisor Brent H. Sweet. âWe were very pleasantly surprised to see the dollar amount.â
Among a grid of faces, a silent talking head is interrupted: âYouâre muted.â
Streamed live online or posted as video conference links, public meetings look and sound different from pre-pandemic town hall and school cafeteria gatherings. The global and ongoing COVID-19 health crisis has ushered virtual meetings to the fore of government operations, inviting public participation through screens and chat boxes.
In the year since the first wave of the pandemic, and like people around the world, public meetings have undergone a sort of existential crisis: What exactly constitutes an open, public meeting?
In the tri-county region, Jefferson, Lewis and St. Lawrence County public officials have logged onto Zoom Video Communications, YouTube, Facebook, Google Meet and Cisco Webex â to name a few â to do the publicâs business.