by teachref09
While listening to the WINY Talk Show this morning (Monday)I heard a woman talking about voting down the proposed bonding issue for the salt shed/Town Garage. Is every building project in the Town of Woodstock going to be called a “Taj Mahal?” First it was the new Town Hall then it was the purchase of the Data General Property to build a middle school. The Elementary School Renovations was cut back because it was going to be another Taj Mahal! And now the salt shed/Town Garage is going to be, yes you guessed it, a Taj Mahal! Maybe Woodstock has been relocated to India, like most jobs in America. How come no one calls Woodstock Academy’s building projects “Taj Mahals?” Oh, it’s ok to make Woodstock taxpayers pay for whatever the Academy wants without question, everything else is a “Taj Mahal” when it comes to town building projects.
I also heard that screeching woman on winy this
morning. She sounded like the village idiot.
Complaining about everything and saying nothing.
It’s interesting reading Dean’s comments in the Villager this week. Apparently “About $1 million of the funds would be used to remediate the contaminated soil at the property, as well as the solid waste and salt.” That’s just over 1/3 of the $2.9M project. That doesn’t include the damage to adjacent property values, the lost revenue to the farm next door due to decreased yields before the new wells were built, any possible health impact on the neighbors, decreased life of the town’s trucks, etc, etc, etc. It is expensive to ignore infrastructure.
This is why we cannot continue to do everything on the cheap when it comes to our town’s infrastructure. We are not saving any money, we are just deferring costs for few years a paying a lot more down the line. To go along with the increased long term cost we get the cheap and ill maintained infrastructure that we are willing to pay for with a short term outlook. We are getting the worst of both worlds, we pay more AND we get a sub-standard infrastructure.
In the future lets do this right the first time around and keep maintaining our infrastructure. Spending a large pile of money to clean up our mess because we couldn’t maintain our infrastructure, now that’s wasting my tax dollars.
Thanks,
Kevin
This post represents my personal opinions and in no way should be considered an official act of the BOE or that I am speaking on behalf of the BOE in any way.
Kevin;
We are going to pay for our own mess one way or another.
Not counting the expensive clean up, imagine having to invest in
equipment that hauls caustic material (salt) and no way to clean it off!
Db
This afternoon I saw the State Highway Trucks going up and down Route 169/171 spraying that new chemical that keeps snow/ice from freezing on the roads. Is this stuff going to work? Does Woodstock Highway Dept. have the same chemicals to treat the roads? Can anyone answer these questions? Does this mean we can cut down on the salt/sand mix that has been the basis of the salt shed issue? Like Kevin said, let’s resolve this issue once and for all.
teachref –
The liquid salt compound (don’t know the technical particulars) that the State is now using is more expensive to use. To retrofit our trucks would be a considerable additional expense. Add to that the now emerging concerns that this treatment accelerates the breakdown of road surfaces and bridge roadbeds and you’ve set yourself up for one kerfuffle of a headache. The treatment does work, but there is considerably more expense than our salt/sand treatment. At the town meeting it was also pointed out that we’d still need a facility to store the new compound… if we ever decided to switch over.