Public Meeting: Playland Bidder CAI at Rye Library Monday Night

(text below here is from Deirdre Curran who’s Patch posting connection is misbehaving today.)

It came to light late on Tuesday afternoon – rather last minute/late notice some would say – that this coming Monday, October 20th, 2014, Westchester County District 7 Legislator Catherine Parker is “hosting” a presentation at the Rye Library regarding Playland.

Now that Sustainable Playland (“SPI”) is officially defunct (they submitted a formal letter to the County Executive on July 15th, 2014 officially withdrawing themselves from the Asset Management Agreement), Central Amusements, Inc. (CAI) is one of the other two finalists left in the RFP bidding process for a management contract to run the Park for Westchester County. (The other finalist is Standard Amusements.)

Both CAI and Standard have better plans for the Park that do not include such drastic changes as eliminating the Amusement Park area or building a behemoth structure in the parking lot. Both have better funding and more experience. Either one would be a far better solution to Playland’s woes than SPI would have been.

There are pros and cons to both plans, and the fundamental question remains: Why are we even LOOKING to privatize management of the park –giving away control and whatever profits the County could potentially make and keep, while most likely losing many very valuable County job positions - based on a theory that it s a financial drain when there has never been any audit produced to back up the claims of financial failure?

Playland had a much better summer this year than last year with attendance and revenues up approximate 20%-25%. This was while it was being run by the County with no improvements or investment made. One has to wonder how well the Park could actually do under County management if a few simple things were done such as taking down the gates and returning to an open/free walk through park, switching out a few old rides for a couple of new ones and bringing in some new concessionaires for food, games and rides that would be given more than one year contracts to work with. Perhaps we should be considering more of a Concessionaire/Partnership deal than a full-on Management contract.

At any rate, the discussion goes on while Dan Biederman’s group does an evaluation that will be finished in late November and presumably submitted to the County sometime in early December. Nothing is going to be decided until everyone sees what Biederman’s recommendations are, but in the meantime, everyone should be eager to finally have this opportunity to engage with the (very nice) folks from Central Amusements, hear what they have to say about their ideas for the park, ask questions (yes, they will answer them! They will not tell you that you are not allowed to speak!) and offer public feedback for what people would and would not like to see happen at this beloved park.

It’s my understanding that because this was scheduled so late RyeTV is not going to be able to broadcast it live either on TV or via internet, so if you want to see what is said, you’d better come on down in person.

Expect this to be very different and a lot less contentious than the “Library Debacle” of last December. These are one of the two sets of ‘Good Guys’ who actually want to help improve the Park and bring it back to life.

Central Amusements discusses their plan for Playland:

Rye Free Reading Room, Monday 10/20/14, 7:00-9:00pm.

If you’d like a quick overview of CAI’s proposal, you can visit this link:

www.keepitplayland.com