What's in bloom now for Arcadian Revival's Bethany Bowyer Khan
Data, tech and your real estate taxes...find out why you might get an updated bill.
Welcome to the Daily Dispatch, the future of Spa City news straight to your inbox.
In this edition:
Top: Fall décor and the changes for Saratoga’s Arcadian Revival.
Mid: Briefs and events
Bottom: Accounts Department “finds” money; find out how and if that might increase your taxes.
Fall, styled: marrying country chic with Saratoga flair
Fresh off a ‘Country Living’ spotlight, Bethany Bowyer Khan leans into fall with podcasts, pumpkins and other autumnal delights with her brand, Arcadian Revival.
By: Abby Tegnelia
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With her family officially back in school mode, designer and influencer Bethany Bowyer Khan is leaning into her other fall adventure: expanding her wildly successful seasonal living brand, Arcadian Revival.
To do so, she’s taking a long look at the projects she has going for her business, which touts bringing ever-changing seasonal décor and touches of nature inside the home via one’s garden, sustainable florals and even what you cook.
“I've had to take a real step back to reassess the next chapter of Arcadian Revival,” says Khan, who in 2020 moved to Wilton from Brooklyn with her husband, Jamil (they now have a family of four with first-grader Natalie and Christopher, 3). “I've taken a lot of time this past year to actually live what I'm preaching about sustainability and being an environmentalist. I have become more engaged with living a more balanced lifestyle and representing my own value system. It's my way of feeling good about how I spend my time as a community member and as a parent.”
Her goal as a designer and content creator: to conjure up a sense of time and place inside the home — including repurposing, using or framing mementos or items passed down in one’s family. (For reference, she grew up in Ohio in the same home as her parents, grandparents and great-grandparents.) For a sense of Khan’s ethos, take a look at her podcast, Things I Learned from My Mother.
“It's about generational wisdom, the things that bring people together through community and through their connections to nature,” she says. “The name is a play on the word mother. So it's not necessarily just about anyone's personal relationship with their mother, but about all these other things that tug at the heartstrings or connect us in a really human way.”
If you’re new to Khan’s brand, you’re in for an autumnal treat. She’s currently decorating with tomato vines from her garden and heirloom blooms foraged from a nearby farm, and is in love with planting fall bulbs and the season’s “festive spirit.” She makes bakes pies with McIntosh apples from her property, hosts neighbors for an apple harvest celebration where they press cider, and even churns out old-fashioned apple cinnamon ice cream with her family.
Fresh off an appearance in rustic-charm bible Country Living, Khan also stays busy writing the Substack (Arcadian Revivalist) that she launched in the spring with an adjoining YouTube channel — all while keeping up with her interior design work. (Plus she’s on the board of Saratoga Plan, is Vice Chair of the Board of Sustainable Saratoga, and is the chair for Pitney Meadows’ annual Fire Feast fundraiser.) She even piled on a separate newsletter, Arcadian Revival Press, which she calls a “behind-the-scenes peek into the business and aggregation of everything we’re doing — all in one place.” Subscribers will get some freebies (think recipes and design tips).
“The Substack is a way to connect with the audience at a deeper level than what you can do with pictures on Instagram,” she says. “It's more substantive but in a fun way where we still talk about styling your home and celebrating the seasons.”
She has even built a home design and kitchen studio for sharing recipes and creating pressed botanicals without getting in her family’s way. Even its design reflects Khan’s connection to family and nature.
“This way, I can continue to share more content from there without taking up my family space in the kitchen upstairs,” she says. “The island custom built for sharing videos was inspired from an antique general store counter that was my kitchen island growing up. There’s also a hatchway that goes right out to our garden — so there's going to be a lot more garden-to-table content to come.”
News briefs
Hochul appoints SEDC’s Greg Connors to SUNY ESU’s council
Connors has a distinguished career spanning nearly five decades in real estate, economic development, and community and government relations. In August 2023, Connors was appointed president and CEO of the SEDC. His career highlights include a decade of leadership at GlobalFoundries’ Office of Government Relations and his tenure as town and county supervisor for Stillwater. There, he co-authored legislation that established the Luther Forest Technology Campus, now home to GlobalFoundries Fab 8. Connors also authored the only municipal tax revenue sharing agreement in New York state.
“I am honored to join SUNY Empire’s University Council and look forward to collaborating with its dedicated group of leaders,” Connors said in a statement.
The council advises the university’s president and acts as a watchdog to make sure the college is fulling its mission, the University Council website says. SUNY ESU is organized statewide, but has its headquarters in Saratoga Springs.
News briefs
SPAC announces unique new residency for flamenco dancers
Flamenco Vivo Carlota Santana will bring the intense and sacred Spanish dance form to SPAC School of the Arts with a 2025 residency, SPAC announced today, September 18. The esteemed flamenco dance company’s one-week residency will run October 12-16 and include a prestigious international competition, workshops and an exciting masterclass.
The Flamenco Certamen USA competition fosters the growth of the revered historical art form worldwide; winners receive scholarships to study the emotional dance in its native Spain. While at SPAC, dancers will work with live musicians and receive top-level instruction. A final performance will take place in NYC on October 18.
