the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, many of the major proponents of the parking deck in the central business district are starting to have second thoughts. Realizing that taking a sizable debt load for a depreciating structure that requires systemic subsidy was not a smart idea. A little late to do anything about the structure, like turf fields in flood zones and the Village Hall wreck-on-vacation another thing resident taxpayers will be stuck with forever .
So what can be done about the central business parking garage ? Perhaps selling the naming rights ,or setting up a lottery allowing everyone to buy tickets and picking the winner in a drawing . The winner gets to name the garage for one year .
In the meantime the Village needs to look at some of the redundant departments that cost money and produce less than optimal results. The word is many departments were asked to come up with a 10% decrease in their budgets . The Village of Ridgewood spends $550,000 on engineering, $440,0000 on the health department and $800,000 on the building department . If the Village eliminated the Engineering and Building departments and hired an outside contractor like Boswell Engineering , Boswell would be charging in the range of $200,000 per year .The Village Health Department could be shut down and the county could take over for $1.45 per resident charging the Village in the $50,000 range plus fees for birth certificates and marriage licenses .
Now before you get all bent out of shape , lets face it Village services are mediocre at best , some would call the engineering department a disaster and the Village spent $1.3million on roads in 2022 and the streets look like crap .
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Fix what can and needs to be fixed, absolutely. But the county is NOT a solution. Perhaps for dispatch, or similar, but NOT for roads. They literally SUCK at road repair, construction and maintenance. They have SUCKED for years.
Are they considering this? Sounds like a solid idea
This is the worst idea possible
Losing a lane in each direction at the Franklin Avenue underpass, one of few ways to traverse from east to west or west to east (and the only way to or from downtown), and narrowing it further with a wall studded with expensive lampposts, which would be difficult to remove, has to have been one of the absolute dumbest decisions ever made in town. (Thank you, Aronsohn and your construction contract deals.) Even during construction something that had been planned wrong had to be removed and replaced for something like $40,000–mere chickenfeed.
Every day and all day the narrowed route (which needed more lanes, not fewer) inhibits the flow of traffic, which had already been worsening and will continue to do so as we add apartment buildings. The idea that drivers would be “calmed” was always a joke. The black things in the road make it hard to turn left into the underpass road from West Ridgewood Avenue.
The design was a disaster from the start. It should be ripped out and that stupid bike lane painted over–but now that money is scarce, that seems unlikely.
Eventually traffic may be so backed up in both directions from the light at Franklin and Broad (with not much room for that to happen) that restoring the lost lanes may become essential. I hope they don’t let it reach that point, but they probably will.
Always the “go to” solution for those who don’t want to fix the problems and don’t understand the economics of outsourcing. Well managed departments cost less than a third party who is always looking for ways to increase profits. I agree current services are not where they should be, given what we pay in taxes. However, having a full time, competent Village Manager would go a long way to fixing these problems, but only if s/he had the ability to hold departments accountable for performance and wasn’t shy about replacing poorly performing employees–which seems to have been a problem for years.
That it sell Ridgewood to the politically corrupt Bergen Democratic County Government . Why not, we are half way there with the 4 councilpersons we have now. .