Cold Spring: Not Only a Fall Destination

By Holly Crocco

While Cold Spring has long been a destination for tourists during the fall leaf-peeping season, visitors actually start flocking to the village months ahead of that, according to data assembled over the past two years through a computer-aided design system.

Cold Spring Police Department Commanding Officer Matthew Jackson explained during the Jan. 14 village board meeting that since the CAD system was implemented by the county in December 2023, law enforcement agencies across Putnam have been able to track much finer-grained data and reports that summarize police activity, and subsequently help them to better police their jurisdictions.

“A lot of things surprised me,” said Jackson of the information he complied from 2024 and 2025.

Using information extracted from the CAD system – including types of incidents, call numbers throughout the year, and proactive versus reactive activity – Jackson said he can better manage the department’s resources.

He said 2024 and 2025 were consistent in the number of calls requesting police intervention, and when.

“The community’s demand for police services remained the same in 2024 and 2025, with reactive call activity at 962 – the same exact number both years,” he said.

However, what was most surprising was the season when activity started to rise: both years, the call volume started to rise in April and peaked in May-June, tapered off in October, but then shot up again in November and December.

“People are coming here and the cars are coming here a lot sooner than expected, and we need to prepare for that a lot sooner than we normally do,” said Jackson, who noted that the village always assumed peak season was the in fall. “Judging by this data it’s not the fall – it’s spring and it continues through the fall.”

The CAD data showed that most of the calls that came in during those times were traffic related and EMS related, “and most of those calls came from Main Street, Chestnut, and Route 9D,” said Jackson. “A lot of it is parking complaints.”

He noted that increasing the number of parking enforcement officers won’t alleviate any work for police because the department still fields the calls and has to respond to any vehicle collisions.

“I want to see the increase in vehicle and pedestrian traffic and the correlation to calls,” said Jackson.

The commanding officer also pointed out that the popular Breakneck Ridge trailhead was closed in 2025 as part of construction of the planned Fjord Trail, and “once those trails open back up, these numbers are going to be higher and that puts a strain on what we have here – not just the police department, but the village as a whole.”

“The sheer number of people that are coming to this village year by year, it’s going up, it’s going up, it’s going up, but what we’re doing is staying the same because we can’t do anything – there’s nothing else we can do with what we have right now,” he said.

Foley explained that in developing the draft environmental impact statement, planners of the Fjord Trail placed counting devices and cameras at “particular intersections” for “particular periods of time” to gather information about how the trail would impact tourism in Cold Spring. However, village officials say the timing and location of the counts don’t capture peak usage of the trails.

“There’s a reality of rising numbers of people visiting and we have to manage them – and it’s just real and it’s a budgetary reality for us,” she said. “I expected the numbers to be higher for us in the spring than we had though originally. I didn’t expect them to be higher than the fall… The season has grown. We can’t just plan for leaf-peeping anymore, because that’s gone. We’re a destination for 10 months of the year.”

“We’re a tourist attraction, and it’s going to bring people here,” added Jackson. “There’s good things and there’s bad things about it. I think we should embrace the good things about it, but we need to prepare for that increase in people visiting the village during those times of year, and it’s definitely putting a strain on resources – not just the police department but the village as a whole.”

Further, he added, “The time of year we need to start preparing for is a lot sooner than we all thought it would be.”

Foley gave a shout-out to the county for enabling all the law enforcement agencies across Putnam to record and share data via the CAD system.

“For all of the times that we express our frustrations with shared services or funding from the county, this is one of the times where we have to recognize a real benefit,” she said. “We do pay for CAD, but it is greatly reduced because it is subsidized by the county.”

The CAD report is available at www.coldspringny.gov/AgendaCenter/ViewFile/Agenda/_01142026-94 (beginning on page 31).