Cohoes Mayor Bill Keeler has delivered his fifth annual State of the City address.
Keeler gave his address at Tuesday’s Common Council meeting. The mayor says the city's finances are in good standing, noting that 2025 is the fifth straight year without any property tax increase.
"In a nutshell, the state of the city is strong, and I'm optimistic that the year ahead will be as good or better than it is right now," said Keeler. "Our finances are solidly in the black. In fact, our rainy day fund now exceeds $8 million and that's an all-time high. Some of the initiatives we put in place over the past couple years are paying dividends, literally. Our LED street light project saved the city $50,000 in its electric bill, and we received another $96,000 in energy rebates last year.
The second-term Democrat says it’s expected the Cohoes Floating Solar Array will come online this fall, saving about $500,000 annually as the city moves from being a net user to a net provider of electricity.
Keeler admits there have been setbacks, including a $10,000 drop in fourth quarter sales tax revenue along with a quarter million dollar hike in the annual cost of providing city employee health care.
"Our sewer fund took a hit last year when Mohawk Paper closed," Keeler said. "They contributed a quarter million dollars annually to the sewer fund. The Water Fund experienced a setback last year when not one but both of our raw water pumps became disabled at the same time. So there, you know, we were in crisis mode for a number of weeks. There, we're just in the process of replacing those pumps, but there's costs involved in that. And with the pumps, the rental of the pumps, for the past month, over time, there's just a lot of costs that went into that. Also, the hazardous waste tax that we imposed on Norlite a couple of years ago, that generated about $200,000 annually. But with Norlite's operation shuttered temporarily, or maybe even longer, that revenue source is probably a thing of the past."
Nonetheless, Keeler says this year will see $3.5 million in upgrades to the raw water pump station, to bring the critical piece of infrastructure into the 21st century.
Common Council Vice-President Shawn Higgins says Keeler's speech reflects the perception of optimism in the Albany County city.
"We have a lot of projects tentatively scheduled for the next coming years with state and federal grants, which is exciting, to replace some infrastructure that the city desperately needs. There's also some plans to do some upgrades to the water treatment facility, which is desperately needed as well. Currently, we are in the process of changing our ambulance service to Mohawk, which will take effect on May 1st. And other than that, everything else has been really good as of right now," Higgins said.
Keeler noted projects stemming from the $10 million dollar Downtown Revitalization Initiative grant Cohoes received from the state are coming to fruition this year, while public safety remains his top priority.
"We hired eight police officers over the last 12 months. Five firefighters. We reduced the speed limit down to 25 miles an hour to reduce the number of crashes, reduce the severity of crashes. We increased our street surveillance cameras. We are in a process of adding nine new cameras this year, so we'll be up to 25-ish all totaled," said Keeler.
