“Buy.”
.
Yeah, right. It’s that simple. The VOR will just “buy” the Town Garage lot.
.
First things first. The town initially needs to lower the price of the property in question, and simultaneously eliminate the Village’s competition for buying it. This is done by declaring that portion of the VOR business district “blighted” which is defined either narrowly, i.e., by the very borders of the property in question, or a little more broadly, i.e., by the square block defined by Franklin Avenue, Walnut Street, Ridgewood Avenue, and Oak Street.
.
/s (sarc off). Governments these days, be they federal, state, county, or municipal, don’t just wade into fights anymore. For a modern politician, there is no fight worth having unless it is fixed fight, meaning, safely fixed in advance. This is sadly probably true with respect to our current Village Council.
.
How many times does this need to be repeated? Many years ago, Ridgewood borrowed some fifteen million dollars via a formal municipal bond, both to finance the purchase of this same Village Garage site AND to erect a municipal parking garage thereon. This maneuver being undertaken in the immediate aftermath of the US Supreme Court’s notorious “Kelo” decision (the noxious holding of which being that a Constitutionally acceptable public use is any use an elected official can dream up and get approved, however hare-brained the scheme), village residents were actually wise to this trick. They loudly objected to the use of the eminent domain power to deprive a fellow VOR property owner of his/her holdings at an artificially depressed price when the “public use” to which the property was to be put was of dubious future value to the public (in this case, a parking garage boondoggle). In light of this, the spooked Village Council dropped the plan before the parcel was even acquired. The bond money, rather than being used to pay off the bond, was promptly spent on other priorities. What a racket, right? We’re still paying off that debt!
