It must be the same few people that have misquoted figures for the restoration time and again! There is a saying “you are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts” The cost has been quoted from the Council time and time and time again and the County has publicly listed its grants to the town.
Maybe the author doesn’t care that across 17 is an area of thousands of taxpaying Ridgewood residents who have been marginalized. First they were cut off by the “improvements” on Route 17, which took away their ability to cross directly to Ridgewood; second their school was taken away; and third the only large parcel of land, 7 acres, was to be a 90 foot baseball field and a historic house torn down. Finally they gathered together and showed the town that they deserved better. They deserved a park; they agreed to a small playing field; they deserved a meeting place which will be the house; and someday maybe they will actually get their school back. The house which the author maligns is listed on the NJ Register of Historic Houses. The author and others keep coming to the mic at public meetings and ask for “proof”, which they have received time and again. Is one taxpayer more equal than others? Is his/her tax money more important than that of a resident of the East Side? Why doesn’t the author and his compatriots who seem to criticize everything, take his/her ire somewhere else? With all that is going on in this world, guns, nationalism, bombs, fires, why keep criticizing the restoration of one house. And I will sign my name, unlike the author.
