Letter to the Editor: Sign Petition Against New Yorktown Highway Garage

Over 1,000 Yorktown residents have signed our petition opposing the construction of a proposed new highway garage, and possibly a new garage for the Parks Department, at a potential cost of $4.8 million.

The petition follows on the heels of a 3-2 vote by the Yorktown Town Board to apply for four state grants totaling $2,065,000 to partially fund the project. Assuming the town received every grant dollar it was requesting, the remaining $2,760,000 would be picked up by Yorktown taxpayers.

Supervisor Michael Grace and Councilmen Tom Diana and Gregory Bernard support the project; Councilmen Vishnu Patel and Susan Siegel are opposed to it.

The UTY is a grassroots taxpayer watchdog group and these are our 10 Reasons To Say “NO” to Building a New Highway Garage

1. A new highway garage isn’t needed. Our highway superintendent has said the current garage is adequate for his department’s needs.

2. Priority for limited tax dollars should be given to paving our roads and repairing our crumbling bridges and aging buildings before constructing buildings that aren’t critically needed.

3. No one knows exactly what a new highway garage will cost. Estimates range from $4.8 million to as much as $6 million.

4. There’s no financial plan for how the garage would be financed and what the ultimate cost to taxpayers would be.

5. There are no numbers, not even rough estimates, that quantify the potential savings the new garage is “supposed” to generate as a result of “greater efficiencies.”

6. Without a plan for financing the project, and without hard numbers on the potential efficiency savings, there’s no way to know how many years it would take for the $6 million investment to “pay for itself.”

7. There’s no actual plan for a new garage. Supervisor Grace doesn’t even know if he wants to build one building to house both the Highway and Parks Departments, or two separate buildings, one for each department.

8. There’s no actual plan for what might get built on the old highway garage site or what type of commercial tenants would want to be located across the street from an auto body shop and down the street from a parking lots for garbage trucks and school buses and a regional UPS truck facility. So far, there are two very different concepts for this potential new building.

9. With over 250,000 SF of vacant commercial space in Yorktown, there’s no immediate need for more commercial space. One more modest sized commercial building will not, by itself, make Yorktown into a “destination.”

10. The taxpayers haven’t had an opportunity to ask questions about the project, let alone provide feedback to the Town Board on whether they want to see their taxes increased to pay for a new garage. There have been NO general public informational meetings on the project.

To sign the online “Say No to the Highway Garage” petition, visit www.change.org, and type “Yorktown” in the search box.

Thank You,

Rosanne BrackettSecretary - UTY