The following letter was published in this week’s issue of the Gazette.
To the Editor,
Oh, boy!! Wowie!! Ladies and gentlemen, girls and boys, drop whatever you’re doing and dash down to Croton Point Avenue (CPA) and see what our village board and 4.5 million taxpayer dollars (although it may be five, or even six, million dollars by now) have bought you.
We now have a new sidewalk on the north side of the street—that looks pretty much like the one we had before construction started. And another sidewalk on the south side that almost no one will use. But the board must feel it’s offensive to ask anyone to cross the street at the South Riverside light and use the north side sidewalk. So they put in another one. Why not? It’s not their money.
We also have two itsy-bitsy bike lanes that, again, hardly anyone will use—no one ever took a bicycle census to determine how many commuters actually used bicycles even before the pandemic struck. And those bike lanes are protected from the heavy traffic on CPA by . . . thick stripes of white paint on the pavement. That’ll really protect those cyclists. And, to fit all of that in, the width of car lanes has been reduced by nearly 10% making both drivers and cyclists less safe than they were before. So it’s probably a good thing that there won’t be many cyclists on the road.
“The crowning glory of the CPA project is the greatest concentration of traffic lights on the East Coast. There are twenty-nine—count ’em—twenty-nine lights (although I may have missed a couple) swinging in the breeze and delaying you as you pass through the area. And especially at night, we have this incredible light show as they change from red to green to amber and back to red again. All computer controlled! This may even put the Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze out of business. And it only cost us 4.5 million bucks. What a deal!!”
But the crowning glory of the CPA project is the greatest concentration of traffic lights on the East Coast. There are twenty-nine—count ’em—twenty-nine lights (although I may have missed a couple) swinging in the breeze and delaying you as you pass through the area. And especially at night, we have this incredible light show as they change from red to green to amber and back to red again. All computer controlled! This may even put the Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze out of business. And it only cost us 4.5 million bucks. What a deal!!
The financing of the project was the true demonstration of the board’s genius. Originally estimated at $1.5 million, our board was able to triple the cost even before the first shovel hit the ground. Those federal and state subsidies? Don’t forget that they’re also taxpayer money. It’s just that we were able to snooker a bunch of other taxpayers to pour funds into this turkey.
And the county “subsidy?” ’Fraid not. That was money the county gave to the village for the perpetual maintenance of CPA when Croton assumed responsibility for the road from the county. And now it’s all gone. The original concrete roadway was in pretty good shape and didn’t require much maintenance. But in a few years, the new asphalt surface will experience the same pot holes that occur in all heavily travelled streets, and their repair will come right out of the pockets of us beleaguered taxpayers. The one place we really did need an overhaul, the right hand northbound lane on South Riverside between CPA and Benedict Blvd., was deleted from the project for cost reasons and remains a real challenge to your car’s suspension. But I guess we can always borrow more money to fix that later. Why not? All us taxpayers are rollin’ in it.
The construction contract itself was another example of the board’s fiscal acumen. When the original low bid came in at $2.9 million, the board rejected it. It’s much too high, they told us. We’ll rebid in a few months and lock in a much lower cost.
And then—when the new bids came in—the low bid had ballooned to $3.8 million. Only about a million dollars more. And they fell all over themselves signing on to it. How devilishly clever they were. What a coup! Way to go guys!!
The whole purpose of the project (they told us) was to improve traffic flow into and out of the station parking lot. But now, due to the pandemic, utilization of the lot has dropped dramatically, and no one really believes that it will ever return to pre-pandemic levels. So we will be paying off the project’s millions of dollars of bonds for decades for no real benefit. Now it wouldn’t be fair to claim that the board should have anticipated the pandemic, but their blind obsession to go forward with this project, despite all of the myriad objections raised against it, has put us in this unenviable position.
Is it any wonder that there was no self-congratulatory announcement when the project was finished, much less a ribbon cutting? I guess they just hoped that no one would notice and recall its sordid history.
Is CPA the very worst decision that a Croton board has ever made? Well, it’s certainly right up there. But I think we’d have the give the ultimate prize to the board’s acceptance of the Gouveia property. You know Gouveia. The place where nobody goes, except, of course, your hard earned tax dollars which continue to pour into it without limit. And the board still doesn‘t have a clue about what to do with it.
Sincerely,
Joel E. Gingold