>Bergen County will not extend bike path at Ridgewood Duck Pond
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
BY MICHAEL SEDON
The Ridgewood News
STAFF WRITER
Bergen County has nixed plans to extend a bike path in Saddle River County Park, much to the delight of residents opposed to the proposal.
The county has put forth multiple plans during the past few years to extend the existing paved bike path a half mile from East Ridgewood Avenue, where the paved portion ends, to Linwood Avenue.
This year’s proposal included the most complex plan to date, with multiple parking lots, property acquisitions, greenhouses, and pedestrian bridges and tunnels. The proposal was also tied the relocation of the dog park at the Wild Duck Pond. That plan, officials said, will proceed as planned.
As with past proposals from the county, neighbors rallied in support of moving the “Bark Park” while arguing against the bike path extension, and gathered more than 350 signatures for a petition they presented to the Bergen County Board of Freeholders last week.
“I am happy to see the path defeated again, and am sorry so much time, effort, resources, money and energy was used to try to pass this plan again, all at the taxpayers’ expense,” said Ridgewood resident Ray Ippolito. “The survey company has gone through this area five times by their count. The dog run was improperly designed, as it had to be fixed just a few months ago, and is now being relocated, all at taxpayers’ expense, again.”
It will cost the county “about $20,000” to relocate the dog park, said Sheri Hensley, press officer for the Bergen County Executive’s office.
“The amount of waste I have seen on the bike path and dog run alone are staggering,” Ippolito added. “I can only wonder how much more is being wasted in the town, county, state and country. This little project is just a microcosm of the massive waste our country spends its money on.”
The path extension has been sidelined “for the foreseeable future,” Hensley said.
“With the limited resources that the county has available in these difficult economic times, we decided that it is not worthwhile to do a project like this if it does not have the full support of the public for which it is designed to serve,” Hensley said. “We have decided not to extend this pathway and will, instead, focus on other projects.”
The neighbors commended the support they received at a March 24 freeholder meeting.
“We compliment Freeholder Elizabeth Calabrese, who was the first county official to support our requests to both save money and conserve the wildscape,” said Ridgewood resident Linda Reik.. “Freeholder Calabrese upheld both the value of constituents’ concerns and the value of citizen stewards of the environment.”
Originally, officials appropriated $950,000 from the Open Space Trust Fund for the project. That money will now be placed back in the trust for future projects, said Calabrese, the freeholder board’s representative to the Open Space Trust.
“It just seemed to me that this would be one of those things that could possibly wait, or not be done at all,” Calabrese said.
Calabrese gave credit to the Ridgewood residents who spoke “very eloquently” at the freeholder meeting.
Reik proposed clearing out the piles of debris near the Saddle River at the Duck Pond, and checking into ways to alleviate leakage, algae and goose droppings at the pond as possible projects for next year.