Learn more or register at spac.org.
Tech, digital data and your real estate tax bill: Accounts Department shows off $112M of 'new' property on the tax rolls.
Scroll down to learn if you have done something that will increase your taxes.
By: Stephen Thurston
[For a shareable link to this story, alone, click here.]
The City of Saratoga Springs has added more than $112 million to its $3.8 billion real estate tax assessment roll over the past two and a half years, the accounts department has reported. The numbers were shared in a recent city council meeting, and in an interview with the Dispatch. The increases are being found as the department combs through two lists of land records, totaling 2,200 properties. About 1,100 properties have been checked, with the assessed value each property increasing, if needed.
This is part of a bigger project of data assessment that Commissioner of Accounts Dillon Moran outlined shortly after he first took office in January 2023. The object, he said, is to make sure everyone’s property is assessed at the right level and therefore everyone pays their fair share of taxes.
“The work we do increases revenue without increasing taxes on the citizens,” although some will see their tax bill corrected, he said.
Pools, roofs, garage add-ons? For more on what house additions are affected (and if you’ll owe back taxes), keep reading…
The first list
Moran and Accounts Department staff explained that in 2024, the city finished checking a backlog of building permits, certificates of occupancy or other documentation that shows where development has been completed in the city.
This is the first list: a spreadsheet created by earlier Accounts Department staff that listed all of the certificates of occupancy that the city had collected but had not processed.
In other words, land owners had completed work on their properties, and the city’s inspectors had approved the new construction for use, but the city had not added the changes to the tax roll. Some of the files dated back to 2017 or even 2015, with the backlog further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
At this point, the city is caught up with the backlog and can handle new files as they come from the building department.
The 5% rule in new assessments
Historically, the system has been a paper file system that somehow missed being burned or drenched during the fire that destroyed a portion of City Hall in 2018.
“All of the water from the damage that happened came down through this office,” Moran said, indicating a corner of the ceiling in the Accounts Department on City Hall’s main floor. “Somehow, through the grace of God, these files were not destroyed. Somehow they made it.”
The files, 9,800 of them for residences in the city, make up the history of each property — what was built upon it, what changes were made, and when. They often include hand-drawn floor plans on graph paper to indicate where an addition — using a blue pen — was built , or — in red ink — removed.
“They wouldn't do a new record card,” said Assistant Assessor David Eaton. “It was just like, draw the lines on here, and after a while,...you can't figure out what's going on.”
The process, then and now, was to make sure a property’s tax assessment reflects any major changes made to the home.
Of the 900 in the initial list, 680 had improvements large enough to change their tax bill, Eaton said.
Not every change is added to the tax roll. The city is looking for development that increases the gross living area of the property by at least 5%. And a 5% change in size does not necessarily require a 5% larger tax bill. The size increase simply tells the city to calculate a new assessment; it does not say how big the change is.
A new roof would not be enough; even a new swimming pool or a garage rebuilt on the original cement pad would likely not trigger the 5% rule.
However, an addition on the side of the house could.
As they worked their way through the pile of property record folders, they digitized the information, with the help of software contractors. At the same time, another contractor used A.I., maps, satellite images and other information and found about 1,300 more properties that might have been changed by 5% or more in years past, beyond the 10 or so years that the initial list included.
This list of 1,300 was the second list, and the city has made its way through about 200 of those properties, often visiting the sites to see if the building on the ground matches what the city has in its record. The city has found that 23 to 25 of the 200 had already been on the first list and their information updated on the tax roll.
What has turned up in the 200, however, were three or four houses that had been built going back to 2010 but had never made it onto the tax roll.
“The house was complete,” Eaton said. “It just got missed.”
In those cases, the owners were paying taxes on unimproved land, the lowest possible valuation of the property, Moran said, even though they won approval for construction and built a house.
The city is not “clawing back” the missed taxes but adjusting the assessment and moving on. It is often not the fault of the landowner that the improvement was missed.
What digitization can do
In 2024 they found improvements worth about $75 million dollars to the total tax base, and through July 2025, more than $37 million has been found. The $112 million is nearly 3% of the city’s entire residential real estate roll of $3.8 billion.
All of this comes without running a full revaluation of the entire city’s real estate, Moran said. The last time the city contracted for that, in 2005 according to state documents, it went so badly it remained a hot election topic into the 2020s.
“We turned it digital, and now, because it's digital, we can do a whole lot more” than simply make sure everyone is paying their taxes, he said. First of all, they can now stay more easily up-to-date with new property information and will not gain the backlog they once had.
Also, Moran has maintained that the city needs more housing, especially affordable housing, and Moran has been pushing to increase the use of Accessory Dwelling Units (think apartments over garages or small cottages next to a main home). He is looking to create maybe 400 units in the city. Currently, they are zoned only in two zoning districts, and there might only be room for 80 of the 400 units there, he said by way of example. With the digitized data, he can see where they might fit more ADUs and could work toward a zoning change or variance that would allow for the ADUs to be placed elsewhere.
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